[FRIAM] "Brown eggs are local eggs and local eggs are FRESH!"

[David Eric Smith]

It is so interesting that, just as in the earlier discussions of emergence and probably others, Nick uses the word “epiphenomenal” in ways it would never occur to me to use it, and as far as I can tell quite exclusive of the only way it did ever occur to me to use it.  I guess DS Wilson (or Elliot Sober?) uses it the same way as Nick is using it, and I never looked up what was the canonical usage.  

But anyway…

I had always used the term in reference to neoclassical economics (NE) and its treatment of preferences and institutions.  I had always said that NE treated institutions as epiphenomena of preferences.  By which I mean the following:
1. Even economists can’t simply pretend institutions don’t exist.
2. However, Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie proved lovely existence theorems for optimal allocations from the competition of individual preferences, and the economists really really insist on remaining in the Garden of Eden of those existence proofs.

What to do?

3. Acknowledge that all these names and descriptions of institutions do really point at things-in-the-world, but declare that economically those things don’t actually do any work or mean anything.  They are like constellations in the sky; patterns that can be seen from certain angles, as one looks at the _actual_ basis for economic behavior, which is individual preferences.  

That was what I had thought was captured in the characterization “epiphenomenal”.  But clearly I am using it as something of a gesture-word, and not something for which I am building a strict formal logic.  It is more an attempt to explain the patterns of choices and work by a group of people, and to impute a state of mind to them to explain those choices.

The alternative to institutions as “epiphenomena” of preferences would be institutions that not only exist as patterns to be named, but as real things in the world that do essential work in determining what happens.  They govern what actions are available to us, what knowledge we have to act on, what power or authority or roles, and on and on.  They define signaling systems (monetary units and physical monies, ownership claims, etc.) and provide the channels on which the signals are transmitted (contract law, taxation, etc.), and thus are the framework to operationally coordinate pretty-much everything we think of as constituting economic life.  Without them we would not have raw, competing complete preferences; we would largely cease to exist as economic agents.

The usage isn’t entirely unlike Nick’s semiotic/intensional-extensional contrasts, but it seems to differ in the sense that, when I say the NE guys treat institutions as epiphenomena of preferences, the work that they want done would be the same whether done by preferences or by institutions.  So if they were to think of institutions as mattering, those would be contributing part of the mechanics of choice then not carried by preferences, whereas if they are epiphenomena they are like a kind of transparent window that preferences can be seen through, while the preferences carry all the weight.  Kind of like the bulk magnetization in a ferromagnet is not a “different” thing that “supervenes” on all the microscopic magnetic moments and forces them into coordination: rather the bulk magnetization is nothing more than a summary statistic for the microscopic magnetizations, and really and truly _nothing_ more or less than the aggregate of them, and hence an epiphenomenon of them-all-taken-together. In contrast, all of Nick’s epiphenomena are actual, independent, real properties, and the discussion then branches off in a different direction of who or what does or doesn’t consider them consequential.  That to me seems more of a contrast of salient vs. ancillary actual properties, rather than fundamental versus epi or purely apparitional phenomena.

But who knows.  I guess it depends on what problem you want to solve, what count as useful categorizations.

Eric





> On Aug 16, 2020, at 6:40 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The quote in the subject line was (is?) a slogan that Massachusetts egg farmers offered in Massachusetts shoppers trying to get them to buy their eggs. It came with a ditty which, if you call me up, I will happily sing for you.   The back story is that the factory egg producers in neighboring NY used chickens that produced white eggs.  Like as not, if you were eating a white egg in MA you were eating an egg that had been shipped in from NY, hence longer in transit.  So, if the campaign were successful, shoppers would seek out brown eggs because of their color.  Brownness in  eggs would be their cue for purchase. If the campaign worked, the freshness would become epiphenonmenal with respect to their selection criteria.  From the point of view of Massachusetts egg-producers, the brownness of the eggs was epiphenomenal.  All they cared about is whether the eggs sold in MA were from MA This would of course break down if NY farmers started using chickens that laid brown eggs or Massachusetts farmers started storing eggs before shipping them.  
>  
> At Friday’s meeting, my mentors urged me to get off the “epiphenomenon” kick.  I suppose I could instead use the language of semeiotics.  [Pause for moaning in the distance.]  In this case we could say that the producers were trying to make brownness a sign of value in eggs.  This works for two quite distinct reasons:  it works for the consumer because the brown is a sign of local and local is a sign of fresh; it works for the producers because brown is a sign of eggs that come from their farms.  
>  
> Instead of semiotic language, we could use the language of intension and extension.  [More anguished groans] The marketing campaign works  because although the intensions of the choices of the two agents are different, these intensions are both part of the extension of brown eggs in Massachusetts.  
>  
> Note also that the slogan is an example of powers and perils of abduction.  The sloganeer first abduces that brown eggs are local and from that category (local eggs) deduces that the eggs are fresh.  The two steps in the abduction/deduction process are 
>  
> These eggs are brown; local eggs are brown; these eggs are local;
> Local eggs are fresh; these [brown] eggs are local; these [brown] eggs are fresh.  
>  
> The point (to me) is that there is a very simple thread underlying all of these ways of talking about natural selection phenomena.  Could all this baroque verbiage be reduced to a simple formula?  
>  
> Years ago I wrote a paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239787151_A_system_for_describing_bird_song_units> that reduced the terminology of bird song down to three operations and 5 levels of organization.  In short, the paper showed that while  scientists had been using several dozen terms, they had, along, only been talking about three different sorts of thing.  That is the sort of reduction I would like to do on all this talk of epiphenomena, intension, extension, function, purpose, cue, side-effect, spandrel, exaptation, blah, blah-blah, and blah-blah-blah. 
>  
> Thanks for allowing me to think in your space and on your time. 
>  
> Nick 
>  
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
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