[FRIAM] Advertents and Inadvertents

Fri Sep 24 17:03:25 EDT 2021

Hi Nick,

Sorry to be slow.  A dozen branches on the exchange so far in which it would be nice to engage, but I have to forego almost-all those.

There may not be much I can offer to the question you ask below, even by way of opinion.  My general take is that if somebody wants to build something, I say build away; I have no wish to be somebody who sits on the sidelines and carps.  

Our worlds, our frameworks, and our sense of what constitute argument are so different that even after the work is done, I don’t know that I could evaluate what is moved by it.  I can give anecdotal examples of why, but probably not more.  You have, as part of a string of things below, the remarkable sentence:

> Think about the relation between functions and purposes. 

I would have been incapable of using the definite article in that sentence.  I take it that you live in a world where both those words have definite meanings, and where you know what those meanings are.  Not only are such meanings available to you, but I gather that they are the most interesting meanings for you, and that your various projects always regress back to attach to them somehow.  That that should be so, for a psychologist, seems perfectly sensible.

For all that I have to be a spectator.  If we are using the word “purpose” in a poetic or literary sense, then sure, I sort-of know about as much about what might be the intended meaning as the next guy met on the street.  If I hear the word “function” used by a biologist, I probably don’t even know at a poetic or literary level what was intended, and my main reaction is a stress response of heightened vigilance  It is like the line in the old-series Star Trek where Kirk says something about freedom, and the big savage-man perks up and says “Freedom?!  It is our worship word; you will not speak it!”.  When a biologist uses the word “function”, it conjures up for me an image of a dragon sitting guard on his gold, because it is attached somehow to that most-sacred of all worship words: “evolution”. c.f.:

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

I think you are born into that biological lineage, as innocently as you were born a New Englander.

In contrast, there is a narrow use of the word function that I will commit to, in which I can say just what I mean by it.  Probably few people or nobody else feels a need to use it in my sense (though it will be more familiar among engineers or physicists), and they would be willing to interact with my usage at a literary level.  But within my own frame of argument, I can be definite enough to mean a specific thing.  (Similar to what I can do for the word “emergence” in the specific sense of phase transition in thermodynamics.)  There is no similarly definite usage I could attach to the word “purpose”, so there are ways of using it (as I could, internally, use “function”)  that are so far out of my reach.  

Yet for you, not only is it given that these terms have meaning; you can refer to _the_ relation between those meanings.  I dunno; it’s just a different style.

So in view of that, your wish to find out if there is a good dichotomy, between phenomena that are situated somehow along the line of a purpose, and those that are somehow out of that line as branches, effected by the progress down the main line, but only feeding back on it through (what?  Un-modeled environment effects?  Le Chatelier-type action/reaction oppositions? Ecosystem engineering or Niche Construction?— I can’t even know that, because I don’t know in your world how people think of when one is referring to a property of a model and when they just make declarations without talking about what is a model and what is something else) is one for which I will have to just witness the output and see if it seems insightful.

That doesn’t contribute, I know, and I apologize for the limitations.  But I hope the self-reporting above can trigger some sensitivity in you that when you just toss off a word in a sentence, there will be some words for which the givenness to you will be much larger stumbling blocks to others than it will for other words.  Figuring out which ones are the mines in that field can be slow work. 

Eric

> On Sep 24, 2021, at 2:18 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Glen and EricS
>  
> My friends are all too busy, so I have to turn to my frenemies for help. 
>  
> My palaver about epiphenomena grows out a much larger project: to identify the resemblance among a bunch of concepts loosely related to the idea of  an epiphenomenon.  Since the word has started to get us into trouble, I have been searching around for another.  How about “inadvertent”?  To “advert” to something is to orient toward it, to turn toward it, to point at it.  INadvertent consequences are those of an action toward which the action itself did not point.  Since, in my lingo, the goal of an action is that toward which it points, we are speaking of the consequences of an action which were not among that action’s goals.   These we will call “inadvertents”, “which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”  Now as the concept of exaptation makes clear, whether a trait is an advertent or an inadvertent depends on the context of its design.  Thus a trait evolved inadvertently in the contest of competition at the kill (the pseudo=penis of the female hyena) can become an advertent within the context of dominance display.  
>  
> The concept gnaws at me, these days, because so much about old age is “inadvertent”.  That was George William’s theory of senescence: that the ills of old age are the inadvertent consequences of the adaptations of the young.  Inadvertency seems to be a key to so many confusions in psychology, philosophy, and even biology.   Think about the distinction between “intension” and “extension”.  (Poor Lady Astor!)  Think about “intentionality” generally.  Think about spandrels and exaptation (= secondary advertency).  Think about the relation between functions and purposes.  Think about the distinction between effects and side effects of medicines.  This fundamental idea is everywhere in our thought.  Think about the indeterminacy of metaphors.  Think about all the things a newly minted program can do that it's designer did not intend it to do.  
>  
> Now, the piece I want to write  and which you (over your dead bodies) have been helping me write, will hold a Wittgensteinian “family” reunion among all these instances of inadvertency and try to discover if they are all of a piece and if there is anything useful to be said about them all.  
>  
> My first question of you, two, is, Do you see this project as useful? Do you see a benefit in such family reunions?  Would you find such a piece, once written, to be of any use in your own thinking? The question is of importance to me because, cantankerous as you sometimes are, I find your opinions on such matters to be of great use, and I fear that your opinion will be that such projects are  nugatory.  “Words, words, WORDS!”, you will say.  This will be a disappointment to me because two of the pieces of writing I am proudest of are those that showed the concepts of gene and adaptation belonged to the family of intensional concepts in psychology and those that showed that D.S.Wilson’s concept of trait group selection was not an example of selection at all, but a run-of-the-mill instance of quantitative inheritance.  In other words, I think  there is some value in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and you do not.  
>  
> In case anybody wants to discuss any of this  in vPerson I am going to try to be at friam between 9 and 11 tomorrow.  
>  
> All the best, 
>  
> Nick 
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
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> Nick Thompson
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
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>  
>  
> Nick Thompson
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
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