[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[∄ uǝʃƃ]

Excellent!  I like everything you've said below.  In fact, were we able to clearly talk about heterarchies as explicitly externalizing controls, where hierarchies leave the source(s) of control ambiguous, then we'd map nicely back to Marcus' example of "serializing" a recursive function into a tree walkable by a single control pointer.  And we'd also be able to discuss Rosen's conception of separating a closure of agency from (an openness to) the other types of cause (material, formal, and final).

The concept of a heterarchy facilitates the discussion of systemic behaviors like motive as separable into sets of distinct causes and structures in a way the concept of hierarchy does not.

On 1/7/19 6:12 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Thanks for the clarification. I intentionally said  Nick was invoking
> *something
> like "levels of analysis" talk, *because I thought I recalled Nick telling
> me at some point that he didn't like that way of thinking, and I'm
> surprised he hasn't disavowed me more completely on it. All metaphors are
> imperfect, and, acknowledging that, I still like that way of talking a lot.
> While you are quite right that tissue isn't literally JUST an arrangement
> of cells, it *is *pretty fair to say tissue is an bunch of cells
> arranged-in-a-structured-fashion and interconnected by various
> inter-cellular structures.... organs are a bunch of tissues
> arranged-in-a-structured-fashion and interconnected by various inter-tissue
> structures, etc.
> 
> At any rate... trying to follow your lead, and translate your preferred
> sentence structure to be more like what (I assert) Nick is thinking:
> 
> Motives ARE a particular type of pattern in a behavior-by-environment
> matrix.
> 
> As a "point of view" based Realism, which Nick has been trying to
> emphasize, it is true that there are many ways the behavior-by-environment
> matrix can be constructed and arranged. Some of those ways will reveal the
> relevant pattern in some instances, others will not. The particular pattern
> is one in which the behavior vary across circumstances so as to stay
> directed towards the production of a particular outcome. This sounds very
> similar to "One of the definitions of "heterarchy" is that the components
> can be organized in multiple ways" but if I understood the prior discussion
> of "heterarchy", I take it that concept is about a flexibility in
> control/leadership, whereas no control is implied here (control being a
> different pattern in a different matrix). The cause of the pattern is a
> different matter entirely from the existence of the pattern - which is
> expressly part of the point of Nick's way of approaching it, i.e.,that a
> "motive" must be identifiable independent of a particular cause.

-- 
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