Word of the Day: ”polygynopaedium”

In the initial, throat-clearing run-up to his massive 1975 masterwork, Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, in the section “The Kinds and Degrees of Sociality”, the author mentions W.M. Wheeler’s 1930 stab at classification, consisting of five types, rather dismissively, by contrast with the earlier (1918) system of Deegener, “who paid close attention to the fine details”, with 40 categories;  but then adds a linguistic or rather lexicographic caveat:

Unfortunately, Deegener felt compelled to provide a full terminology for his classification.  One form of concunnubium, he noted, is the amphoterosynhesmia, a swarm of both sexes  gathered for reproductive purposes … or the polygynopaedium,  an association of mother and daughters  each of which is reproducing parthenogenetically.

-- op. cit., p. 16)

Note:  However sesquipedalian those coinages may be, they are at least more self-explanatory [provided you are familiar with Greek and Latin roots] than e.g “Class II(a) and Class IV(b)”.  They are no more inherently outlandish than  deoxyribonucleic acid; successful such mouthfuls live on as acronyms, like DNA.

In any case, these categories are not nearly as obscure as their polysyllabicity might suggest -- both being exemplified  even within human societies, without so much as a nod  to baboon troops or termite hives.    An amphoterosynhesmia (I was personally familiar with several of these, in and around Berkeley) was precisely a hippie crash pad (the attention being however directed to reproductive preliminaries, rather than actually getting knocked up) or a Weatherman collective  during their period of obligate panmixia (for which see Susan Stern’s moving memoir).  And a polygynopaedium is the stated aim of The Rodwoman ©  and her coven of androphobic maenads.

Note:  Wilson himself seldom shies at the lexical rara avis or hapax legomenon.  A few pages after clucking his tongue at polygynopaedium, he writes of efforts “to define a niche as a Hutchinsonian hyperspace”  -- neither of those terms having been defined.  Your lexicographer might find that definition  a case of obscurum per obscurius.

On What There Is (expanded)

Existence is -- what existential quantification expresses.

       -- W.V.O. Quine, “Existence and Quantification”  (epigrammatic punctuation added) 

And, contra a couple of celebrated slogans of Quine:

The locution ‘ontological commitment’ is not one I have any use for, and neither do I care to ask or to answer the curious question “What is there?”  I say “There are chairs in the room,” and if someone wants to say “Therefore there are chairs”, tout court, it sounds odd… If this is ontology, then ontology is a mouthful of air.

-- Paul Ziff, Semantic Analysis (1960)

The subject of this essay is ontology; we gave a foretaste of the subject here.

By its dictionary definition, ontology is the study of Being.   Now, for me, “What is Being?” is the ultimate conversation-stopper;  that question, like Being itself in so bald an encounter, is like a diffuse and vaguely repugnant blancmange, filling all space.   It is questions like that which persuaded me early on that I was not interested in Philosophy.   And at that level, I still am not.

Quine, it turns out, is of like mind, for he remarks, of his epigram above, “This is as unhelpful as it is undebatable, since it is how one explains the symbolic notation of quantification to begin with.  The fact is that it is unreasonable to ask for an explication of existence in simpler terms. … Explication of general existence  is a forlorn cause.”

(Similarly, this, self-stultified by its own generality:

      The meaning of a remark in any language.

-- section-heading in: Jonathan Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning (1963), p. 154 )

A pre-philosophical, psychosociological observation:  The opportunity of waffling-on about Being with a capital B, seems to bring out the worst in writers.  As, Emerson (well, not quite fair to ontologists, since it doesn’t take much to bring out the worst in Emerson -- an ordinary pen-nib will do), in his celebrated essay “Compensation” (1841):

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature.  The sould is not a compensation, but a life.  The soul  is.   ….  Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts and times  within itself.

Now that is ten pounds of horse-doody  in a five-pound bag.

~

At only one level down of abstraction, philosophers have traditionally brooded upon the ontological status of qualities or attributes or essences -- “whether concepts have a supramundane, or only a psychological existence;  whether they are transcendent intuitables or only private instrospectibles.” (Gilbert Ryle, “Ordinary Language” (1953).)   For hardcore Realists like Meinong and even early Russell, “Consistently with the assumed equation of signifying with naming, they maintained the objective existence of all sorts of abstract and fictional entia rationis.” (id., “The Theory of Meaning” (1957).)

The question becomes more compelling in the context of the philosophy of quantification (“To be is to be the value of a variable,” quoth the Quine); and shapelier still in the context of what counts as an ‘item’ for, say, physics.
(Incidentally… I have borrowed the title of this post from a well-known work (1948) of the eminent Harvard philosopher, who taught me logic when I was but a wee lad.  Quine, having passed to a different realm of quantification, will doubtless not object.)
(Sudden update:  Just browsing around, I notice that this is actually the second time I stole  the title -- Shakespearian in its simplicity -- of my former magister;  earlier effort here.)

Thus, the focus shall be now  not on Being, but on beings -- on what counts, for us, as entities, when we pursue science, and why.   As Quine nicely puts it:  “Ontology … is a generalization of somatology.” (Roots of Reference (1973), p. 88).  The top-down approach to ontology -- “What is Being?” -- is baffling;  but starting from what we understand, we might build upwards.

Thus, we confront more tractable matters of hypostasis (reification) and individuation.  

By getting down in the weeds concerning what choices have been hit upon by the various scientific enterprises that have had to deal practically with such matters, we might in time return refreshed to the general question.

Consider this analogy.  The ancient Greeks asked themselves, “What is motion?”, and discovered that, once you dig into the matter, it’s more puzzling than it looks  -- cf. St. Augustine’s celebrated quip about the meaning of Time:  If you don’t pose the question, I know perfectly well;  if you ask me point-blank, I am flummoxed.  Some philosophers even came to feel that the very notion of motion was paradoxical, or impossible : compare more contemporary thinkers with similar doubts about Free Will.  (Eppur’, in both cases, si muove.)  Once one has studied the matter, however, in classical dynamics and in special relativity, and understood how (Achilles and the tortoise) an infinite series may yet sum to a finite value, you return to the matter with new confidence.

~     ~     ~

We must concede at the outset that ontological quandaries seldom arise in daily life.  Only very occasionally, and that not systematically, do you pose What-There-Is questions.  Things like:  Does Bigfoot exist?  Does Dark Energy?  (Everyday life if you’re a physicist, that is.)   True, a questing undergraduate may once in a while trouble himself with questions such as the Existence of Other Minds, and Is the Universe an Illusion;  but such queries cease once he gets himself a proper girlfriend.

 

~     ~     ~

The atomists, in their purest and here somewhat idealized form, imagined a world in which indivisible particles were the basic Things, all else being combinations of these, and thus, in the most parsimonious view, ontologically subaltern.   (Leibniz imagined something rather like this for the noösphere, with his ineffable monads.)  And indeed, we can well imagine a world, in which such entities entered into but fleeting congeries, without definite or lasting outline, and crucially, with no emergent properties for the ensembles (thus, in particular, no reproduction of atomic ‘clouds’).   Such a world would have an essentially unambiguous, monolevel ontology.

Now, however, consider a different world:  a pool table.  And -- for this is necessary too, and we rather finessed the question in the fable immediately above -- consider that we have been given a task:  viz, to characterize the perambulations of matter atop it.   In this scenario, it is the billiard balls themselves we must consider, and in no wise the atoms that constitute these.

 

Consider now Euclidean geometry.  Here, fundamental ontological status was posited for just two entities:  the point, and the line.   (Notoriously,  one can present this geometry in a ‘substrate-neutral’ way that professes agnosticism as to the nature of these posited ‘points’ and ‘lines’ -- beer-mugs and beer-mats, we could call them just as well.  And, more tellingly, styles of geometry in which the point and the line are dual to each other, thus interchangeable.  But to consider this further, were to sail afield.)

No higher figures were distinguished as fundamental -- neither the triangle nor the ten-million-and-seventeen-gon  enjoy axiomatic status as part of the furniture of the Euclidean universe.  And indeed, in the broader perspective (the Erlangen Program) which sorts out and makes sense of a variety of geometries, it is not the individual figures  on which all things hinge, but their transformations -- their symmetries, and the way these form an algebraic Group.

~     ~     ~

The prototypical example of an indisputably extant entity is you.  You are physically coherent, you have purposes and plans, you are self-aware from moment to moment; ontologically, it doesn’t get better than this.  And if you’re Donald Trump, you’re done:  end of ontology.  You slide through life like a bubble down the duodenum, a blob of solipsism.

For the rest of us, we embrace the existence of Other Minds, and indeed quite on a par with our own.  

And now comes (as Blessed Pope John Paul II put it ) an ontic discontinuity or  “ontological gap” between ourselves and the beasts.   There is a spiritual truth to this, but biologically, it does not cut nature at the joints.

(Note:  That gap itself should not be over-emphasized, since, in the grand mediaeval vision of the scala naturae, it is just one of several such.  Roughly:

archangels -- seraphim -- cherubim -- penguins -- mankind -- critters -- Protista -- sludge.)

[Click that image for more exciting details!]

So we admit the biosphere -- only, just where to draw the lines among individuals gets murky, the more you learn about what-all is out there.  Herd animals, species all of whose members are genetically identical, parasites, incorporated former parasites such as plasmids and mitochondria, slime mold, elm forests (one giant subterraneanly-connected plant), and even such exotica as the cast-off arm of a male cuttlefish:  as Darwin put it, “So completely does the cast-off arm resemble a separate animal, that it was described by Cuvier as a parasitic worm”.

There is no fact-of-the-matter about such cases; their intershadings show that our question, Which are the functional individuals?, must be more sharply posed.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"Were I alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I would be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am Quine, the great and powerful;

and I approved this message.)

~         ~

Let us revisit the examples of the pool table, and the geometries.   Here the basic entities were identified relative to certain transformations of the roster of potential entities:  the billiard balls caroming about, rebounding, never blending, proved to be the units to reckon with here.   And in modern mathematics, the symmetry transformations of the individual geometries proved more important that the various squiggles and shapes (or collections of squiggles and shapes) that undergo them.    So perhaps the way forward is to consider the kinematics of life. Ecology, that is, and Evolution.

When the theory of Natural Selection was introduced to the world in 1859, species rose to prominence in our conception of the way the world really is, right in the title of that great work, The Origin of Species.  Individuation can be problematic when we contemplate such things as animals undergoing complete metamorphosis, sessile vs. vagile stages,  and so forth:  but at each moment the species are (in the somewhat idealized classic view) sharp in outline, non-interbreeding, reliable entities.  (From a NeoPlatonist perspective, the species may even be more real than any of the variously imperfect and misshapen individuals that instantiate that ideal.)  For a time, Nature red in tooth and claw was conceived as a battle among these  supra-individual entities, competing, going extinct -- tyrannosaur versus triceratops. predator and prey, the early mammals peering out discretely from the prehistoric underbrush, waiting their chance.

Yet no sooner had we managed to wrap our heads around the notion of the species   as the fundamental unit of biological accounting (which in particular, delightfully,  cleared up the mystery of sex), than a pot of cold water was flung in our face:

Why should a female  produce offspring carrying only half her genes, when by parthenogenesis … she could produce clones…?  The simple answer, that the variability produced by sexual recombination makes for greater adaptability, and is therefore ‘for the good of the species’, will not serve.  Darwinian natural selection … has to do … with individuals,  and selection for group characteristics  has no simple place.

John Bonner & Robert May, introduction (1981) to a reprint of Darwin’s Descent of Man.

The next step (and the consensus of current thinking) settles neither on individuals nor on groups, but on a unit which, in Darwin’s day, was not even known specifically to exist:  the gene.  The argument has been superbly laid out for the general public in Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, so we needn’t walk through the reasoning here.  The upshot is as follows:

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2^nd edn. 1989), p. 34:

In sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit  to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection.  The group of individuals is an even larger unit.  Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust-storms in the desert.  They are temporary aggregations or federations.

(This reminded me curiously of a suggestive passage from a historical-espionage novel by Tim Powers, Declare:

You know what the djinn tend to be made of, from moment to moment -- wind, dust, snow, sand, agitated water, swarms of bugs, hysterical mobs. )

Anyhow, Dawkins goes on to make clear that his definition is functional not anatomical:

The largest practical unit of natural selection -- the gene -- will usually be found to lie somewhere on the scale between cistron and chromosome.

This functional/structural rather than physical definition  is reminiscent of the notion of phoneme, as opposed to a phone or sound.

Edward Wilson concurs:

The average differences between people in different localities … are narrowing.  Genetic homogenization has similarities to the stirring together of liquid ingredients.  … But the most elemental units, the genes, remain unperturbed.  They stay about the same  in both kind and relative abundance.

-- E.O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 273

Now we feel we are back on familiar ground.  These genes are rather like biological analogs of atoms, in the old Greek well-behaved, billiard-ball-like conception of these.  They just take some getting used to.

Yet even after the first ontological question has been answered (What is there?) in favor of the gene, there is still the second (What is it?).  As.

Should we think of a gene … as a structure that is replicated, or as information that is copied and translated?

J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 10

Actually, Dawkins makes a much simpler and apparently unanswerable argument for thus privileging the gene as a unit of accounting:

The true unit of natural selection has to be a unit of which you can say it has a frequency.

(Individuals and groupings obviously don’t fit the bill.)   This argument is completely general, and is independent of the details of biology.   Thus in particular, it should apply (if it is valid) mutatis mutandis  outside of biology.

For the style of thought, though not the detailed content, cf. Quine (“On What There Is”), maintaining that quantification is “the only way we can involve ourselves in ontological commitments”.

Further, compare this:

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 246, quoting Read Tuddenham:

To the statistician's dictum that whatever exists can be measured, the factorist had added that whatever can be 'measured' must exist 

[For a brief and untendentious survey of the various candidates for status as a Unit of Selection, click here.]

~     ~     ~

Having persuaded us that the gene, rather than the individual or the herd or the species, is the fundamental reckoning-unit of life, Dawkins then complicates matters in a way reminiscent of those extended and ill-individuated entities like elm forests and slime molds, or even Bertrand Russel’s definition of the number ‘four’ as the set of all foursomes:

What is the selfish gene?  It is not just one single physical bit of DNA, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA.  … ‘It’ is a distributed agency, existing in many different individuals at once.

By this time it is clear that, the more you look into it, the ontology of biology looks more like biology and less like Ontology -- in that original maximally abstract metaphysical program to whose allurements we confessed ourselves deaf.

Still, this business of the gene, defined as a functional rather than a spatiotemporal unit, does get us back to old-fashioned ontology as practiced by philosophers.   Quine sparkles at this.   He wastes no time on “What is the Nature of Being?”, but rather rolls up his sleeves, and, in the chapter “The Ontogenesis of Reference”, constructs a plausible, insightful, and wittily-told fable of how we acquire our notions of objects, and what it is that we acquire.   (A wry tribute to the style of mind involved in such exercises  can be appreciated here.)   By page 98 of Word & Object (1960), he has made a case for the ontological respectability of “a single sprawling object”, and admonishes:

There is no reason to boggle at water as a single though scattered object, the aqueous part of the world.  Even the tightest object, short of an elementary particle, has a scattered substructure  when the physical facts are in.

To which, Amen;  adding only that, when even more surprising physical facts are in, concerning indistinguishable elementary particles (bosons, at any rate), there is a sense in which these too could be considered a single scattered object.

The genes (or bosons), as thus conceived, are only, so to speak, accidentally scattered;  things empirically might have been otherwise.  Consider now rather entities that are scattered by construction, by definition:  higher-level entities, sets or collections of lower ones.

Questions about the ontological status of such things can arise even in the everyday pre-philosophical world.  In what way can we say that the following are genuine entities, with lasting contours and cross-temporal identification, despite the changing roster of the individuals that make them up? -- Your (nuclear/extended/….) family; the Boy Scouts; the nation-state to which you belong.   This is a moral and practical matter, not simply ontological:  having pledged allegiance to any one of these at t=0, are we likewise bound at a later time, despite their ever-shifting membership (and foreign policy)?  (I address such questions in a projected essay, “Continuity of Identity”.)

So, we have noticed an actual ontological question within the cares of daily life.  Still, it is not to a metaphysician that you would turn for clarification, should your eighth cousin thrice removed suddenly show up on your doorstep, claiming ties of kin that give him the right to move in with you and to borrow your car,  nor to an ontologist, were the Boy Scouts ever to get the Bomb.

In Biology -- the fons et origo of structured higher-level objects in scientific practice -- such entities include:  species (made up of conspecific individuals);  genus (made up of species); family (made up of genera); order; class; and so on up.  Here the ‘atom’ is the individual animal or plant;  there is no place in the traditional taxonomy of considering an individual as a congeries of genes -- and indeed the set-theoretical structure is completely different, the gene-sets in question being radically non-disjoint, whereas an animal is either in one species or another, not both.

 

In the nature of the case, it is clear that the higher taxa of biology are not ontologically given as such, but are confections of convenience, based  to be sure  upon what’s out there, and proceeding via sound and defensible principles.  Thus in particular, whereas a species as a whole does pretty much hang together or hang separately (say, in a sexually reproducing species, if the survivors are too sparsely scattered to hook up), there is no such selective linkage among the various n-level groupings in a taxon at level n+1.  Should the echidna ever bite the dust, ‘twill be a sad day for all lovers of monotremes; but the valiant platypus  still will soldier on.

There have also been major revisions in higher-order taxa;  even some quite familiar ones (reptiles, insectivores, puffballs) have  upon closer inspection  been dismissed as polyphyletic.

~     ~     ~

So much for the entities of biology.  What of Chemistry -- which is “the next level down” in terms of the agenda of Consilience?

Here we are in for a pleasant surprise.  No such agonizing and backtracking will be necessary as it was before.  The answer is:  atoms.   And not just atoms, in a row as it were, but, stacked, structurally stacked, in a most revealing way.  This is the Periodic Table of the Elements, first unveiled to a grateful world by Mendeleev, of blessed memory.  It is possibly the single most satisfactory scientific object on the planet.  Moreover its elements and its structure reach directly, consiliently, straight down to basic physics.  It is a wonder to behold.

There is even a loose analogy between atoms-and-molecules, on the one hand, and genes-and-individuals, on the other.  Loose, but better than most of those cited by Wilson in his ambitious book.

~     ~     ~

Physics, by contrast, is in no such happy case.  Such subjects as cosmology or thermodynamics or hydrodynamics don’t seem to have ‘basic-level objects’ in any obvious way.   There are, to be sure, the “elementary” particles, but these have been as troublesome as they are helpful, referred to distastefully as the “particle zoo”.   What with quarks and various subtle symmetries, these have now been regimented into something more satisfactory, though still nothing like as self-explanatory as the Periodic Chart.  Further, they do not span the whole of physics, but only of Particle Physics, a subfield.

There are, nonetheless, deep ontological questions within physics, with still-tentative but sophisticated answers.   I am not currently competent to comment on these, but a selection of intriguing quotations may be consulted here.

~     ~     ~

Astronomy affords relatively little by way of ontological interest; but consider this wise observation by astronomer  Mike Brown (quoted in The New Yorker for 24 July 2006):

Planets are like continents. ‘Continent’ is a good geological word, but, like ‘planet’, it has no scientific meaning whatsoever.

That is an epigram, and thus permits itself a breezy way with words; meaning here really means ‘ontological status’.

The point is of course lost on the layman;  witness the heavy coverage of Pluto’s “dethronement” by the latest Kuiper-belt detritus, as though this were of the least importance for the understanding of our cosmos.  But far more important, the opposite assumption seriously misled some of the finest minds of the Middle Ages.  For Galileo’s misadventure with circular planetary orbits, click here.  For Kepler’s fine failed vision of the planetary distances reflecting nested Platonic solids, here.  Their basic insights were sound, even brilliant; but planets (i.e., floating lumps of dirt) simply don’t have the ontological status to deserve such angelical constructions.

~     ~     ~

In Mathematics, the conundrum concerns, not so much the existence of thís (class of) object versus that (class of) object, let alone which are the ‘basic-level’ objects (I know of none), but the existence of any objects überhaupt.  That is, we have retreated from the question of beings, and are back at the bad old topic of Being.   At best:  for in fact, the question is probably not best posed in terms of “the existence of mathematical objects”, which threatens to involve us in fruitless discussions of what they are exactly (e.g. the integers as really sets of one sort or another, including Russell’s extravagant suggestion), whereas in fact,  mathematical objects or entities or thingums or whatever they are, are the very plume and prototype of substrate-neutrality;  a less contentious formulation would be “the transcendence (epistemological independence) of mathematical truths”.  (One is less likely to wonder whether a “truth” is, say, pink, than whether an object is.)

Let us consider a specific question, with an at least superficially ontological aspect, that is more localized than that vast barely-answerable question about the ontological status of mathematics as a whole.  (My attempt at a Realist answer to that one begins here.)

For example:  Does there exist a topological object of the following description:  It is regular, second-countable, yet could never be assigned a metric?   Urysohn looked into the matter, and concluded that none exist.  But it wasn’t by looking around, or by exhaustive search, that he reached this conclusion, the way you might drag every inch of Loch Ness and finally conclude that it contains no monster.  Never quitting his armchair, he deduced the result, in a way in which things were never really serially considered.

Indeed we had to strain a bit to cast the problem in the form of a question about ‘existence’ at all:  it’s not like finding Bigfoot, or failing to find him.   If biology were like mathematics, then we could infer the existence or non-existence of Bigfoot, without ever actually spotting him, nor searching the wooded hills, based upon abstract patterns elsewhere in the system.  This is one of the very many ways in which biology and mathematics are not the least bit alike (I mention this only because of the counter-program of consilience - a nice idea, but a will-o’-the-wisp.)

Mathematics does nonetheless afford good grist for the ontology-mill, indeed more clearly ontological than anything we have yet seen.  Namely, the entities posited by what are known as “existence proofs”.    There is no properly (intra)mathematical doubt about these purported objects -- they uncontroversially have such&such properties, if indeed they are there to bear properties at all.  The problem is with the special sort of purported demonstration that says, although we may never see such a thing, yea verily, it doth exist.  Such proofs can be purely deductive, non-constructive; so that, although we are assured of the existence of something fitting a given description, we are given no hint as to how to find the item in question.  Understandable ontological qualms about such spectral beings led to the founding of a school of mathematics that rejects such non-constructive proofs:  Intuitionism.  This dog-in-the-manger school gets vastly less play in actual day-to-day mathematical practice, than it does in philosophy books.

The one place within mathematics where ontology is definitely at home is Set theory.  A typical credo:

I have written this book from an uncompromisingly realist or platonist position; that is, I have taken the viewpoint that  in some sense  sets do exist,  as objects to be studied, and that set theory is just as much about fixed objects as is number theory.
Frank Drake, Set Theory (1974), p. 18

Indeed, this subject is often practiced by ontologically-inclined philosophers (such as Quine) and taught in the philosophy department.  (That other mathematical outlier -- logic -- is likewise often so housed.  I took Intro Logic -- “Phil 140” -- from Quine.)  It is from this milieu that we got the slogan “To be is to be the value of a variable.”

Quine’s quip, suitable for recital to the babe in the cradle, is actually trickier than it sounds, owing to his notion of substitutional quantification, which does not express existence, vs. objectual quantification, which does.  There is a grey area of entities which, like most nonalgebraic real numbers, are assumed to lead just as robust an existence as the algebraic irrationals, but which are not finitely specificable.
(Further remarks on the ontology of logic and set theory  here.)

Note, incidentally, a certain resonance between this last distinction, and the notion in physics of observables -- an attempt to get a firm handle on What There (Really) Is, amid the welter of mathematical abstractions.

 

~     ~     ~

Linguistics and Anthropology come each in two flavors: on the one hand, traditional mostly-European philology and Völkerkunde; and on the other, a present-day, typically American scientistical approach.  The former fall under the Humanties.  They were not much concerned with positing abstract analytical entities;  the “parts of speech” go back to ancient times, and were defined intuitively, largely morphologically, which is something you can get away with in the highly inflected classical languages like Latin or Sanskrit or Greek.   The latter, by contrast, strives (or, in the case of Anthropology, strove; now it strives only to be politically correct) to be honest-to-goodness sciences like physics or anything else.   Many intricate and closely-argued entities were posited and fought over, for phonology and syntax (some in morphology and semantics too, of course, but those weren’t worth fighting over);  and anthropology became algebraically structural in its analysis of kinship systems.  Both fields were self-aware of what they were up to, and there was a running discussion of the ontology of the theories, under the genial rubric “God’s Truth vs. Hocus-Pocus”.  The God’s Truth faction took a Realist stance towards the posited analytic entities; the Hocus Pocus faction, a Nominalist.

~     ~     ~

Somewhat surprisingly, the study of Folklore is also distinguished by the positing of abstract analytic entities, known as motifs; and this, already in the early years of the twentieth century.  These were carefully and exhaustively catalogued in the Stith-Thompson Motif Index.  Their combinatorics determine the tale-types around the world.   They are reminiscent, not really of atoms (since the characteristics of molecules are so wildly ‘emergent’ above anything visible in the atoms that make them up;  cf. H2O, I rest my case), but rather of genes.   Okay, the analogy is loose, but no worse than that of genes & memes.  Indeed, motifs were the forerunners of the meme idea, and already much better thought out.  There is even a sort of folkloristic analogue of the allele:  the oikotype.

 

~

There is no reason to boggle at water as a single though scattered object,  the aqueous part of the world.  Even the tightest object, short of an elementary particle, has scattered substructure  when the physical facts are in.

-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960), p. 98

In support of this:

(1) “the aqueous part of the world”:  cf. “empty space”, an anything but simply-connected entity (object).

(2) “scattered substructure”:   Unsure quite what he meant by this -- quarks are substructure of hadrons, but were unknown -- nay, unhypothesized -- in 1960, the publication-date of Quine’s classic.   However, a “smeared-out” (not really ‘substructural’)  nature of something so tiny-tight as the electron (still regarded as truly elementary) was suggested already

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Postscript:   These are the posts so far that have touched on ontology. These largely concern mathematical Platonism, which we won’t focus on here,  other than to say that Quine’s quip ("To be is to be the value of a variable"), suitable for recital to the babe in the cradle, is trickier than it sounds, owing to his notion of substitutional quantification, which does not express existence, vs. objectual quantification, which does.

[Footnote] Contra-Quine:

It is not true that ideas face the bar of reality as corporate bodies:  rather, in the past, they evaded reality  as corporate bodies.  …  This word has, so to speak, a turnover ontology.  The “objects” (ie. the terms in which we classify the continuum of experience  into “things”), are not there for keeps.  In trying to handle … the continuum of experience, it is … proper to experiment with … diverse ways of clustering the flux into “objects”.

-- Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book (1998), p. 64f.

Eliminative materialism (expanded update)

…those bright and breezy Americans  who call themselves Behaviourists.  They declare with some warmth that there is really nothing in their minds, and that they only think with their muscles.

-- G.K. Chesterton,  Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)

Biology is only the Fascist substitute for sociology.

-- Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (1940)

… that faulty inference  from the plausible view of the cognitive sovereignty of sense, to the absurd conclusion that explanatory models of human conduct must be in terms of elements similar to ‘sensation’ or ‘stimulus’.  The inference is quite fallacious, though an entire movement in psychology (Behaviourism) is based on the failure to see this.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 16

Abstract:   The psycholytic style of current neuroscience-invoking reductionism  is intellectually and philosophically unilluminating;   and the social and political effects to which it is often put  are morally debilitating.   Taking ever-more-microscopic tallies of the goings-on in neural tissues  is of interest only to a histologist.   The attempt to press such observations into service as solvents of long-standing noëtic questions  is unsuccessful, probably in principle so. 

As Freud put it in the first paragraph of his final summary of his own work, the Abriss der Psychoanalyse (1938), we know about the brain on one side, and consciousness on the other, but

Alles dazwischen ist uns unbekannt;  eine direkte Beziehung zwischen beiden Endpunkten  ist nicht gegeben.  Wenn sie bestünde, würde sie höchstens eine genaue Lokalisation der Bewusstseinsvorgänge liefern  und für deren Verständis  nichts leisten.

That is to say such correlations amount to a higher phrenology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[Prefatory note:  An earlier nineteenth-century forerunner]

Köhlerglaube der Wissenschaftler

In the course of the Materialismusstreit …, the German Darwinist Karl Vogt  published a widely read essay entitled Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (1855), in which he tried  with cynical witticism  to dispense with the problem of the human soul [NB: and mind].  According to Vogt, thought is a secretion of the brain  just as the digestive juices are secretions of the stomach, bile a secretion of the liver, and urine a secretion of the kidneys.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 594

By now, the man in the street has become acclimated to the notion of secretions, and is unlikely to be swayed by that account.  He will notice that, somehow, the liver never secretes anything but bile, the kidneys, urine;  whereas the brain ‘secretes’ such unexpected and unprecedented and mutually contradictory things as:  Catholicism, Communism, situation comedies, and the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.

But the underlying atheist-nihilist idea, that of wave-of-the-wand eliminativism (it does not even deserve the name of reductionism), whereby you eliminate the problem from consideration, rather than doing anything to actually solve it,  ever and again resurrects itself, morphing into a semblance of life, from some discarded afterbith.

~      ~      ~      ~      ~

[Herewith our original essay  from a couple of years ago]

We did not have to wait for the tribe of those laboratory nihilists known as neuroscientists, to behold an academic school dedicated to reducing free will and cogitation to the level of meat.  The behaviorists were there first.    And it is our great good fortune that we are spared the chore of actually reading and refuting their earlier and generally gratingly ill-written output, since their fifteen minutes have expired(*), the quietus marked by a famous and scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky, way back in 1959 (a good year -- aye, a vintage year).

 

Skinner himself, and others of his spawn, continued to “engage in writing behavior”.(**)   And like the dragon’s-teeth of Cadmus, the doctrine springs up ever anew, in this or that contorted form.

Maxfield Parrish:  Cadmus

[(*)  I spoke too soon.  Savor my groveling retraction here.]

[(**)  The phrase was made famous by a journalist who, to test the nature of asylum-based therapy in general  and involuntary commitment in particular, had himself commited, and immediately began acting perfectly normal, and telling the doctors he’d like to go home.  He kept a journal of his experiences.   This latter fact did not go unnoticed by the keenly observant psychiatric nurses, who wrote in his chart, “Patient engages in writing behavior.”  An immortal and dactylic line.]

Skinner, apart from his paid occupation of making life miserable for rats, is best known as the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971 -- not such a good year).  The title echoes that of Jenseits von Gut und Böse,  by that other evil troll, Nietzsche:   beyond, not in the sense of uplift, but of, “Get O-o-o-vah-rit!” -- A similar bit of titular legerdemain (sugar-coated in the title, rat poison on the inside) was perpetrated by Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (1986).  What is really being proposed there is not Unity, but Anschluss, with the mind playing the hapless role of Austria.

Professor Skinner, hard at work in the lab

Again, prior to contemporary neuroscientists, there were philosophers who ground much the same axe.   Wikipedia (s.v. “Self-refuting idea”), re eliminative materialism, speaks of identity theorists like the philosophers Boring and Smart, who “claim that ideas exist materially as patterns of neural structure and activity.”  Now, that is one unilluminating and bone-headed idea.  By which I mean, of course, no more than that it is an unilluminating and bone-headed pattern of neural structure and activity.  Owing possibly to an excess of calcium at one of the synapses.

And why, indeed, stop short at the level of the cells, themselves already doubtless epiphenomenal?  Take it right down to quantum mechanics!   Let some gaggle of labcoats come up with the Schrödinger equation for the Bible, and another for “Paradise Lost”, and show us how certain passages -- excuse us, certain Hermitian forms -- of the former, lead directly to the eigenkets of the latter.  Put literary critics  plumb out of work.
(Something more than just a joke:  Cf. entomologist/ultrareductionist Edward Wilson donning the robe of a Milton scholar here.)

-- A further word about this scenario of ideas as “patterns of neural structures and activity".  It really is little more than ye olde idea of Ideas as Pictures-in-the-head, but dressed up in a modern labcoat (the sort worn by actors playing doctors on TV); and this is one subterranean source of  plausibility of a doctrine that  on logical (and indeed theological) grounds  is a tissue of absurdity.

~

What gives the “thought is a physical pattern” account some specious plausibility, is our modern picture of vision:  which, to be sure, is vastly more complex than the everyman’s pre-theoretical account, whereby the vision of an apple is like a little apple in my eye.  (Compare, indeed, the etymology of the word pupil.)  -- Actually, the completely pre-theoretical account doesn’t even involve vision at all;  it’s just, “Behold! an apple!”  (or, holophrastically:  Gavagai!)

In that account, we begin with the beheld object.  

  (a)  It is, as a ding-an-sich, as hopelessly unknowable in its totality as a black hole;  yet like those reticent celestial bodies -- the veiled houris of the stellar harem -- by their corona ye may know them (that, and a bit of math).

  (b)  From this object -- let us take it to be specifically a coffee-cup, since we have proved the existence of these -- photons and phonons and perhaps even an occasional Higgs boson, bounce and boing and go-or-do-not-go through visual slits, in some inextricable and inexplicable quantum fashion, to wind up

  (c ) landing on, and lighting up, this or that spot on the retina.  From there,

  (d) ganglia shiver and synapses thrill, and eventually

  (e) the visual cortex receives various rude jolts, after which

  (f) the rest of the brain somehow sorts it all out, until finally

  (g) the mind says, “Aha!  There it is!  Time for a spot of java!”

Unfortunately, this comparatively simple scenario won’t do for the generality of ideation.  It would seem that, when these reductionist gentlemen contemplate an “Idea”, they go no farther than an analogue of (f) or at best (g), for an object of thought as simple as a coffee-cup (or, in their own case, their own endlessly contemplated navel) -- the ‘idea’ of one, rather than the image of one.  -- One is reminded of Hadamard’s plaint, in The Psychology of Mathematical Invention, that previous researchers into thought-processes had restricted themselves to the elementary thumb-sucking mental-motions of the Beoetians, which simply do not display the richness of thought-processes of research mathematicians, so that his own researches had to start from scratch.
(Similarly, generative linguistics would not have gotten far, had it never considered sentences more complex than "John is fat.")

For consider:

What the cognitive eliminativists are proposing, is not that a thought consists of some pattern of little electrochemical twitches and irritations plus ideation (the thinker contemplating the canvas of his own neuroprocesses, as it were);  their explicandum cannot involve the explicans.  No, it is really just -- splat -- that.

Now consider the following ideas:

  (a)  A topological space T is regular.

  (b)  T has a countable basis for its topology.

To each of these corresponds -- in Henry’s head -- a cortical panorama (A, B) not unlike a TV test-pattern plus static, or a Jackson Pollock painting on a bad day.

And consider that, as we all know by now, (a) and (b) imply

  (c)  T is metrizable.

which in turn duly corresponds to some porridge of pixels (C) on Henry's cortex.  Fine, we grant that.
But how  by all that is holy  do (A) and (B) imply (C)?  The moreso as Henry’s cortical idiosyncrasies  differ from those of Hector (A’, B’,C’), let alone those of the silicon-based mathematicians of the planet Gnorf:  who, whatever their physiological differences from ourselves, must reach exactly the same conclusion as did Urysohn, since that conclusion is, in fact, a fact (laid up in heaven, where Churchlands do not penetrate, and the worm corrupteth not).

[An attempt from an entirely different direction, to reduce the complexly interrelated richness of mathematics to triviality, by translating it into a non-mathematical world of discourse  entirely unsuited to it (in this case, the mushy one of metaphor), is  Where mathematics comes from:  How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being (2000), by   George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez.  You can tell already by the subtitle, that the authors are no Platonists.   I did coursework with George, briefly at Harvard and later at Berkeley, where at one point I TA’d for him;  so I shall not criticize him here, lest I fall into the crime of magistricide.   Yet I must sadly concur with the verdict of the reviewer, Terence Langendoen, in the March 2002 issue of the refereed journal Language.]

~     ~      ~

Ethicists should likewise soon be out of a job.  The latest in the public press:

The End of Evil?
Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing.
Are they right? 

A word:  I have no quarrel at all with the reductionist program as propounded and practiced by, say, Steven Weinberg (who embraces the term).  The problem comes in with the eliminativists who do not really mean to explain things, but to explain them away.

For remarks on the ontology of attributes, and their vulnerability to the eliminativist attack, click here.

~     ~      ~

What tends to get eliminated, in these proceedings, are things like consciousness and free will -- features of which we had grown rather fond.   Their very familiarity (as “folk theory”), for these gentlemen,  somehow tells against them.  As though a good rule of thumb were, If the ancient Greeks believed it, it must be wrong.  An eternal verity gets rechristened a “stagnant theory”. 

(Extraordinary idea, that, in any case: that to be any good, a theory must, like a fashion-slut, annually change the length of her skirts.  By that measure, the truths of numbers known to Diaphantos must be positively mildewed.)

Here  phlogiston plays ever and again the useful role of whipping-boy.  (Indeed, given the continued prominence of this ethereal etwas in philosophical debate, it must count as one of the most fruitful scientific hypotheses ever.  If it didn’t not-exist, someone would have to uninvent it.)  

The line of reasoning, reduced to its essentials, runs:  Well if that thing turned out not to exist, maybe freedom and God and all that lot   are just illusions too.

One problem with this angle of attack is that there's more to physics than phlogiston.  Also on the roster of theoretic posits  we find:  acceleration, force, electromagnetism, atoms, protons …  Phlogiston went out on a limb, which broke;  atoms & co. went out on a limb, and so far it seems to have held.   The eliminativists are being rather choosy in what to highlight.

Another problem with their reasoning  is that it’s nonsense.   Shooting down this or that hypothesis of theoretical physics, or even the whole lot of them, is not at all the same thing as denying what every mother has been telling her children since the beginning of time.   We are rather more certain of our own consciousness and free will, than we are of protons.

Let us examine another favorite butt of their mirthless hilarity.  Your great-great-grandsires believed in God, and that the sun set in the west.  The more fools they!   We New Atheists proclaim triumphantly that the earth circles the sun, and not the other way about.  Therefore, everything else you believe is false as well.

But in point of fact, you haven’t got much further along by taking the sun as the rest-point of your dynamical system, than when you stood firm on the earth.  For now you may be held to depict a system in which the entire galaxy whirls lumbrously around the axis of a single, peripheral, faint star.

In reality, none of these choices of a reference frame intend the absurdities ascribed to them.   Each has its use for some purpose or other.  Grandpa was well within his rights, both cosmologically and theologically.

~     ~      ~

~   Commercial break  ~            

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

All biochemists and molecular biologists today are ‘mechanical materialists’.

J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 11

Probably no harm in that, so long as the molecularists  stick to their last, and don't go sounding off in the Sunday supplements about matters that concern them not;  indeed, it would be more concerning, were they all Cantorian Realists, or Presbyterians.   But the day when all musicologists, or mathematicians, or literary critics, take mechanical materialism for their lodestar and touchstone, is the day when we shall cease to learn anything of interest about music, math, or literature.

~     ~      ~

 

We earlier glanced at the program of consilience, which (speaking somewhat informally) depicts the sciences stacking up one atop the other, like proverbial pancakes, while the life-giving maple syrup of shared method and ontology, seeping from one to the next, unites them.   (That summary, while not perfect, is both more concise and somewhat clearer than what you may glean from scattered passages in Wilson’s book.)  Eliminative materialism takes all this a step further:  the whole stack is squashed flatter than flat (again, the individual pancake has passed into legend for this very quality) into an inedible paste: the which, however, is declared to be the sole reality, things like syrup and pats of butter being just figments of your imagination (which itself does not exist).  Understandably, this philosophy was quite popular among the guards at Belsen-Belsen.

That may sound harsh, but truly, the often creepy frisson of the behaviorist/neuroscientific mindset does recall certain experiments during that unlamented Reich which were better left undone.  Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 19, on the founder of American Behaviorism:

Watson presented a baby with a white rat, and then clanged a hammer against an iron bar, alledgedly making the baby associate fear with fur.

Thus, to all our weightier indictments against Nominalism in all its forms, we add this slogan:   

“Behaviorists Hate Bunnies.”

(Our own favorite behaviorist, jolly Dr. Quine, does suffer from a certain lagomorphobia,  in his obsession with "undetached rabbit parts", documented here.)

Wilson pens a highly entertaining parable of the termite ethical code, extoling:

…the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil …. the sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal rights (the colony is ALL!); … the aesthetic pleasure of eating feces from nestmates’ anuses  after the shedding of our skins; and the ecstasy of cannibialism … (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat).

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p.  148

This is jolly stuff, skillfully done; probably give Donald Trump a stiffie.  Yet one senses a sour note,  as the (“consilient”) goal of the eliminative materialists   is to provide a similar account of human morality, decency, caring, flights of fancy, love …. Ever again and inevitably, these proctoscopists return to the anus, the central life-ring (Lebenszirkel) of their Weltanschauung.

~     ~      ~

To be fair to the reductionist program, let us briefly consider a proposal narrated by Wilson, who is both a much more graceful writer  and a more congenial companion than Skinner or the Churchlands.

Wilson offers one worked-out example of  basically eliminative reduction (or ‘consilient’ explanation): from oneirology straight down to biochemistry.  Here is a sketch of the bad old days of Freud:

Mysticism and science meet in dreams.  … When we sleep, the ego releases its grip on the id…  Freud … -- to put it as kindly as possible -- guessed wrong.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 74

Wilson is in fact a kind and temperate man; that mild rebuke is as strongly-worded as anything in the book.  (He is even able to discuss the Postmodernists without resorting to scatological invective, a task far beyond my own capacities.)

But now (p. 75) for the good news:

The competing and more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming  is the activation-synthesis model of biology.  … Sleep descends upon the brain when chemical nerve cell transmitters … such as norepinephrine and serotonin, decline in amount… Simultaneously a transmitter of a second kind, acetylcholine, rises in amount.  …

Etc., etc.; we skip to the exciting climax on the next page:

The electrical membrane activity, still mediated by acetylcholine at the nerve junctions, moves from the pons (the P of PGO), a bulbous mass of nerve centers located at the top of the brain stem, upward to the lower center of the brain mass, where it enteres the geniculate nuclei (G) of the thalamus, which are major switching centers in the visual neuronal pathways.  The PGO waves then pass on to the occipital cortex (O), at the rear of the brain, where integration of visual information takes place.

Voilà ! Any questions?  No?  We're done then.

Oh dear -- did I type all that up aright?  Was it not perhaps the serotonin that flows into the thingummy, thereby (de)activating the thalamo-geniculo-pataphysico reaction?  Well, no matter;  for you will notice that we have so far learned absolutely nothing about actual dreams.(*)

(*  Don’t misunderstand:  this is sound, painstaking work, and it is excellent that someone is doing it.  No doubt it will prove crucial to some hyperspecialists in the approriate microcompartment of biochemistry.  For the general man of science and letters, on the other hand, it is precisely as fascinating as the mysteries of the pancreas.)

This lacuna Wilson hastens to remedy by rushing in with his own broad-brush description, eclipsing that of that bungler Freud:

We fly through the air, swim in the deep sea, walk on a distant planet, converse with a long-dead parent … In dreams we are insane.  We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Hm.   Doesn’t ring a bell, either with my own experience or that of friends with whom I have discussed such things.    In my own dreams, I tend to be at work, or in a classroom, or (oddly) at some sprawling party on the grounds of a great country house.   No flying through the air;  more like, irksome difficulties catching the right bus.  But let that pass.   No doubt spending your days as a reductionist  means you must compensate with florid fantasies at night.

But the real killer is that last line.   It is, I believe, wildly and crucially false.   The real mind-set of the typical dreamer was captured perfectly by Louis Carroll:  Alice retains her level-headedness, while all around her are acting fantastically, and she rather taxes them for their behavior.  (A similar depiction occurs in the long-running comic strip, "The Strange World of Mr Mum".  The eponymous everyman wanders bemused through the strangest situations.)  What the dreamer beholds  may resemble the visions of psychotics:  yet the dreamer is not psychotic. In our dreams we remain our real selves:  we retain, in particular, our unbanishable morality, not doing in dreams what we would not do or at least fantasize doing in waking life. (Morality: a word anathema to some of these gentlemen -- though here Wilson himself is sound enough -- yet it survives the oneiric lysis, as it shall survive their nihilism.)  We remain perfectly rational, only…. just not at our best.   For instance, in dreams I often work out etymologies, or expound mathematical ideas.  These are without exception in error -- hey, happens to the best of us -- but that is what I do, I don’t imagine I’m a prophet, or a giant cockroach, or that everyone is out to get me, or what not.

Freud may not have nailed it, but you’ll learn more about actual dreaming from Die Traumdeutung than from this ultrareductionist stuff.

[Update]  I am currently re-reading Die Traumdeutung;  some actual reflections might follow.
Preliminary musings here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/appendix-to-appendix-on-oneiric.html
And now this;
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/die-traumdeutung-still-further-updated.html

~     ~      ~

That only somewhat facetious polemic brings me to another point.   While specialists of this or that stripe  may want to drill down to the last detail, what most of us require -- expressing this somewhat provocatively -- is an explanation that is as shallow as possible, in that it digs down only as far as it needs to, to clear things up a bit.  (Compare Quine's "Maxim of shallow analysis:  Where it doesn't itch, don't scratch.")  And even if you wind up doing a deep-dive yourself, what you intellectually retain is likely to be an explanatory skeleton. 

Thus, take mathematics.  When a proof is truly “irreducibly reductionist” (to coin a phrase), like that of the Four-Color Theorem,  where intermediate guiding Ideas, of general application, do not emerge, but everything is tediously and computationally broken down into a bad-infinity of special cases, mathematicians are disappointed and frustrated.   What we want ultimately is an agencement of Leading Ideas.  We might dutifully check the details of the proof, but these we shall probably not retain.

(Keynes, whose Treatise on Probability  brims with Leading Ideas, charmingly prefaces one particularly symbol-ridden chapter with absolution for any reader who wishes to skip it.  “We do it, to show that the thing can be done;  the exercise is more for the benefit of the writer, than the reader.” [Quoting from memory, so you might not be able to Google that.])

So, suppose we wish to know what launches birds or butterflies on their migrations.  What we hope to hear about is an account in terms of concepts antecedently familiar or at least learnable without too much fuss -- things like average temperature, extremal (trigger) temperature, average length of daylight, or depletion of ambient foliage.  Or, how do they find their way.   We are prepared for an explanation in terms of magnetism, starlight, or even “an instinct, varying in its details from species to species, whose guiding factors are as yet unknown”.   In the first-named case, we are open to talk about iron molecules in the inner ear;  but if the account in inextricably entangled in the details of the cross-effects between the ornithoboson cycle and the L-dextro-retro-feniculation mechanism, it’s TMI, and we tune out.  A ‘molar’ elucidation suffices for the general public and for the general zoologist   (and indeed, even this much is often too much to ask in practice;  apparently major mysteries remain about many migration-patterns, including the celebrated case of the Monarch butterfly).  An avian histologist might want to know more about those iron particles and their interaction with the inner ear.  But at some point even he is satified to call it a day, content to say, of levels yet further down, The Thing Can Be Done.

[Update 26 April 2012]  And now, for pigeons, it has been:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/science/study-sheds-light-on-how-pigeons-navigate-by-magnetic-field.html?hpw

[Update 14 July 2012]  And trout:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magnetic-sensing-cells-20120714,0,828028,print.story
And sharks (a segment this morning on NPR).

Now, sometimes, perhaps usually, no such shallow-draught explanation will be forthcoming.  Thus, the saga of individual animals gets you only so far towards the understanding the appearance and disappearance of species; a lower-level unit, the gene, turns out to be quite handy; and to further understand the behavior of these, we occasionally have to get down among the DNA.

Consider further,  the symmetries of snowflakes.  The usual explanation is straightforwardly intuitive, local and deterministic.  But somehow I don’t buy it.   It just feels as though such endlessly varied detail, with symmetries nonetheless rigidly enforced, brewed in a whirling cauldron of stochastic accident, must have some energy-minimizing post-editing -- something global (or “holistic”, if you like that word) along the lines of surface tension, or of standing waves on tympani.  In which case you’ll be dragging in Bessel functions, or calculus of  variations, or quantum mechanics.   And in that case  snowflakes will be one of those phenomena that can barely be intuitively understood.  In this, it would join ranks with what may be a host of questions that Homo sapiens will never really understand.  -- This is the Mysterian stance.  Believe it or not, this is also the orthodox Judeo-Christian-Muslim position towards the ultimate unknowability of the mind of God -- certain TV preachers and football coaches to the contrary.

So:  Reduce as you can and as you must, but not for its own sake.  Practically, cognitively, there is a price to pay.   The naturalist tracking an ecosystem knows he may need to have recourse to natural selection, perhaps to geology, a bit of statistics -- but it’s not as though he can’t wait to get his hand on the string theory of the thing. 

Or consider the case of generative syntax, which over the years has dug ever deeper, and become increasingly abstract in its ontology of explanation, drifting further and further from categories familiar to Jespersen.  Yet it did this, not out of any fetishism for abstraction, nor reductionism for its own sake, but rather because earlier, more traditional and intuitive attempts just did not work.  Indeed, the principle figure behind this sweep of developments has also consistently been in the forefront of debunking popular but vacuous styles of reductionism.

~     ~      ~

Again, to be fair, let us quote a man whose mind we entirely admire, whose prose sparkles like dew-bedecked blooms at break of dawn.  None other than -- but you have already guessed -- the master himself, Mr. Willard (“Van”) Orman Quine:

Corresponding to every mental state … the dualist is bound to admit the existence of a bodily state  that obtains when and only when the mental one obtains..  The bodily state is trivially specifiable in the dualist’s own terms, simply as the state of accompanying a mind that is in that mental state.  Instead of ascribing the one state to the mind, then, we may equivalently ascribe the other to the body.  The mind goes by the board, and will not be missed.(*)

(*In fairness to Quine, let us hasten to add, that his core concern here is quite abstractly ontological, even quantificational, as befits a symbolic logician.   It may even be compared to the notion, not of dualism, but of duality, in mathematics, being related rather like the positive and the negative of a photograph, where either one will do.  --  Still, his chosen periscopic viewpoint leads to some no very edifying reflections: “Mental states, construed as states of nerves, are like diseases.”  And such reasonings spawned venomous afterbirths  with Dennett and the Churchlands.)

This nifty epiphany casts our Quine into something of a Little-Jack-Horner state (= excitation of synapse #5328b), for (coming to his senses) he straightly confesses that “this effortless physicalism smacks of trickery”.   Yet what he says is true enough. --  True… enough, for sake of argument; that no such isometric reduction has ever actually been made and perhaps never will, is beside the present point.  Let us grandly grant it done;  Nobels all round, lads!  What then?  Well, then, nothing.  We are back where we were.

For: every carpet has an underside.  We may even concede (perhaps over-generously) that both sides are interderivable:  given the one, you can work out the other.  Now, you and I prefer the upper side, where green birds are depicted in an azure sky, and the prince urges his huntsmen  forward in the chase.  Equally -- and it is their right, -- the proctoscopic philosophers prefer to ogle the underside, an unintuitive tangle of knots and loose ends.  You and I can observe why the green beings  appear on a background of blue;  whereas the proctoscopists can only stare miserably at their welter of circumanal shorthairs.

Such, indeed, is the case most favorable to the proctoscopists, where we are concerned only with a single static pattern.  Consider now -- well, our old friend, the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.  All the proctoscopists can do, in trying to wrangle with that, is to examine the brains (not, note:  the thought processes) of actual people trying to wrangle with it, since the theorem itself is incorporeal.  (Compare the Competence:Performance  distinction, in linguistics. Recall as well the unprofitability of obsession with the latter.)  And granting our epistemological vivisectionists  superhuman abilities  far beyond the offing of likelihood, they will be able to peer into everybody's brain-pan  and inspect the various chemical blurps, electric fizz, and meandering fat-globules  of the would-be topologists.  Yet worse, far worse for their case -- even granted their ability to somehow read off, from this mephitic brew, such messages as “SMITH - NOW - CONSIDERING - FIRST-COUNTABILITY.  UH-OH, SMITH SAD.   MEBBE FIRST-COUNTABILITY NOT ENOUGH. OH NOES!!”, -- they will be not a whit closer to understanding the theorem.  For their data-set consists of all the various blunderers of the earth, barging about, running into dead-ends, committing fallacies, thinking they’ve proved it whereas in reality (victims of a misfolded protein) they did not -- really one would like to see Monty Python work this one up into a skit.  (They did the complete works of Marcel Proust;  why not Urysohn?)  For the truth of the theorem resides, not in the cloaca which these gentlemen are pleasured to inspect, but in the realm of Invisibilia, the kingdom of the Lord of Hosts.  And the valid mathematical moves made by this or that fallible incarnated creature, in their groping attempts to approach the truth, gain their validity, not from thermodynamic or statistical considerations, but from our miraculous harmony with such abstract truth itself, which stems, we know not whence;  though some of us have an inkling.

That, technically, one might perform such fundamental (or rather fundament-level) analyses or rather catalyses,  shows only that it is possible, by the wrong sort of reduction, to reduce meaningful phenomena to the meaningless.  We may dub this excretory reduction, as opposed to explanatory reduction.  And the craft practiced by these proctoscopic coprophiles, we may dub stercochemistry.  (Not a typo, that:  sterco-, not stereo-.)  Indeed, in this perspective, we notice that the doctrine of -- eliminative materialism, is singularly well-named.

Envoi:

… grob geredet, wie gesagt:

womit noch keineswegs  der Wunsch  ausgedrückt ist,

auch grob gehört,

grob verstanden zu werden …

-- Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral

[Update 10 III 2012]   For a briefer, parallel argument, in a lighter vein, click here:
Eliminative Immaterialism

[Update 28 III 2012] Roger Scruton weighs in:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7714533/brain-drain.thtml

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[Update 13 April 2012]  This particular post keeps receiving a disproportionate number of pageviews.  Since the Comments are virtually nonexistent, I am at a loss to know why.

If you have been enjoying it for its sober philosophical content, and want more, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Realism

If, on the other hand, you rather relish the invective, trouncing the nihilists, then you might further appreciate this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophy-porn.html