Productive Evolution: On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design 9783110320145, 9783110319958

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Nicholas Rescher Productive Evolution On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design

Nicholas Rescher

Productive Evolution On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design

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Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1: Evolutionary Processes

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Chapter 2: Homo Sapiens and the Evolution of Intelligence

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Chapter 3: Amphibious Man: the Evolution of Imagination

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Chapter 4: The Cultural Evolution of Communal Practices in Inquiry

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Chapter 5: Rational Selection: the Case of Scientific Method

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Chapter 6: Mind/Matter Coordination and the Evolution of the Will

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Chapter 7: Evolution and Intelligent Design

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Chapter 8: Meeting Theological Objections to Evolution

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Chapter 9: Meeting Scientific Objections to Intelligent Design

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References

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Name Index

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PREFACE

A

doctrine of intelligent design through evolution is not going to find many friends. It is destined to encounter opposition on all sides. Among scientists the backlog of evolution will have little patience for intelligent design. Among religionists, many who form intelligent design have their doubts about evolution. In the general public’s mind there is a diametrical opposition between evolution and intelligent design: one excludes the other. This book will argue that this view of the matter is not correct, and that in actuality one can regard evolution itself as a pathway to intelligent design. We would do well to go beyond The Origin of Species and—taking as our guide such works as W. Wentworth’s Thomson’s On growth and Form acknowledging that evolutionary adaptation can result in solutions of a sort that intelligence could readily ratify. Accordingly, what the present book seeks is a naturalization of Intelligent Design that sees such design as itself the result of natural and evolutionary processes. And where does this leave theology? It will be argued that it is left untouched on the sidelines. With intelligently oriented change seen as the result of natural process, it need not be viewed as a theological product. But on the other hand, with design or “fact of life” so to speak, nothing prevents theology from seeing evolution as an acceptable process in a divinely ordained world-order. So insofar as intelligent design is a battlefield between science and religion, the conflict has to be seen as terminating in a draw. To argue this position may be espousing a lost cause. But, as long experience shows, this is not necessarily a fatal defect.

Pittsburgh PA June 2011

Chapter One EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES Synopsis (1) Evolution is a process that functions at very different levels of operation: cosmic, biological, and cultural. (2) And although differential selection is operative in each case, the selectivity at issue will vary. For there is not only biology’s “natural selection,” but also cosmology’s processual selection and culture’s rational selection. (3) Cosmological selection deals in “ware,” biological selection in “hardware,” cultural selection in “software.” (4) What all of these differ in mode of operation, they produce the same general effect—the inauguration and consolidation of novelty in nature.

1. MODES OF EVOLUTION

O

verall, evolution is a complex developmental process that has proceeded in successive stages, each of which continues in operation as the next stage comes to be. And it is a process that unfolds across a very diversified range of phenomena—cosmic, biological, and cultural. A swiftly unfolding course of development begins with the big bang. At first small-scale stabilities emerge to form the sub-subatomic units whose modus operandi preoccupies quantum theory. And thereupon the maintenance of atomic physics emerges, soon followed by the subject materials of chemistry. Meantime cosmos evolution of the materials of astronomy has been doing its work. And then as large scale units become stabilized we move on to biology. The stabilization of processes of an ever larger scale typifies this unfolding of cosmic evolution.

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Biological evolution is an integral component of this larger story. Here on earth—and for ought we know at many other points of the cosmic—random variation and survivalist selection are at work in shaping and reshaping the world’s biomass. Biological evolution is an essentially causal process that results a net condition of things obtaining in a population of organisms of a certain sort. This process has two processual components: • heritable variation, • natural selection. The former consist in a more or less random change in the genetic makeup of a new generation of organisms. The latter involves a change in the likelihood that the organism, so altered, will successfully reproduce, thus transmitting this genetic variation to the next generation. And this sets the stage for further evolutionary operations. For biological evolution paves the way for the emergence of creatures whose survival advantage lies not in the profuseness of ants or the swiftness of gazelles but rather in the use of intelligence. And once intelligent beings emerge evolution takes a radical turn. For cultural evolution by rational selection comes upon the scene. Intelligent beings have multiple needs and wants, and a certain amount of stab-in-the-dark trial and error enter into their endeavors to satisfy these. And of course those operations, modes of procedure, and methods that meet the needs of the situation more effectively and efficiently are more likely to be emphasized and—above all—more likely to be transmuted to the next generation. Cultural evolution thus favors reflectively those ways of doing things that meet conditions of efficacy and economy of operation. And just this tendency is the core of cultural evolution by rational selection. To be sure, cultural evolution is shaped and canalized by constraints that themselves are the products of biological evolution. For our instincts, inclinations, and natural dispositions are all programmed into us by evolution. The transition from a biologically advantageous

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economy of effective physical effort to a cognitively advantageous economy of effective intellectual efforts is a short and easy step. An individual’s heritage comes from two main sources: a biological heritage derived from the parents and a cultural heritage derived from the society. However, in the development of our knowledge, this second factor becomes critical. To establish and perpetuate itself in any community of rational agents, a practice or method of procedure must prove itself in the course of experience. Not only must it be to some extent effective in realizing the pertinent aims and ends, but it must prove itself to be more efficient than comparably available alternatives. With societies composed of rational agents, the pressure of means-ends efficacy is ever at work in forging a process of cultural (rather than natural) selection for replacing less by more cost-effective ways of achieving the group’s committed ends—its cognitive ends emphatically included. Our cognitive faculties are doubtless the product of biological evolution, but the processes and procedures by which we put them to work are the results of a cultural evolution which proceeds through rationally guided trial and error in circumstances of a pragmatic preference for retaining those processes and procedures that prove theorists efficient and effective. Rational people have a strong bias for what works.1 And progress is swift because once rationality gains an inch, it wants a mile. 2. SELECTION PROCESSES Human evolution has been subject to two significantly different sorts of selection processes: 1) “natural” selection by a failure (absolute or statistical) to reproduce or replicate for physical causes. 2) “rational” selection by a failure (absolute or statistical) to be culturally transmitted for functional/rational reasons. Given this duality, four very different modes of evolution can in principle be contemplated:

Nicholas Rescher • Productive Evolution

Darwinian: Lamarckian: Bergsonian: Teilhardian:

Mutation

Selection

random random purposeful purposeful

natural rational natural rational

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We shall not have occasion here to invoke the two “mixed” modes of Lamarkian and Bergsonian evolution. For the cases that will concern us primarily are that of biological evolution which (so one may at this time of day suppose) takes the Darwinian form and that of cultural evolution which (as the discussion will try to substantiate) is rather different in character. Biological evolution is undoubtedly Darwinian, with teleologically blind natural selection operating with respect to teleologically blind random mutations. Cultural evolution, on the other hand, is generally Teilhardian, governed by a rationally guided selection among purposefully devised mutational variations.2 Taken in all, cognitive evolution involves both components, superimposing rational selection on biological selection. Our cognitive capacities and faculties are part of the natural endowment we owe to biological evolution. But our cognitive methods, procedures, standards, and techniques are socioculturally developed resources that evolve through rational selection in the process of cultural transmission through successive generations. Our cognitive hardware (mechanisms and capacities) develops through Darwinian natural selection, but our cognitive software—the methods and procedures by which we transact our cognitive business—develops in a Teilhardian process of rational selection that involves purposeful intelligence-guided variation and selection. Biology produces the instrument, so to speak, and culture writes the music— where obviously the former powerfully constrains the latter. (You cannot play the drums on a piano).

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3. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE Scientifically minded epistemologists nowadays incline to consider how the workings of the “mind” can be explained in terms of the operations of the “brain.”3 But this approach has its limits. Biological evolution is doubtless what accounts for the cognitive machinery whose functioning provides for our possession of intelligence, but explaining the ways in which we use it largely calls for a rather different sort of evolutionary approach, one that addresses the development of thought-procedures rather than that of thought-mechanisms—of “software” rather than “hardware.” What is at issue here is a matter of cultural-teleological evolution through a process of rational rather than Darwinian natural selection. Very different processes are accordingly at work, the (natural selection) one as it were blind, the other (rational selection) purposive. (In particular, biological evolution reacts only to actually realized changes in environing conditions: cultural evolution in its advanced stages can react also to merely potential changes in condition through people’s capacity to think hypothetically and thereby to envision “what could happen if” certain changes occurred.) Once intelligence appears on the scene to any extent, no matter how small, it sets up pressures towards the enlargement of its scope, powerfully conditioning any and all future cultural evolution through the rational selection of processes and procedures on the basis of purposive efficacy. Rationality thus emerges as a key element in the evolutionary development of methods as distinguished from faculties. The “selective” survival of effective methods is no blind and mechanical process produced by some inexorable agency of nature; rational agents place their bets in theory and practice in line with methods that prove themselves successful, tending to follow the guidance of those that succeed and to abandon—or readjust—those that fail. Once we posit a method-using community that functions under the guidance of intelligence—itself a factor of biologically evolutionary advantage—only a short step separates the pragmatic issue of the applicative success of its methods (of any sort) from the evolutionary issue of their historical survival. As long as these intelligent rational agents have a prudent concern for

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their own interests, the survival of relatively successful methods as against relatively unsuccessful ones is a foregone conclusion. Philosophers and scientists sometimes maintain that a Darwinian evolutionary account of the origin of mind and its operations is bound to be deficient because it leaves no room for intentionality, with the result that meaning and purpose are excluded not just from the sphere of inanimate nature, but even from the domain of man and his works. Biological evolution—so it is held—is fundamentally inadequate because all characteristically mental operations involve meaning and purpose, factors which evolution banishes from nature’s scheme of things. An evolutionary account is accordingly seen as inherently flawed in its elimination of the entire characteristically human dimension of intentionality and meaning. The evolutionary origin of our thought-mechanisms—it is said—is somehow at odds with an intentional (or purposive or teleological or “spiritual”) dimension to our thinking. Such a position would, of course, call into question the very idea of evolutionary epistemology. For if it is indeed the case that, as a matter of general principle, evolution cannot provide for the entire gamut of characteristically mental operation, then it is an inherently defective instrumentality of explanation. Such a view is very much mistaken, however. All that is required to operate the process of evolution (along the lines of a Darwinian natural selection) is that there be a heritable, physically transmissible basis for the operations of mind by way of the brain as the agency for the neurophysiological process associated with thinking. An evolutionary account of the emergence of mental faculties requires no more than the physical replication over time of creatures whose capacity for mental processes inheres in and results from the operations of their physical endowment. This does indeed mean that our mental functions and performances must be regarded as the causal product of our physical equipment and its physical operations. But such a supposition as to their causal basis and origins is quite devoid of any implications for their substantive nature as ideational processes that involves purpose and meaning. The causal operations of thought processes is one thing, their experienced import quite another.

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Evolution brings new qualities to the fore that can transcend origins. DNA molecules are an assemblage of physical atoms but they encompass the key to organic life. Birds doubtless initially developed song for signaling warnings of danger, but that did not preclude the evolutionary transmutation of song-behaviors into means for establishing territoriality against potential competition. The physical rooting of an activity or process does not restrict or circumscribe its functional character. The emergence of new modes and levels of operation, function, and behavior that transcend the capabilities of their causal origination is in fact characteristic of evolutionary processes. For the first microseconds of cosmic history after the big bang there was no chemistry. The early stages of the universe had no place for biology. There was no foothold in nature for laws of sociology or market-economics before the origin of man. The emergence of new phenomena at different levels of scale and organizational complexity in nature means the emergence of new processes and laws at these levels. The transition from protophysical to physical and then to chemical and onwards to biological law reflects a succession of new levels of operational complexity. And this holds good for purposive intelligence as well—it is a new phenomenon that emerges at a new level of operational complexity. New products and processes constantly develop from earlier modes of organization. The emergence of the psychological processes that open up the realm of meaning and purpose is simply another step in this course of development of new levels of functional complexity. It is important to bear in mind, however, that while causal explanation proceeds from a mind-external point of view, cognitive functions like meaning and purpose can be comprehended as such only from within—in the order of hermeneutical understanding. The physical processes that lie at the causal basis of thought are, as such, fully open to second-party (“external”) examination, description, explanation, modelling. But the ideational aspect of thinking can of course only be apprehended in one’s own first-hand experience (though of course it can be described to others who have similar experiences at their disposal.) There is, accordingly, a crucial difference between having a causally productive account of the physical-process concomitants of human mental operations (of the sort that biological evolution pro-

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vides) and having experiential access to its products “from within.” Meaning, intending, understanding, purposing are all resources that are only at the disposal of someone who himself has the appropriate sort of foothold within the realm of mind. Understanding them requires performing them, and performing them requires being a mind and having those mental experiences. (Explaining them, on the other hand, can in principle be managed by any sort of sufficiently intelligent being.) Proper heed of this distinction between the productive causal basis and the descriptive functional nature of mental operations should lead to the recognition that one should not ask an evolutionary account of mind to do the impossible in this regard. Such an account can perfectly well explain the developmental origination of mental operations in terms of their causal basis, but it cannot make their inner experiential character intelligible. The existence of mental functions like meaning and purpose can be accounted for on evolutionary principles. But their qualitative nature is nevertheless something that can be adequately comprehended only “from within,” from a performer’s rather than an observer’s perspective. The purposive intentionality of certain mental processes is part and parcel of the internalized, experiential aspect of the workings of mind. One can fully understand a physical process like the spider’s webweaving without being a spider—without ourselves being in a position to perform this process and so without having what it feels like to perform the activity. But one cannot fully understand a cognitive process like color-vision or symbol-interpretation or anger without experiencing that sort of thing. It is one thing to explain how operations originate and another to know what it is like to perform them. The physiology of inebriation can be learned by everyone. But only the person who drinks can comprehend it in the “inner” experiential mode of cognitive access. The mental performances that reflect meaning and purpose can be understood only from within the orbit of experience (though their occurrence can doubtless be detected and accounted for through external scientific-causal examination). Talk of meaning, intending, purposing, and the like is bound to experience—to performer’s perspective—and thus differs from the neurophysiology of brain processes which is wholly accessible to external observers. They re-

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flect issues that evolutionary explanations simply do not address, given their altogether different orientation to the causal dimension of the matter. 4. RATIONAL SELECTION Intelligent comportment in matters of cognition and action involves interplay between the speculative forays of investigation and that of application in observation, praxis-guidance, and interpersonal succession. The rational selection at issue in the adoption and perpetuation of those proceedings that prove affective in practice is the very hallmark of intelligent being. Rational selection is a matter not of a biological but of a rationally selective elimination (or rationally preferential retention)—of a process of historical transmission that involves a reasoned preference based on purposive consideration. A rigorously biological eliminative model for methodological or procedural evolution is unrealistic. For what is basically at issue in this domain is the matter of historical survival based on communal behavior in transmission through teaching and example. As changes are entertained (under the pressure of necessitating circumstance), one methodological instrument may eventuate as more fit to survive than another, because extensive experience shows that it answers better to the range of relevant purposes. The ways in which we make use of our biologically given capacities are cultural resources preserved and transmitted by social preferences operative in example and teaching. There is a preferential selection at work in the perpetuation of those methods and procedures whose effectiveness is indicated by the lessons of experience. Whatever may be the shortcomings of a Lamarckian approach to biological evolution via genetic mechanisms, it is clearly useful and appropriate for the cultural evolution operative in the transmission of our intellectual resources. Natural and rational selection are kindred processes. Even as organic evolution is a matter of the selective perpetuation through biological transmission over time within a certain population of those physical traits which are favorable to the continued existence of individuals, so in rational evolution those methods (processes) are selectively perpet-

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uated over time in teaching and borrowing from examples which are favorable to the efficient achievement of tasks to whose accomplishment the group is committed. Rational selection is accordingly a process of fundamentally the same sort as natural (biological) selection—both are devices for eliminating certain items from cross-generational transmission. But their actual workings differ, since elimination by rational selection is not telically blind and biologically eliminative, but rather preferential/teleological and overtly rational. Orthodox Darwinian selection is in effect a way of removing teleology; it provides a way of accounting for seeming purposiveness in purpose-free terms, by deploying the mechanisms of a blindly eliminative annihilation of certain forms in place of any recourse to preferential considerations. But rational selection is something else again: it can operate only with respect to beings endowed with intelligence and action, with reasoning and purposes— its mechanism being the deliberate failure to perpetuate forms that are not purpose-serving. And cultural evolution can manage to achieve things that biological evolution cannot—borrowing across genealogical lines (that is, from “foreign” groups), for example, or effecting changes of operation within the boundaries of a single generation. Given the reasonable agent’s well-advised predilection for success in one’s ventures, the fact that the cognitive methods we employ have a good record of demonstrated effectiveness in regard to explanation, prediction, and control is not surprising but only to be expected: the community of rational inquirers would have given them up long ago were they not comparatively successful. The effectiveness of our cognitive methodology is thus readily accounted for on an evolutionary perspective based on rational selection and the requirements for survival through adoption and transmission. While, natural selection unquestionably accounts for man’s possession of such capacities as intelligence and reason, but rational selection, clearly best accounts for the characteristics of their use. Biological processes are ill-suited to accommodate the characteristic flexibility of intelligence as opposed to the programmed automatism of most modes of behavior encountered in the animal kingdom. Our methods of using intelligence develop selectively under the aegis of intelligence itself. However implausible a rationally teleological approach

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may be in strictly biological evolution, it is eminently and unproblematically tenable in methodological evolution in matters pertaining to the modus operandi of intelligent and rational beings. The historical emergence of our thought mechanisms is doubtless biological (Darwinian), but the development of our thought methods is governed by the social process of cultural evolution. And at this secondary, procedural stage biological and cultural evolution part ways to some extent. Thinking people are by and large just as interested in the future fate of their ideas as in the future fate of their descendants: the survival of their values is no less significant for them than that of their gene. With the emergence of intelligence, rational selection takes over. Rational selection is a complex process that transpires not in a “population,” but in a culture. It pivots on the tendency of a community of rational agents to adopt and perpetuate, through example and teaching, practices and modes of operation that are relatively more effective for the attainment of given ends than their available alternatives. Accordingly, the historical development of methods and modes of operation within a society of rational agents is likely to reflect a course of actual improvement. Rational agents involved in a course of trial and error experimentation with different processes and procedures are unlikely to prefer (for adoption by themselves and transmission to their successors) practices and procedures which are ineffective or inefficient. It is clear that there are various alternative approaches to the problem of determining “how things work in the world.” The examples of such occult cognitive frameworks as those of numerology (with its benign ratios), astrology (with its astral influences), and black magic (with its mystic forces) indicate that alternative explanatory frameworks exist, and that these can have very diverse degrees of merit. Now in the Western tradition the governing standards of human rationality are implicit in the goals of explanation, prediction, and preeminently control. (And thus the crucial factor is not, for example, sentimental “at-oneness with nature”—think of the magician vs. the mystic vs. the sage as cultural ideals.) These standards revolve about considerations of practice and are implicit in the use of our conceptual resources in managing our affairs.

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NOTES 1

These present deliberations have a close kinship with the “epigentic rules” that figure prominently in Michael Ruse’s fine book on Taking Darwin Seriously (Oxford: Blackwells, 1986). The only significant divergence is that Ruse sees the rules at issue as having a predominantly biological basis where the present discussion sees their basis as predominantly cultural.

2

Various aspects of cultural evolutions are interestingly treated in Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Byrd and Peter J. Richardson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Their deliberations indicate that cultural evolution is not just an analogue of biological evolution, but that both are variant forms of one structurally uniform process.

3

See, for example, P. M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) and P. S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science for the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

Chapter 2 HOMO SAPIENS AND THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE Synopsis (1) Intelligence is the distinctive feature of homo sapiens as product of biological evolution. (2) It affords us humans with our key and characteristic instrumentality of survival. (3) For it is—and should be— obvious that the satisfaction of our needs and wants is vastly advantaged by the possession of intelligence.

1. HOMO SAPIENS

H

umans have evolved within nature to fill the ecological niche of an intelligent being. This human intelligence of ours is the product of a prolonged process of biological evolution. There are many ways for an animal species to make its way in the world. Diverse alternative modes of coping within nature present themselves to biological organism: the routes of multiplicity, toughness, flexibility, and isolation, among others. But one promising evolutionary pathway is afforded by the route of intelligence, of adapting by the use of brain rather than brawn, of cleverness rather than power, of flexibility rather than specialization. A fertile ecological niche lies open to a creature that makes its way in the world not by sheer tenacity or by tooth and claw, but by intelligence—by coordinating its own doings and the world’s ways through cognitive foresight. Man’s possession of intelligence and capacity for reason are readily understandable on evolutionary principles. For these resources are clearly a means to adaptive efficiency, enabling us—sometimes at least—to adjust our environment to our needs and wants rather than the reverse. It is not all that

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difficult to visualize how intelligence—with its characteristic pursuit of cogency, efficiency, and optimality—can facilitate advantageous arrangements. Reason-deploying intelligence—the use of our brains to guide action by figuring out the apparent best—is the survival instrument of our species in much the same way that other creatures ensure their survival by being prolific, or tough, or well-sheltered. Intelligence constitutes our particular “competitive advantage” in the evolutionary scheme of things. As Darwin himself already stressed, in a competitive Darwinism world a creature that can understand how things work in its environment and exploit this understanding in action thereby secures an evolutionary edge. Intelligence has evolved not because the emergence of intelligence is a purpose of nature, but because intelligence aids the survival of its possessors within nature (at any rate, up to a point, since a benign outcome to the nuclear arms race is not yet a foregone conclusion). Intelligence arises through evolutionary processes because it has in the past afforded an effective means of survival. Intelligence is our functional substitute for the numerousness of termites, the ferocity of lions, or the toughness of microorganisms. The long and short of it is that we rational animals would not be here as the sorts or creatures we are and could not long continue in existence as such if our rationality were not survival-conducive. Intelligence is not an inevitable feature of conscious organic life. Here on earth, at least, it is our peculiarly human instrumentality, a matter of our particular evolutionary heritage. Man is homo queerness. With us, the imperative to understanding is something altogether basic; we cannot function, let alone thrive, without information regarding what goes on about us. The knowledge that orients our activities in this world is itself the most practical of things—a rational animal cannot feel at ease in situations of which it can make no cognitive sense. The demand for understanding, for cognitive accommodation to one’s environment, for “knowing one’s way about,” is one of the most fundamental requirements of the human condition. The “discomfort of unknowing” is a natural human feeling and understandable as such. To be ignorant of what goes on about one is actually dangerous from an evolutionary point of view.

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2. INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION Why are we humans so smart? How is it that we possess the intellectual talent to create mathematics, medicine, science, engineering, architecture, literature, and other comparably splendid cognitive disciplines? What explains the immense power of our intellectual capacities? An immediate difficulty looms when this question is posed. “How,” an objector urges, “can you possibly set out to explain why we are as intelligent as we are without first addressing the question of just exactly how intelligent we indeed are?” Clearly, if this issue had to be settled at the outset, the inquiry would never get off the ground. The available time and effort would be consumed in preliminary clarifications. But, in fact, this matter of extent only concerns us in a comparative way here. The pertinent analogy is that of considering why we humans are so relatively tall on the basis of our being taller than our distant cousins, the chimpanzees. And the cardinal point would be that nonamphibious humanoids could not be chimpanzee-size without undue loss of brain capacity. (And by a comparable token, we couldn’t be taller than giraffes and still free that second pair of limbs from transport service.) Similarly, what concerns us here is simply the rough, comparative issue of our capacity as intelligent agents to outdistance the other terrestrial species by a very substantial margin in regard to intelligence-guided capabilities. The general direction—at any rate—of the answer to this query about human intelligence is relatively straightforward. Basically, we are so smart because that is our place in evolution’s scheme of things. Different sorts of creatures have different ecological niches, different specialties that enable them to find their evolutionary way down the corridor of time. Some are highly prolific, some very hard, some swift of foot, some hard to spot, some extremely shy. Homo sapiens is different. For the evolutionary instrument of our species is intelligence with everything that this involves in the way of abilities and versatilities. Thus if we weren’t so intelligent, we wouldn’t be here as the anatomical creatures we are. We have all those splendid intellectual capacities because we require them in order to be ourselves.

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Of course it’s not all just a matter of luck—of fate’s lottery bringing intelligence our way. Evolution’s bio-engineering is the crucial factor. Bees and termites can achieve impressive prodigies of collective effort. But an insect developed under the aegis of evolution could not become as smart as a man because information-processing needs of the lifestyle opportunities afforded by its physical endowment are too modest to push it to the development of intelligence. Smarts are an inherent concomitant of our physical endowment. Our bodies have many more independently movable parts (more “degrees of freedom”) than those of most other creatures.1 And this circumstance has significant implications. For suppose a system with n switches, each capable of assuming an ON or OFF position. Then there are 2 exp n states in which the system can find itself. With n =3 there are only 8 system-states, but with n doubling to 6 there are already 64 states. As a body grows more complex and its configuration takes on more degrees of freedom, the range of alternative possible states expands rapidly (exponentially). Merely keeping track of its actual position is already difficult. To plan ahead is more difficult yet. If there are m possible states which the system can assume now, then when it comes to selecting it next position there are also m choices, and for the next two there are m x m alternatives overall (ignoring unrealizable combinations). So with a two-step planning horizon the 3state system has 64 alternatives while that 6-state system has 4096. Within a mere doubling of states, the planning problem has become complicated by a factor of sixty-four. The degrees of freedom inherent in mobility are pivotal considerations here. The moment one walks upright and begins to develop the modes of motion that this new posture facilitates—by way of creeping, running, leaping, etc.—one has many more problems of physical management to solve. Considerations of this sort render it evident that a vertebrate having a more highly articulated skeleton, with many independently operable bones and bone-complexes, faces vastly greater difficulties in management and manipulation—in what military jargon calls “command and control.” Physically more versatile animals have to be smarter simply because they are physically more versatile.

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We are driven to devising greater capabilities in information acquisition and management by the greater demands of the lifestyle of our ecological niche. The complexity of our sophisticated surveillance mechanisms in the context of friend-or-foe identification is an illustration. We can observe at a considerable distance that people are looking at us, discriminating minute differences in eye orientation in this context. The development of our sophisticated senses with their refined discrimination of odors, colors, and sounds is another example. Environmental surveillance is crucial for our lifestyle. We have to know which feature of our environment to heed and which can safely be ignored. The handling of such a volume of information calls for selectivity and for sophisticated processing mechanisms—for intelligence in short. Not only must our bodies be the right size to support our physical operations and activities, but our brains must be so as well. The complexities of information management and control pose unrelenting evolutionary demands. To process a large volume of information nature must fit us out with a large brain. A battleship needs more elaborate mechanisms for guidance and governance than a row boat. A department store needs a more elaborate managerial apparatus than a corner grocery. To operate a sophisticated body you need a sophisticated brain. The evolution of the human brain is the story of nature’s struggles to provide the machinery of information management and control needed by creatures of increasing physical versatility. A feedback cycle comes into operation—a complex body requires a larger brain for command and control, and a larger brain requires a larger body whose operational efficiency in turn places greater demands on that brain for the managerial functions required to provide for survival and the assurance of a posterity. As can be illustrated by comparing the brain weights of different mammalian species, the growing complexities and versatilities of animal bodies involve a physical lifestyle whose difficulties of information processing and management requires an increasingly powerful brain. How one makes one’s living matters: insect-eating and fruit-eating monkeys have heavier brains, for their size, than leaf-eating one’s do.2 Here then is the immediate (and rather trivial) answer to our question: We are as intelligent as we are because that is how we had to

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evolve to fill our place in nature’s scheme of things. We are so smart because evolution’s bio-engineering needs to provide those smarts for us to achieve and maintain the lifestyle appropriate to our ecological niche. But there remains the problem of why evolution would take this course? Surely we didn’t need to be that smart to outwit the sabertooth tiger or domesticate the sheep. Let us explore this aspect of the matter a little. The things we have to do to manage our lifestyle must not only be possible for us, they must in general be easy for us (so easy the most of them can be done unthinkingly and even unconsciously). If our problem-solving resources were frequently strained to the limit, often groaning under the weight of difficulty of the problems they are called on by nature to wolves in the interests of our lifestyle, then we just wouldn’t have it. For evolution to do its work, the survival problems that creatures confront have to be by and large easy for the mechanisms at their disposal. And this fundamental principle holds just as true for cognitive as for biological evolution. If cognitive problem-solving were too difficult for our mental resources, we wouldn’t evolve as problem solving creatures. If we had to go to as great lengths to work our 2 + 2 as to extract the cube root of a number, or if it took us as long to discriminate 3- from 4-sided figures as it takes to discriminate between 296 and 297-sided ones, then these sorts of issues would simply remain outside our cognitive repertoire. The “average” problems for survival and thriving that are posed by our lifestyle must be of the right level of difficulty for us—that is, they must be relatively easy. And that calls for excess capacity. All of the “ordinary” problems of one’s mode of life must be solvable quickly in real time—and with enough idle capacity left over to cope with the unusual. A brain that is able to do the necessary things when and as needed to sustain the life of a complex and versatile creature will remain underutilized much of the time. To cope at times of peak demand, it will have a great deal of excess capacity to spare for other issues at slack times. And so, any brain powerful enough to accomplish those occasionally necessary tasks will have the excess capacity at most normal

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times to pursue various challenging projects that have nothing whatever to do with survival. These deliberations resolve the objection that evolution cannot explain our smarts because we are a lot smarter than evolution demands—that, after all, evolution does not set us examinations on higher mathematics or theoretical physics. What is being maintained here is not the absurd contention that such disciplines somehow afford humans with an evolutionary advantage. All that is being said is that the capacities and abilities that make a realization of these enterprises possible are evolutionarily advantageous—that evolution equips us with a reserve capacity that makes these activities possible is a sidebenefit. The point is that an intelligent creature whose capacities do not allow of development in these directions just isn’t smart enough to pass evolution’s examinations in other matters—that is, wouldn’t be able to make intelligence its evolutionary specialty after all. The brain/computer analogy once again proves helpful in this connection. Very different things can be at stake with being “simple”: the simplicity of “hardware” at issue with comparatively less complex computers is one sort of thing, and the simplicity of “software” at issue with comparatively less complex programs is something quite different. And there are clearly tradeoffs here. Solving problems of the same level of difficulty is generally easier to program on a more sophisticated (more complex) computing machines. Something of an inverse relationship obtains: greater machine complication can make the actual use of the machine easier and less demanding. It is generally easier to program more “advanced” (i.e., complex) machines to do various sorts of tasks. And the circumstance is reflected in the fact that a creature which makes its evolutionary way in the world by intelligence requires a rather powerful brain. To be sure, evolution is not, in general, over-generous. For example, evolution will not develop creatures whose running-speed is vastly greater than what is needed to escape their predators, to catch their prey, or to realize some other such strictly utilitarian objective. But intelligence and its works are a clear exception to this general rule, owing to its self-catalyzing nature. With cognitive artifacts as with many physical artifacts, the character of the issues prevents a holding back. And once one can do a little with calculation or with information pro-

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cessing, one can in principle do a lot. Once evolution lets intelligence in through the door, it gets “the run of the house.” When bio-design takes the route of intelligence to secure an evolutionary advantage for a creature, it embarks on a slippery slope. Having started along this road, there is no easy and early stop. For once a species embarks on intelligence as an instrument of coping with nature, then the pressure of species-internal competition enters as a hot-house forcing process. Intelligence itself becomes a goad to further development simply because intelligence is, as it were, developmentally self-energizing. The result of the preceding deliberations is straight-forward. Intelligence is the evolutionary specialty of homo sapiens. If we were markedly less smart than we in fact are, we would not have been able to survive. Or rather, more accurately, we would not have been able to develop into the sort of creatures we have become. Intelligence constitutes the characteristic specialty that provides the comparative advantage which has enabled our species to make its evolutionary way into this world’s scheme of things. We are so smart because this is necessary for us to be here at all. To be a substantially smarter species, we would, for starters, need a much bigger brain on prevailing bio-engineering principles. To manage this would require a larger—less agile—body, forcing us to forego the advantages of maneuverability and versatility. To process twice the information would require a brain of roughly four times its present size. But to quadruple our brain-weight we would need a body of sixteen times its present weight.3 A body of so great a weight is not only extremely cumbersome but involves enormous demands for energy. The most plausible and probably move would then be to opt for a very different ecological niche and take to the water, joining our mammalian cousins the whales and dolphins. The stimulating surroundings of a land environment with its invitations to communal socialization, division of labor, and technological development would all be denied us. That gain in brain power would have come at an awesome cost, the sacrifice of the collective intelligence of the social institutionalization of tool-using creatures. The price is one that evolution cannot afford.4

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3. THE POWER OF MIND All that we can reasonably ask of an evolutionary account of mental operations is that it should explain the emergence of the capacities and processes for thought. The inner phenomenology of actual thinking lies beyond its range—not because of its deficiencies, but because of the simple fact that it addresses altogether different issues. We cannot fault an evolutionary account of the origination of mind for failing to provide that what no causal account of mind’s origination could possibly deliver on its own—cognitive access to the inner, phenomenological nature of mental experience. The nature of the apparatus of thought does not restrict the substance of our thinking. An evolutionary account of mind is not at odds with intentionality, purpose, meaning, and the like because it does not even address these issues. And this is not a shortcoming because it is designed to answer very different sorts of questions—questions which lie in the order of causal explanation rather than hermeneutic explication. An evolutionary account of the development of our capacities for mental operation accordingly leaves open scope for purpose and meaning because it does not—and cannot by its very nature—shut the door on issues that it simply does not address. And it clearly cannot be faulted for failing to deal with an issue (viz. the nature of understanding and intentionality) that lies entirely outside the range of its causal concerns. Intentionality (aims and purposes and the like) forms part of the thought-machinery of thinkers, even as mathematical objects triangles and spheres do. They do not evolve in nature but come to feature in the operations of (sufficiently sophisticated) minds operating in social interaction. How minds arise and come to acquire their talents and capacities is one thing, what they do with them is another. Biological evolution has to do with the first; intentionality with the second. Evolution operates with respect to the workings of mind—with its processes; intentionality is a matter of its products. There is—and can be—no incompatibility between them, seeing that different issues are involved. To be sure, then, an evolutionary account of mind is predicated on a position that is “materialistic” in viewing the mind as having a crucial

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basis for its operations in the processes of the body (and the brain in particular)5. But this sort of causal-origin materialism is nowise at odds with a hermeneutical idealism which maintains that we understand several of the world’s processes in terms of concepts and categories drawn from the “inner” experience of the mind’s self-observation.6 Evolution’s “mechanical,” causal accounting for our experiences of purposiveness and intentionality is nowise at odds with the inner experienced aspect of these phenomena. The former issue belongs to the domain of the causal explanation of experiencing as events in the physical world, the latter to the phenomenology of our experiences as phenomena in the world of thought. The long and short of it is that a Darwinian account of the origin of mind does not—and by its very nature cannot—conflict with intentionality and purpose because its range simply does not extend to this domain. But of course, it would simply be foolish to deny the originative power of evolutionary processes. To say that a purposive being cannot arise by evolution in a theretofore purpose-lacking world is much like saying that a seeing being cannot arise by evolution in a theretofore vision-lacking world or that an intelligent being cannot arise by evolution in a theretofore intelligence-lacking world. A commitment to the spirit of Darwinism may well impede an acceptance of the purposiveness OF nature, but it clearly does not and cannot impede an acceptance of purposiveness IN nature, through the emergence within nature of beings who themselves have purposes, intentions, goals, etc. No doubt, Darwinian natural selection ill accords with an anthropomorphism of nature, but it certainly does not preclude an anthropomorphism of man. The long and short of it is that acceptance of an evolutionary account of the origination and operation of human intelligence leaves ample scope for meaning and purpose in the domain of our human doings and dealings. And it would surely be both naive and mistaken to think that our human assessments of purpose, meaning, and value is somehow undermined or neglected by an account which sees their origination in capacities that more has been acquired through development in the natural course of evolutionary events. After all neither logic nor natural science are diminished by noting that the capacity to

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develop these disciplines is one that has come our way in the evolutionary course of things. NOTES 1

The human skeleton has some 220 bones, about the same number as a cat when tail bones are excluded. A small monkey has around 120. Of course, what matters for present purposes is independently moving parts. This demotes centipedes and— thanks to fingers, among other things—takes us out of the cat’s league.

2

At any given time in evolutionary history, the then-current herbivores tended to have smaller brains than the contemporary carnivores. Cf. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 190.

3

On this issue compare J. B. S. Haldane’s insightful and provocative essay “On Being the Right Size” in his collection Possible Worlds and Other Papers (New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1928).

4

Of course here—as elsewhere—we cannot let matters rest with speaking of an evolutionary process in this rather anthropomorphic way. In the final analysis, we have to cash in these metaphors in terms of different groups (tribes, clans) of humanoids chancing to produce a bumper crop of more than ordinarily intelligent individuals and finding themselves at a reproductive disadvantage thereby because of their comparatively greater risk-averseness. But no imaginative student of recent demographic phenomena will find difficulty in envisioning an appropriate sort of scenario here.

5

For a good overview of the philosophical issues involved see Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. 1984).

6

Some of the issues of this chapter are dealt with in greater detail in the author’s Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973). The eminent English biologist J. B. S. Haldane once protested: “If my opinions are the result of chemical processes going on in my brain, they are determined by the laws of chemistry, not those of logic.” But this argument is surely problematic. If the brain processes involved in opinion function become (to some extent) aligned, via evolution, to the laws of logic, then clearly it becomes possible to have it both ways. And there can be no conflict here. While chemistry (or neuro-physiology) may explain how the brain works, very different resources are need to explain what it does with these capabilities.

Chapter Three AMPHIBIOUS MAN: THE EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION Synopsis (1) Imagination is yet another of our distinction of our evolutionsupplied distinctive capacities. (2) It is crucial for supposition—a process essential to conducting the hypothetical reasoning required in many fields—science included. (3) Moreover, fiction for its own sake is a salient form of human creativity.

1. IMAGINATION

I

n its production of homo sapiens, evolution has led to the emergence of a creature that can not only perceive the real but image unrealities, one that can fictionalize. Overall we can engage in two very different modes of thought and discourse: the realistic aimed at characterizing how matters actually stand, and the imaginative aimed at broadening our insight into the realm of possibility. Humanity inhabits two worlds: that of experienced reality and that of fancy and imagination. Sometimes our thoughts and efforts are directed to the realm of what is⎯the real world that is the object of our informal and scientific inquiries. But sometimes it is addressed to the realm of what is not⎯the imaginary object of our fancies and speculations, of our conjectures and imaginings. Accordingly, we are dual citizens of two realms: the real world of our reality-interactive experience and the thought world of our reality-suspensive imagination. We are constantly involved with both experience and imagination⎯cognitive interaction with reality and the mind’s projection of realitysuspensive conjecture.

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Why should we concern ourselves with unreal possibilities at all? For many reasons. Fictions can be entertaining and instructive⎯and useful as well because they enable speculative thought to penetrate to regions where realities do not go. Imagination increasingly borders the range of hypothetical thinking. For we can now reflect and reason not just in the counterfactual context of “Whenever A is so, then B will also be so” but also in the counterfactual context of “Had A been so (which it wasn’t), then B could have been.” On the negative side they enable us to engage in deceit, but on the positive side they enable us to do planning and contrive precautionary measures through engaging in “what if” thinking. They also enable us to broaden our understanding by means of thought experiments and the exploration of hypotheses. Fiction can serve us as a source of inspiration and encouragement rendered achievable through the contemplation of possibilities to whose realization we can at least aspire. And not only can ambition and aspiration be enlivened in this way but also our sympathy and empathy can be engendered through the imaginative exercise of “putting ourselves in another person’s shoes”⎯be that person real or imaginary. Virtually every step in the history of human innovation and invention has come about in the wake of someone asking about imaginary possibilities, speculating about what would happen if and reflecting on yet-unrealized and perhaps unrealizable possibilities. Speculation about as-yet nonactual and often never to be realized possibilities is a pervasive feature of innovation. The domain of the possible plays a prominent part in our thought about the affairs of nature and of man. Deliberation about alternatives, contingency planning, reasoning from hypotheses and assumptions, and thought-experiments are but a few instances of our far-flung concern with possibility. The rational guidance of human affairs involves a constant recourse to possibilities: we try to guard against them, to prevent them, to bring them to realization, etc., and this speculative endeavor constitutes a significant part of our understanding of man’s ways of thought and action. There is, in fact, a complex but close interrelationship between the two realms of reality and imagination. We cannot effectively separate them, nor manage to live in one without involvement in the other.

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The concepts and ideas we employ in forming our view about unactualized possibilities must invariably be taken from our experience of actuality. In this regard the classical empiricists were right. In constructing our view of the unreal we have to make use of the conceptual materials we derive from our experience of the real. The descriptive features we are in a position to attribute to the imaginary are invariably features we know from our experience of the real. The domain of our science fiction is based on the offerings of our science. It is our experience of reality⎯and reality alone⎯that is the ultimate source of the materials out of which we shape our conceptions of the merely possible. On the other hand, our view of reality is itself in a way a product of the contemplation of possibilities. Imaginative guesswork is always the starting point for our belief formation. Thought experiments are the starting points of our real experiments. No science of the real can be developed without use of the imagination to engage in “what if” deliberations. After all, science is abstract but experience is always concrete⎯now this now that. Science deals in generalities, experience in specifics; science in causes, experience in events. And anything that has the least structure of generality about it transcends the limits of actual experience. Our only access way to generality is by means of imagination and conjecture: by asking ourselves what general arrangements would effectively yield the specifics at our disposal. Experience delivers episodes, not theories⎯particulars, not universals. Without forays into the reality-transcending realm of imagination, supposition, conjecture, or the like we could not get beyond the specifics of concrete experience. For a fully adequate understanding of the real we have to situate it against the larger background of the merely possible. After all, the whole object of induction⎯of scientific method⎯is to establish a smooth coordination between the concrete specifics of experience and the abstract generalities of thought. To paraphrase Kant, imagination without experience is empty, experience without imagination is blind. We have to strive for symbiosis⎯for optimal collaboration and coordination between the two. And the guiding principle of rational inquiry is ultimately to maximize the range of ex-

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perience while at the same time minimizing the amount of mere conjecture that is needed to realize an adequate account for it. And here, the issue of priorities comes to the forefront in connection with the uses to which these cognitive resources are put in forming our overall manifold of thought about real actuality and mere possibility. This will and must pivot on the question of purpose⎯of the aims and goals of the enterprise on which we are engaged. For with scientific inquiry into the world’s events and processes it is experience that is⎯or should be⎯in the driver’s seat, while in the domain of intellectual artifice and belles-lettristic creation it is imagination and conjecture that is in charge. Very different principles of priority are operative in these two realms of describing reality and illuminating possibility. The one⎯inquiry⎯is actually geared and committed to the prioritization of substantially inert experience where our wishes and preference play little part. The other⎯intellectual artifice⎯is possibility-geared and gives free reign to an imagination that is limited only by our wishes and desires. Inquiry is tethered to reality via experience; artifice does what it can to unbind these fetters via the imagination. The specifics of the purposive context make for a crucial difference in approach here. The groundrules of factual and fictional discourse are altogether different, with different aims and objectives in view⎯to portray experientially discernible reality on the one hand, and to project imaginative possibilities on the other. 2. SUPPOSITIONS Philosophers have often said things to the effect that people whose experience of the world is substantially different from our own are bound to conceive of it in very different ways⎯and thereby operate in terms of very different category-schemes. Supporting considerations for this position have been advanced from very different points of view. One example is a thought experiment suggested by Georg Simmel in the last century—that of envisaging an entirely different sort of cognitive being,1 intelligent and actively inquiring creatures (animals, say, or beings from outer space)

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whose experiential modes are quite different from our own. Their senses respond rather differently to physical parameters—relatively insensitive, say, to heat and light, but substantially sensitized to various electromagnetic phenomena. Such intelligent creatures, Simmel held, could plausibly be supposed to operate within a largely different framework of empirical concepts and categories—the events and objects of the world of their experience would doubtless be very different from our own. The way in which they describe the realm of their experience might differ radically. In a similar vein, William James wrote: Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these [actual ones] of apprehending our experiences. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those we actually use.2

Different cultures and different intellectual traditions, to say nothing of different sorts of creatures, will, so it has been widely contended, describe and explain their experience—their world as they conceive it—in terms of concepts and categories of understanding substantially different from ours. They may, accordingly, be said to operate with different conceptual schemes, with different conceptual tools used to “make sense” of experience—to characterize, describe, and explain the items that figure in the world as they view it. And it is clear that the substantiation of any such conclusion will crucially and unavoidably rest on thought experimentation. In intellectual regards, homo sapiens is an amphibian who lives and functions in two very different realms—the domain of actual fact which we can investigate in observational inquiry, and the domain of imaginative projection which we can explore only in thought by means of reasoning. This second ability becomes crucially important for the first as well, when once one presses beyond the level of a mere description of the real to concern ourselves also with its explanation. In the history of Western thought, this transition was first made by the Greek nature-philosophers of Presocratic times. It is they—as will be

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seen—who invented thought-experimentation as a cognitive procedure and practiced it with great dedication and versatility. To us moderns, brought up on imaginative childrens’ nursery rhymes (“If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride”) exposed to manifold fictions, this sort of belief-suspensive thinking seems altogether natural. But it takes a competent logician to appreciate how complex and sophisticated thought experimentation actually is. What it involves is not simply drawing an appropriate conclusion from a putative fact; rather, it exploits the higher-level consideration that a particular thesis (be it fact or mere supposition) carries a certain conclusion in its wake. Supposition is, of course, a commonplace device that operates via such familiar locutions as “suppose,” “assume,” “what if,” “let it be that,” “consider the hypothesis that,” and the like. A supposition is not an acknowledged fact, but a thesis that is accepted “provisionally” or laid down “for the time being.” A mere supposition must, as such, be deemed if not false, then at least uncertain to some extent; if it were deemed true there would be nothing assumptive about it.3 It is the occurrence among the premises of an argument of such a suppositional hypothesis that renders such a piece of reasoning in which it figures a “hypothetical.” Supposing something to be the case is conceptually more sophisticated than affirming it to be the case. The person who does not grasp what it is to accept the claim that p is not in position to suppose doing so, even as the person who imagines finding a dollar bill must know what actually finding a dollar bill would be like. From the logical point of view, knowing is supposing. For consider: One can only know so what is actually true, which is obviously not so with supposing. And one can suppose something in one context of discussion, and something else that is incompatible with it in another whereas knowledge is once-and-for-all. Supposing is conceptually more complex than knowing. 3. FICTION AND REALITY Fiction departs from fact. And the world is a realm of facts—only facts exist as such and only they are accessible to observational expe-

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rience. Our sole access to the realm of fiction is through the mediation of mind. There is no other way to get there from here and no other way to be in touch. People cannot eat, misplace, or destroy fictional apples; they can only think (imagine, pretend, suppose) that they are eaten, misplaced, or destroyed. We (fortunately) do not live in Logopolis. The fact is that we are amphibians who dwell not only in the realm of thought and talk but also in the realm of actions and interactions within the environing world. And while there is much that is easily said, there is much less that is easily done. It is, accordingly, in the domain of praxis, of the actions and activities of intelligent agents, that the crucial difference between reality and fiction comes to make itself felt. At the writing desk, the theater, the movie house we sit inert. It is when we emerge once more into the open air and engage ourselves in life’s affairs that our sturdy sense of reality reasserts itself. Fictions are figments of the imagination. The claim “It is fictionally true (in the fiction F) that P” amounts to “It is actually true (in the real world) that there is the fiction F that has it (explicitly or implicitly) that P.” Fictional truths—the truths of fictional worlds—are obliquely actual truths, truths about the real fictions projected in the real world. Specifically, they are truths about the explicit or tacit commitment of fictional works. A fictional world has no independent ontological status of its own; such status as it has it derives from the real-world actualities of the fictional work at issue. While there is no reality to fictions as such, there certainly are fictions in reality. Like everything else, works of fiction have to exist in the real world in order to exist at all. Fictions have no actual reality in themselves; their only reality is the thought reality projected through the creativity of their authors and the receptivity of their readers. And of course, there are no fictional worlds as such—they are mere thought projections, mere mind products. (To be sure, those mental proceedings are real enough.) But where lies the boundary between fiction and reality? The principal difference clearly lies in what we do about it. The text says: The cat is on the mat. You see this as factual and you readjust your world picture—and accordingly your actions. (You watch how you step on the mat; adjust where you go to summon the cat for its feeding; etc.)

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But if you were to see the statement as fictional you would do none of the above and go about things quite differently. Real cats are part of experiential reality. So when you think cat-on-the-mat behavior to be in order and find that proceeding on this basis turns out appropriately as per expectation, then you have good grounds for endorsing that claim as correct. And the better that things work out, the better the grounds for thinking, “That’s really the way it is.” The best way to monitor factuality lies in seeing what those putative facts actually do for us. Two things are at issue with respect to responses to a claim: how we respond to it in action, and how the world responds to the relevant state of affairs. And the difference between fact and fiction lies in how matters comport themselves at these two levels. On this basis, the proper procedure with respect to the fact/fiction distinction is to construe the whole issue in a pragmatic light. An important way in which fiction can differ from reality arises because unlike the real world, fictional worlds can be schematic. The hero’s father—so let it be—died in his fifties. Did he die at age fifty-one or fifty-nine? Not even heaven knows. Nobody knows because there is no possible way for this to be known and no actual fact of the matter. And yet we have to concede that even in that fictional world people die at a definite age. But what that age is is not determinate or determinable. The fictional world does not make up its mind between these alternative possibilities. This is not a luxury that the real world enjoys. The real world cannot have it that both P and not-P; it must commit itself one way or the other. The luxury of leaving matters understood— a luxury that writers of fiction do and must enjoy—is one that the real world cannot afford. It makes sense to say of the real world (with Wittgenstein) that it is everything that is actually the case, so that—especially if one envisions God as a thinker—there is no in-principle gap between the reach of thought as such and the real world.4 But this cannot be said about fictional worlds. There are facts regarding such worlds that are in principle impenetrable to mind. As the example shows, we can know of such a world that a man dies at a definite age even though what that age is remains undetermined, seeing that there is no one definite age at which it is true that he died.5 It is not just that we do not know the right answer to that question but that there is none.

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Reality and fiction, achievability and possibility, stand in a dialectical relationship of a reciprocal dependency of sorts. Ontologically the real world has primacy: we and our minds inevitably exists within it and project our thoughts⎯those about possibilities included⎯from within the vantage point of a position world-internal. Ontologically we have to be existentialists and acknowledge that existence precedes possibility. But epistemologically we are essentialists who prioritize possibility over actual existence. For here in general we have to contemplate a series of possibilities about how things might be in order and then to identify and evidentiate that particular alternative we propose to acknowledge as representing the truth of the matter. And in general, the ability to contrast what is with what might be is crucial for planning, for evaluation for rational choice, and for human creativity as well. Without imagination our mental life would be direly diminished. NOTES 1

Georg Simmel, “Ueber eine Beziehung der Selektionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie und Soziologie, vol. 1 (1895), pp. 34–45 (see pp. 40–41).

2

Pragmatism (New York: Longmans Green, 1907), p. 171. The basic line of thought goes back to the ancient skeptics. Compare Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I 54, 59–60, 97, et passim.

3

“Supposition on the part of the Creator would be ridiculous, for supposition implies doubt.” (Alfred Guillaume (ed.), The ‘Summa Philosophiae’ of Al-Shahrastānī (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 62 of the translation.) Conditionals whose antecedents are seen as true⎯factual conditionals, that is⎯are generally formulated with since rather than if.

4

Compare John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 27–29.

5

The equivalence of T(∃x)fx with (∃x)Tfx presumably holds when T is real-world truth, but it certainly fails when T is story-relative truth.

Chapter 4 THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF COMMUNAL PRACTICES IN INQUIRY SYNOPSIS (1) Cognitive unlike biological evolution is cultural and thereby teleological in nature. Our cognitive methods and procedures (software)— in contrast to our cognitive faculties and capacities (hardware)— emerge through a process of rational rather than Darwinian natural selection. (2) In particular, the emergence of trust and collaboration in inquiry is provided for by considerations of cost-effectiveness relative to the aims of the enterprise. Any communicatively interacting group of rational inquirers is bound to develop into a collaborating community under the pressure of self-interest. (3) The practices that comprise the operations characteristic of a scientific community should be seen as the products of such a purposively guided cultural evolution based on rational selection. (4) The survival of stupidity is no obstacle to the emergence of intelligence processes through rational selection.

1. CULTURAL EVOLUTION AS TELEOLOGICAL: RATIONAL SELECTION

S

cientifically minded epistemologists nowadays incline to consider how the workings of the “mind” can be explained in terms of the operations of the “brain.”1 But this approach has its limits. Biological evolution is doubtless what accounts for the cognitive machinery whose functioning provides for our possession of intelligence, but explaining the ways in which we use it largely calls for a rather different sort of evolutionary approach, one that addresses the development of thought-procedures rather than that of thought-mechanisms—of

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“software” rather than “hardware.” What is at issue here is a matter of cultural-teleological evolution through a process of rational rather than Darwinian natural selection. Very different processes are accordingly at work, the latter as it were blind, the former purposive. (In particular, biological evolution reacts only to actually realized changes in environing conditions: cultural evolution in its advanced stages can react also to merely potential changes in condition through people’s capacity to think hypothetically and thereby to envision “what could happen if” certain changes occurred.) Once intelligence appears on the scene to any extent, no matter how small, it sets up pressures towards the enlargement of its scope, powerfully conditioning any and all future cultural evolution through the rational selection of processes and procedures on the basis of purposive efficacy. Rationality thus emerges as a key element in the evolutionary development of methods as distinguished from faculties. The “selective” survival of effective methods is no blind and mechanical process produced by some inexorable agency of nature; rational agents place their bets in theory and practice in line with methods that prove themselves successful, tending to follow the guidance of those that succeed and to abandon—or readjust—those that fail. Once we posit a method-using community that functions under the guidance of intelligence—itself a factor of biologically evolutionary advantage—only a short step separates the pragmatic issue of the applicative success of its methods (of any sort) from the evolutionary issue of their historical survival. As long as these intelligent rational agents have a prudent concern for their own interests, the survival of relatively successful methods as against relatively unsuccessful ones is a foregone conclusion. Rational selection is a complex process that transpires not in a “population” but in a culture. It pivots on the tendency of a community of rational agents to adopt, and perpetuate through example and teaching, practices and modes of operation that are relatively more effective for the attainment of given ends than their available alternatives. Accordingly, the historical development of methods and modes of operation within a society of rational agents is likely to reflect a course of actual improvement. Rational agents involved in a course of trial and error experimentation with different processes and procedures are unlikely to prefer (for adoption by themselves and transmis-

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sion to their successors) practices and procedures which are ineffective or inefficient. This line of consideration does not envision a direct causal linkage between the historical survival of method users and the functional effectiveness of their methods. The relationship is one of common causation. The intelligence that proves itself normal conducive also forms functional efficacy. In consequence, survival in actual use of a method within a community of (realistic, normal) rational agents through this very fact affords evidence for its being successful in realizing its correlative purposes.2 These deliberations regarding rational selection have to this point been altogether general in their abstract bearing upon methodologies of any shape or description. They apply to methods across the board, and hold for methods for peeling apples as much as of methods for substantiating knowledge-claims. But let us now focus more restrictedly on specifically cognitive methods, and consider the development of the cognitive and material technology of intellectual production. There is certainly no need to exempt cognitive methodology from the range of rational selection in the evolution of methodologies. Quite to the contrary: there is every reason to think that the cognitive methods and information-engendering procedures that we deploy in forming our view of reality evolve selectively by an historic, evolutionary process of trial and error—analogous in role though different in character from the biological mutations affecting the bodily mechanisms by which we comport ourselves in the physical world. Accordingly, cognitive methods develop subject to revision in response to the element of “success and failure” in terms of the teleology of the practice of rational inquiry. An inquiry procedure is an instrument for organizing our experience into a systematized view of reality. And as with any tool or method or instrument, the paramount question takes the instrumentalistic form: Does it work? Does it produce the desired result? Is it successful in practice? Legitimation along these lines is found in substantial part on the fact of survival through historical vicissitudes in the context of this pivotal issue of “working out best.” This sort of legitimation has at the basis of the cultural development of our cognitive resources via the varieties and selective retention of our epistemically oriented intellectual products.3

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It is clear that there are various alternative approaches to the problem of determining “how things work in the world.” The examples of such occult cognitive frameworks as those of numerology (with its benign ratios), astrology (with its astral influences), and black magic (with its mystic forces) indicate that alternative explanatory frameworks exist, and that these can have very diverse degrees of merit. Now in the Western tradition the governing standards of human rationality are implicit in the goals of explanation, prediction, and preeminently control. (And thus the crucial factor is not, for example, sentimental “at-oneness with nature”—think of the magician vs. the mystic vs. the sage as cultural ideals.) These standards revolve about considerations of practice and are implicit in the use of our conceptual resources in the management of our affairs. Given the reasonable agent’s well-advised predilection for success in one’s ventures, the fact that the cognitive methods we employ have a good record of demonstrated effectiveness in regard to explanation, prediction, and control is not surprising but only to be expected: the community of rational inquirers would have given them up long ago were they not comparatively successful. The effectiveness of our cognitive methodology is thus readily accounted for on an evolutionary perspective based on rational selection and the requirements for survival through adoption and transmission. Yet, people are surely not all that rational—they have their moments of aberration and self-indulgence. Might not such tendencies selectively favor the ineffective over the effective—of the fallacious rather than the veridical—and so slant the process of cognitive evolution in inappropriate directions? C. S. Peirce certainly recognized this prospect: Logicality in regard to practical matters … is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection; but outside of these it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.4

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However, the methodological orientation of our approach provides a safeguard against an unwarranted penchant for such fallacious tendencies. At the level of individual beliefs “pleasing and encouraging visions” might indeed receive a survival-favoring impetus. But this unhappy prospect is effectively removed where a systematic method of inquiry is concerned—a method that must by its very synoptic nature lie in the sphere of the pragmatically effective. To be sure cultural evolution is shaped and canalized by constraints that themselves are the products of biological evolution. For our instincts, inclinations, and natural dispositions are all programmed into us by evolution. The transition from a biologically advantageous economy of effective physical effort to a cognitively advantageous economy of effective intellectual efforts is a short and easy step. An individual’s heritage comes from two main sources: a biological heritage derived from the parents and a cultural heritage derived from the society. However, in the development of our knowledge, this second factor becomes critical. To establish and perpetuate itself in any community of rational agents, a practice or method of procedure must prove itself in the course of experience. Not only must it be to some extent effective in realizing the pertinent aims and ends, but it must prove itself to be more efficient than comparably available alternatives. With societies composed of rational agents, the pressure of means-ends efficacy is ever at work in forging a process of cultural (rather than natural) selection for replacing less by more cost-effective ways of achieving the group’s committed ends—its cognitive ends emphatically included. Our cognitive faculties are doubtless the product of biological evolution, but the processes and procedures by which we put them to work are the results of a cultural evolution which proceeds through rationally guided trial and error in circumstances of a pragmatic preference for retaining those processes and procedures that prove theorists efficient and effective. Rational people have a strong bias for what works.5 And progress is swift because once rationality gains an inch, it wants a mile.

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2. THE RATIONALE OF TRUST AND THE EMERGENCE OF COLLABORATION

The historical development of the social processes and practices that characterize the conduct of inquiry in its institutionalized setting in the domain of science affords a clear illustration of this phenomenon of rational selection. In any community of interacting rational agents, the pragmatic impetus conduces powerfully to the selection and retention of those practices that prove themselves to be teleologically successful and functionally cost-effective in realizing the shared aims of the enterprise at hand. The modus operandi of the scientific community affords a clear illustration of this state of affairs. Consider, for example, such customary practices of scientists, as information sharing and open publication, a credit system based on the principle that being first is everything, and a rigoristic intolerance of plagiarism cheating,6 data forgery, and other modes of dishonesty. Rational selection militates towards their emergence and consolidation among scientists because all such practices are cost-effective relative to the goal structure of the scientific enterprise. In particular, the development of the institutional groundrules of science can best be understood on this basis. Once the impetus to systematic inquiry emerges in a human community (as the nature of the human condition renders it only natural that it should eventually do someplace or other, the efficient pursuit of the aims and objectives of the enterprise will engender the emergence—in a community of rational agents—of the sorts of practices of cooperation that characterize the operational code of the natural sciences. Science is indeed a project of cooperation and collaboration. Buts its motive force is selfinterest since to be helpful to others when in so doing we are, to all intents and purposes, helping them to be helpful to us. Contrast two hypothetical communities: The Trusters and the Distrusters. The Trusters operate on the principle “Be candid yourself. And accept what other people say as truthful—at any rate in the absence of counterindications.” The Distrusters operate on the principle: “Be deceitful yourself. And look on the assertions of others in the same light—as ventures in deception and deceit. (Even when ostensibly being truthful, they are only trying to lure you into a false sense of

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security.)” It is clear once again that the policy of the Distrusters is totally destructive of communication. If the accession of information for the enhancement of our knowledge through communication and exchange is the aim of the enterprise, the process of distrust is totally counterproductive. In intellectual as in financial commerce, trust is essential to the maintenance of universally beneficial institutions. Not only is the maintenance of credibility an asset to communication, but some degree of it is in fact an outright necessity. The precept “Protect your credibility; do not play fast and loose with the social groundrules, but safeguard your place in the community of communicators” is basic to the entire project of communication. And so, practices which discernibly lead in this direction are for that very reason the more likely to be tried and, once tried, retained. A society of communicators is accordingly destined to evolve under the pressure of rational self-interest into a kind of mutual-aid association whose members are engaged in a collaboration to create and maintain a fabric of trust. For, clearly, everyone benefits from a system (modus operandi) which maintains the best balance of costs and benefits for each of us in this matter of creating a communally usable pool of information. It is easily seen that a contrary practice—one which takes a sceptical or agnostic stance towards the declarations of others—would be disastrous. For if, instead of treating those with whom one communicates on the basis of “innocent until proven guilty,” one were to treat them on the lines of “not trustworthy until proven otherwise,” this procedure would clearly prove vastly less economic. We would now have to go to great lengths in independent verification before we could achieve any informative benefits from the communicative contributions of others. We know that various highly “convenient” principles of knowledge-production are simply false: —What seems to be is. —What people say is true. —The simplest patterns that fit the data are actually correct.

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We realize full well that such generalizations do not hold—however nice it would be if they did. Nevertheless throughout the conduct of inquiry we accept them as principles of presumption. We follow the higher-level meta-rule “In the absence of concrete indications to the contrary, proceed as though such principles were true—that is, accept what seems to be (what people say, etc.) as true.” The justification of this step as a measure of practical procedure is not the factual consideration that, “in proceeding in this way, you will come at correct information—you will not fall into error.” Rather it is the methodological justification: “In proceeding in this way you will efficiently foster the interests of the cognitive enterprise: the benefits will—on the whole—outweigh the costs.” Any group of mutually communicating rational inquirers is fated in the end to become a community of sorts, bound together by a shared practice or trust and cooperation, simply through self-interest operating under the pressure of economic advantage. For when nature (“the operating environment”) can be seen to function in such a way to reward a center course of action, rational people will obviously favor this course in what they do, and thereby in their teaching by example (if not also by precept). This sort of process works on other fronts as well. Consider such operational rules as: Be clear: Formulate your ideal intelligibility, avoid imprecision, equivocation, obscurity, etc. Be honest: Do not manipulate data, distort findings, misrepresent work, etc. Be careful: Do not be sloppy, indifferent to precision and exactness, heedless of pitfalls, etc. Be open-minded: Do not ignore difficulties, neglect alternative possibilities, etc. Be ambitious: Strive for generality, elegance, etc.

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All such groundrules of scientific practice have been developed and consolidated because they are cost-effective within the setting of the project of inquiry. They are procedures that have as their economically cogent rationale the characteristic feature of being the cheapest (most convenient) way for us to secure the data needed for answers to our questions about the world we live in. The considerations of efficacy that lie at the root of rational selection speak loud and clear on their behalf. As one recent theorist insightfully observes: In science … the ultimate goal is not the transmission of genes but of ideas. Scientists behave as selflessly as they do because it is in their own self-interest to do so. The best thing that a scientist can do for his own career is to get his ideas accepted as his ideas by his fellow scientists. Scientists acknowledge the contribution made by other scientists because it is in their own best self-interest to do so.7

With rational agents, at any rate, cultural survival is guided by considerations of efficacy and effectiveness. Rational agents are constantly impelled by the impetus of evident advantage towards a system of cooperative social practices—an operational code that serves the aims and objectives inherent in the scientific enterprise. The relevant modes of mutually helpful behavior—sharing, candor, and trustworthiness— are all strongly in everyone’s interest, enabling each member to draw benefit and advantage from his own purposes. In the circumstances, cooperation emerges not necessarily from morality but even from mere self-interest. Cognitive and biological evolution alike are replete with situations in which self-interest simulates altruism—in which the inherent “doing the right thing” advantages the species and the individual agent with it. 3. THE PRACTICES OF A “SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY” The free and open exchange of “the scientific literature” further illustrates this state of affairs. Such an unfettered literature initially impels the community of inquirers towards becoming a mutual assistance society and thereafter sustains it as such. Even if (contrary to fact) individual credit for one’s own contributions were not forthcoming

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through “professional recognition,” it would still be well worthwhile for individuals to enter into such an arrangement. For this obviously redounds to their interests in furthering their own work—at any rate as long as intellectual curiosity is a motivating factor for them. Information viewed as a commodity illustrates rather than contravenes the division of labor that results for Adam Smith’s putative innate human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” The market in knowledge has pretty much the same nature and the same motivation as any other sort of market—it is a general-interest arrangement. To be sure, it is by no means the case that the evolutionarily relevant cost-benefit advantage lies wholly on the side of cooperation. Competition also has its role to play. Cooperation is useful and indeed necessary in bringing budding scientists up to the frontier of current inquiry. But in moving that frontier forward—in innovation— competition has a crucial role to play. It is illuminating in this regard to consider the reward system of science. Why do scientists when evaluating people’s contributions accord such great value to priority? Why make scientific discovery a “winner takes all” process, as in political election? (After all, as long as the work was done independently and accomplished within the same “state of the art,” the achievement is surely just as great?) The answer lies largely in the circumstance that this provides a maximum incentive to creative effort. Moreover, the interests of the community require avoidance of duplication of effort. The originality-promoting principle that “once done it’s a dead issue” gives powerful assurance that people will not work in “dried-up” areas. The reward system of science is by and large designed to promote aims and objectives of the enterprise in the most efficient way. This is clearly illustrated by the emergency of a reward system that apportions credit for scientific discoveries in line with their inherent importance. Good quality work is lauded to the skies and highly rewarded in “professional recognition” and other rewards while poor quality work is ignored. Such a system obviously fosters the interest of the enterprise-in-general, in which its participants all have a substantial stake. When operating true to form, the scientific community is self-policing (to an extent that, for example, police departments or the medical community are not) because of mutual dependency—

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people are in a position where they chance to make use of each other’s work in the course of doing their own. Note that even apart from the aforementioned considerations of rewards and incentives, powerful considerations of economic costeffectiveness militate against anonymity in scientific and scholarly publication. Identification is advantageous through enabling readers to make some initial discrimination between the presumably competent work of people who, having gained good reputations through competent work, have something at risk. And their identification is clearly also a guarantor of care and conscientiousness for those who still “have to make their name” in the field. Blind publication would have the substantial disadvantage of entailing the loss of useful information. (Contemplate a scientific journal of anonymous results.) The upshot of such deliberations is straightforward. The codes of practice by which we humans pursue the project of serious inquiry in science are the product of rational selection. The systematic practices that constitute the modus operandi of “the scientific community” in its various characteristic aspects are in the main products of a cultural evolution proceeding under the governing directive of functional effectiveness. They have emerged under the teleological pressure of purposive efficacy as the product of a fundamentally rational process of perpetuating—through acculturation, preaching, teaching, rolemodelling, and the like—just those practices that are cost-effective in facilitating the efficient realization of the objectives that characterize the scientific enterprise. The factors of effectiveness and efficiency have operated to assure that the real is rational in this regard, enabling the process of cultural selection to do their effective work.8 4. A PROBLEM FOR RATIONAL EVOLUTION The objection looms: “But how can you say that evolutionary survival among cognitive methods is inherently rational? Hasn’t astrology survived to the present day—as its continuing presence in newspaper columns attests?” The response runs: Astrology has indeed survived. But not in the scientific community, that is, not among people dedicated in a serious way to the understanding, explanation, and control of nature. In the Western, Faustian9 intellectual tradition of science,

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the ultimate arbiter of rationality is represented by the factor of knowledge-wed-to-action, and the ultimate validation of our beliefs lies in the combination of theoretical and practical success—with “practice” construed primarily in its pragmatic sense. All these “occult” procedures may have survived in some ecological niche in Western culture. But in science they are long extant. It is accordingly not difficult to give examples of the operation of evolutionary processes in the cognitive domain. The intellectual landscape of human history is littered with the skeletal remains of the extinct dinosaurs of this sphere. Examples of such defunct methods for the acquisition and explanatory utilization of information include astrology, numerology, oracles, dream-interpretation, the reading of tea leaves or the entrails of birds, animism, the teleological physics of the Presocratics, and so on. No doubt, such processes continue in issue in some human communities to this very day; but clearly not among those dedicated to serious inquiry into nature’s ways—i.e., scientists. There is nothing intrinsically absurd or inherently contemptible about such unorthodox cognitive programs—even the most occult of them have a long and not wholly unsuccessful history. (Think, for example, of the prominent role of numerological explanation from Pythagoreanism, through Platonism, to the medieval Arabs, down to Kepler in the Renaissance.) Distinctly different scientific methodologies and programs have been mooted: Ptolemaic “saving the phenomena” vs. the hypothetico-deductive method, or again, Baconian collectionism vs. the post-Newtonian theory of experimental science, etc. The emergence, development, and ultimate triumph of scientific method of inquiry and explanation invite an evolutionary account—though clearly one that involves rational rather than natural selection. The scientific approach to factual inquiry is simply one alternative among others, and it does not have an unshakable basis in the very constitution of the human intellect. Rather, the basis of our historically developed and entrenched cognitive tools lies in their (presumably) having established themselves in open competition with their rivals. It has come to be shown before the tribunal of bitter experience— through the historical vagaries of an evolutionary process of selection—that the accepted methods work out most effectively in actual practical vis-à-vis other tried alternatives. Such a legitimation is not

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absolute, but only presumptive. It does, however, manage to give justificatory weight to the historical factor of being in de facto possession of the field. The emergence of the principles of scientific understanding (simplicity, uniformity, and the like) is thus a matter of cultural rather than biological evolution subject to rational rather than natural selection. NOTES 1

See, for example, P. M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) and P. S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science for the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

2

No recent writer has stressed more emphatically than F. A. Hayek the deep inherent rationality of historical processes in contrast to the shallower calculations of a calculating intelligence that restricts its view to the agenda of the recent day. See especially his book, The Political Order of a Free People [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], Volume 3 of “Law, Liberty, and Civilization.”

3

The French school of sociology of knowledge envisioned a competition among and selectively diverse modes of procedure to account for the evolution of logical and scientific thought. Compare Louis Rougier, Traite de la Connaissance (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1955), esp. pp. 426–428.

4

C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1934), sect. 5.366.

5

These present deliberations have a close kinship with the “epigentic rules” that figure prominently in Michael Ruse’s fine book on Taking Darwin Seriously (Oxford, 1986). The only significant divergence is that Ruse sees the rules at issue as having a predominantly biological basis where the present discussion sees their basis as predominantly cultural.

6

Compare J. R. Cole and S. Cole, “The Ortega Hypothesis,” Science, vol. 178 (1972), pp. 368–375, and also their Social Stratifications in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

7

David L. Hull, “Altruism in Science: A Sociobiological Model of Co-Operative Behavior among Scientists,” Animal Behavior, vol. 26 (1978), pp. 685–697. Hull’s writings carry much grist to the mill at work in this section.

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NOTES 8

The distinction between cultural and biological evolution is pivotal in the author’s A Useful Inheritance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990). See also Gerhard Schurz, Evolution in Natur und Kultur (Heidelberg: Spektrum, 2011).

9

“Im Anfang war die Tat” as Goethe's Faust puts it.

Chapter 5 RATIONAL SELECTION: THE CASE OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD Synopsis (1) The development of the scientific method is a clear instance of cultural evolution. (2) It vividly exhibits rational selection at work in return to methods and techniques. Granted, man is not always rational in every department of activity. But science is an honorable exception here.

1. SCIENTIFIC METHOD

T

here is a crucial division of labor between biological and cultural evolution—between natural and rational selection. Natural selection provides the tools while cultural selection shapes the manner of their use. Natural selection creates the capacities, cultural selection canalizes their exploration. The domain of science affords a clear illustration of the phenomenon of development through rational selection. In any community of interacting rational agents, the pragmatic impetus conduces powerfully to the selection and retention of those practices that prove themselves to be teleologically successful and functionally cost-effective in realizing whatever enterprise is at hand. The modus operandi of the scientific community affords a clear illustration of this state of affairs. Consider, for example, such customary practices of scientists, as information sharing and open publication, a credit system based on the principle that being first is everything, and a rigoristic intolerance of plagiarism cheating,1 data forgery, and other modes of dishonesty. Rational selection militates towards their emergence and consolidation

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among scientists because all such practices are cost-effective relative to the goal structure of the scientific enterprise. In particular, the development of the institutional groundrules of science can best be understood on this basis. Once the impetus to systematic inquiry emerges in a human community (as the nature of the human condition renders it only natural that it should eventually do someplace or other), the efficient pursuit of the aims and objectives of the enterprise will engender the emergence—in a community of rational agents—of the sorts of practices of cooperation that characterize the operational code of the natural sciences. Science is indeed a project of cooperation and collaboration. But its motive force is selfinterest since to be helpful to others when in so doing we are, to all intents and purposes, helping them to be helpful to us. 2. THE ASPECT OF METHODOLOGY Scientific inquiry is not a process of blind groping among all conceivable alternative theses and theories. Instead, it is a methodically organized but as a carefully guided search among the really promising alternatives.2 Inquiry is not a process of setting a random generator to work to produce hypotheses for testing. Useful hypotheses emerge not from haphazard combinations but from the detection of patterns in the empirical data. They are not created ex nihilo by random groping: they are constructed upon a suitable methodological foundation. Once a cognitive method begins to acquire a fair record of success, it builds up credit in the bank of epistemic validation. Now its endorsements begin to be the beneficiary of a favorable presumption of innocentuntil-proven-guilty rather than the reverse.3 And so the method now provides not isolated items but systematic results. We avoid blind groping amongst endless possibilities by methods and techniques— systematic processes that make use of analogies, plausibilities, simplicities, and the like, that cut a complex imprint of cases down to manageable size. Without such methodological guidance we are driven to a “method” that is in effect tantamount to the absence of method, that “method of last resort,” as it were, a merely random groping among the possibilities.4

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The weaknesses of an evolutionary model of scientific inquiry based on thesis-oriented trial and error can thus be overcome by a cognitive Darwinism of the method-oriented sort mooted here, one which operates at a level of generality that is lacking when our attention focuses on particular theses. On such a methodological approach, the process of trial-and-error mutation and rational selection is not seen as operative primarily and in the first instance in regard to theories or theses themselves, but in regard to the procedural principles and rule-of-thumb heuristics used in their substantiation. The human imagination is fertile enough that at any given stage the range of theoretically envisageable hypotheses is “more plentiful than blackberries.” But experience teaches that where the solution of our cognitive problems is concerned, the range of available investigative and explanatory methods is emphatically limited, being radically circumscribed by the particular resources of the historical era which out only limited alternatives at one’s disposal. General methods that have some discernible promise of success to recommend them are few and far between and when the range of alternatives is manageably small, haphazard groping among the possibilities can be a sensible way to proceed. Blind variation and selective retention is indeed a promising procedure in cognitive development, but only when it proceeds at the wholesale level of process rather than the retail level of product. Most of the characteristic difficulties of an evolutionary epistemology based on thesis Darwinism are consequently obviated when we make the shift to a method Darwinism. The prospects of a trial-anderror evolutionism are vastly improved at this methodological level of trying available alternative procedures for the realization of our ends, retaining those that prove effective in the course of experience. Beliefs do indeed enter into cognitive evolution, but only beliefs of a very special sort, namely, those about methods, whose enormous advantage lies in their many-sided applicability. Such methods can become “tried and true” though a variety of diversified applications in a way that outdistances the multi-sidedness of all but the most vague and indefinite theses. In effect, the shift from theses to methods—and specifically, methods for thesis-substantiationism—enables us “to have it both ways.” We avoid occultism by relying at the methodological level upon a

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strictly trial-and-error mechanism of learning through rational selection. The combination of a model of method-learning based on trial and error and of thesis-learning based on the use of methods makes it possible to have the best of both worlds.5 It means that the venture of thesis-validation is not condemned to blind trial and error, but is guided by heuristic principles of method, involving the use of methods that have proven their effectiveness in the past, and whose application in present conditions thus embodies a fundamentally inductive commitment. Sometimes, of course, our use of cognitive methods figures in situations of biological survival. Michael Ruse provides one cogent example: Consider two would-be human ancestors, one with elementary logical and mathematical skills, and the other without very much in that direction. One can think of countless situations, many of which must have happened in real life, where the former proto-human would have been at great selective advantage over the other. A tiger is seen entering a cave that you and your family usually use for sleeping. NO one has seen the tiger emerges. Should you seek alternative accommodation for this night at least? … Analogously for mathematics. Two tigers were seen going into the cave. Only one came out. Is the cave safe? … [and for consilience] One hominid arrives at the water-hole, finding tiger-like footprints at the edge, blood-stains on the ground, growls and snarls and shrieks in the nearby undergrowth, and no other animals in sight. She reasons: ‘Tigers! Beware!’ And she flies. The second hominid arrives at the water, notices all of the signs, but concludes that since all of the evidence is circumstantial nothing can be proven. ‘Tigers are just a theory, not a fact.’ He settles down for a good long drink. Which of these two hominids was your ancestor?6

But usually, what is at issue in the evolution of cognitive rules is not the survival of the rule’s-employers but that of the rules employed within an inquiring community that tends to adopt and transmit those rules of procedure that have proven to be functionally effective. Given the preceding critique of thesis Darwinism, someone may well object to the proposed method Darwinism as follows:

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Your argument against thesis Darwinism is (put roughly) that the pace of progress of science is too rapid to be plausibly accounted for by a process of trial-and-error selection among the available alternatives. But does this argument not hold against your own position? The success of science certainly indicates very substantial sophistication on the side of procedural and methodology, and is this not every bit as difficult to account for along the lines of a Darwinian trial-and-error theory as is progress on the side of accepted theses?

Clearly if this objection held good, this would be something serious, but—fortunately—it is badly flawed. The argument that “not enough time” is available for the realization of the observed progress through more or less random improvements tells very differently as between theses and methods. For thesis Darwinism requires a tremendous number of successive improvements, given the immense range of the claims at issue in the build-up of the sciences. It is this enormous number of successive iterations of the selection-process that demands so much time on the Darwinian account, and that makes the rapid progress of science appear virtually miraculous from the Darwinian point of view. However, there is—by contrast—no reason why methodological improvement cannot proceed at a glacially sedate Darwinian pace. Then, when at last an even modestly effective method has finally been devised, any further development can clearly proceed with extreme rapidity. Think of an analogy: a slow and stumbling process may have lain behind the ultimately successful development of the technology needed for human flight, but once the rudimentary beginnings of the venture were in hand, the further development of sophisticated aerial transport proceeded with astonishing speed, and yet in an almost routine way. Millennia separated Icarus from the Wright brothers, but the step to Werner von Braun took but a single generation. Free flight advanced from a range of a few dozen meters to astronomical distances with astounding rapidity. And there is no reason to believe that the case of cognitive rather than technically manipulative methods should not be similar. Once an even partially adequate method for the testing of factual theses has been contrived, there is every reason to think that human ingenuity will devise suitable occasions for putting it to use—

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to the great advantage of the rapid progress of knowledge. At the level of theses—of envisageable alternative explanatory hypotheses—one faces an embarrassment of riches that makes effective progress through randomized selection-processes unintelligible on any basis that does not call for suppositions rationally unpalatable to any mind of empiricist inclinations. But the situation is very different in the methodological case where progress can be very swift because of the inherent power and generality of methods. After all, thanks to their cyclically self-corrective aspect we can use our cognitive methods themselves to appraise their own performance and suggest the need for improvement. 3. THE ASPECT OF RATIONAL SELECTION The upshot of such deliberations is straightforward. The codes of practice by which we humans pursue the project of serious inquiry in science are the product of rational selection. The systematic practices that constitute the modus operandi of “the scientific community” in its various characteristic aspects are in the main products of a cultural evolution proceeding under the governing directive of functional effectiveness. They have emerged under the teleological pressure of purposive efficacy as the product of a fundamentally rational process of perpetuating—through acculturation, preaching, teaching, rolemodelling, and the like—just those practices that are cost-effective in facilitating the efficient realization of the objectives that characterize the scientific enterprise. The factors of effectiveness and efficiency have operated to assure that the real is rational in this regard. NOTES 1

Compare J. R. Cole and S. Cole, “The Ortega Hypothesis,” Science, vol. 178 (1972), pp. 368–375, and also their Social Stratification in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

2

This represents a crucial disanalogy between biological and cognitive evolution indicative of the quasi-“vitalistic” character of the latter. In biological evolution the mutations that actually arise fall across the entire spectrum of possible alternatives with equal probability, and so the direction of evolution is not determined by the

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direction of mutation: “It is emphatically selection, not mutation, that determines the direction of evolution,” and if this were not so, then “it would be necessary to suppose that such mutations must be predominantly favourable.” (Gavin de Beer, “The Darwin-Wallace Centenary,” Endeavor, vol. 17 [1958], pp. 61–76; see p. 68.) In the case of cognitive evolution viewed from the standpoint of thesis-acceptance, the case is exactly opposite: the actualization of possible mutant alternatives is probabilistically skewed, favorable mutations predominate, and the direction of evolution is governed as much by the inherent selectivity of mutation as by selection proper. But, as we shall see, in the cognitive case—unlike the biological— there is nothing occult about any of this, because one can in principle imbed the “vitalistic” features of epistemological evolution at the thesis level within an orthodoxly randomized and blindly unguided evolutionary model at the methodological level. 3

See Chapter XII of the author’s Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

4

The issues of this problem-area have perhaps been pursued more effectively by Herbert A. Simon than by any other current cognitive theoretician. See his essay “Does Scientific Discovery Have a Logic?” Philosophy of Science, vol. 40 (1973), pp. 471–80, where further references to his work are given. One key summary runs thus: “The more difficult and novel the problem, the greater is likely to be the amount of trial and error required to find a solution. At the same time, the trial and error is not completely random or blind; it is, in fact, highly selective.” (The Sciences of the Artificial [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969], p. 95.) Exploration of the computer simulation of the processes of human learning and discovery brings clearly to light the operation of a heuristic of an essentially regulative/methodological kind. It is based on principles (such as the priority of “similarity” augmenting transformations in problem-solving) which qua theses are clearly false (are heuristic “fictions” in the sense of Vaihinger), but which prove methodologically effective.

5

The methodological approach can thus lay claims to resolving the issue perceptively posed by Donald T. Campbell in the following terms: Popper has, in fact, disparaged the common belief in “chance” discoveries in science as partaking of the inductivist belief in directly learning from experience. … [T]hat issue, and the more general problem of spelling out in detail the way in which a natural selection of scientific theories is compatible with a dogmatic blindvariation-and-selective-retention epistemology remain high priority tasks for the future. (P.A. Schillpp [ed.], The Philosophy of Karl Popper [2 vols.; La Salle, Il: Open Court, 1974], p. 436.

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NOTES

The present theory provides a natural basis for combining a natural selection process at the level of theories with an epistemology of blind-variation-and-selectiveretention at the level of methods. 6

Michael J. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 162.

Chapter 6 MIND/MATTER COORDINATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE WILL Synopsis (1) Free will is yet another of our distinctive evolution-supplied capacities. (2) It can coexist with an airtight correlation between mind and body. (3) This is because the issue of productive initiative is crucial here. There is coordination rather than conflict between the mental and the physical aspect of human functioning: like intelligence itself free will can be a product of evolution. (4) The operation of the will is not supra-natural: it hinges—quite naturally—in which of two interconnected two individual agencies exercise the initiate in given cases. (5) What counts is coordination rather than causation as such: the fabric of nature is in this regard seamless.

1. FREE-WILL NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION ne often hears said claims along the lines that “the very idea of free will is antithetical to science because free will is something occult that cannot possibly be scientifically naturalized.” But surely any sensible exponent of free will could (and should) be happy to see it as part of the natural course of things. For if free will exists— if homo sapiens can indeed make free choices and decisions—then this should of course be part of the natural order of things. And in fact if we indeed are free, then this has to be so for roughly the same reason that we are intelligent—that is, because evolution it is—or should be—hard to work up much sympathy to this objection as if figures in Roy Weatherford’s insistence that “belief in free will presumes a special and puzzling separation [of humans] from the natural world.”1

O

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Here one can certainly accept special, seeing that free will involves intelligence and that intelligence occupies a rather special place in the world. But that such rarity should constitute a puzzling separation from nature is itself a rather puzzling claim. For it is only too clear that nature has managed to work things out that way. The objection at issue is thus fallacious in that it rests in the inappropriate presupposition that free will has to be something super- or preter-natural. The mind-engendered decisions of intelligent agents on the basis of motivational deliberation will themselves have to be a mode of causal determination of a kind characteristic of the modus operandi of such beings. Choosing and deciding must be as much a capacity developed through evolutionary emergence as is speaking or imagining possibilities. If free will there is, it must be an aspect of how naturally evolved beings operate on nature’s stage. It is, clearly, an efficient and effective way for an intelligent agent to function successfully in a complex environment for it to be equipped with a free will, seeing that this will give the agent the power to adjust his decisions and choices to the detail of conditions as he discerns them to be up to the moment of resolution. Only such an arrangement puts the agent into an optimal position to provide for his then-operative needs and wants, affording a flexible, ongoingly updated harmonization of information and the satisfaction of needs and desires. After all, if homo-sapiens indeed has a free will he has surely come to have it because evolution put it there for his advantage. These considerations point to a further probatively significant point, namely the patent utility of free will as an evolutionary resource. For what lies at the heart and core of free will is up-to-the-lastmoment thought-control by a rational agent of his deliberationproduced choices and decision in the light of his ongoingly updated information and evaluation. To see that such a capacity is of advantage in matters of survival is surely not a matter of rocket-science. And so, the explanatory rationale for this innovation would be substantially the same as that for any other sort of evolution-emergent capability, namely that it contributes profitability to the business of natural selection. In the final analysis the realization of free will in (some of) this world’s creatures will hinge on its status of an instrumentality of sur-

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vival-advantage. There are, of course, many different ways for a creature to shape its activities on the world stage so as to meet its needs and wants: sheer biochemical determination, reflexive automatism, pure instinct, and even random groping. But intelligently managed free agency—the ongoingly monitored orientation of behavior to desire satisfaction via thought based on information secured through inquiry—is also one of these. And experience and theory alike indicate that only the flexibility of free decision and choice can most efficiently deliver the goods here. The ancient Greeks divided reality into the works of nature (phusius) and the contrivances of man (nomos). And this was considered wise of them. For with the developmental emergence of intelligent beings all sorts of new things have come into existence. Beings capable of intelligence-guided agency will be capable of • symbol use (and thus linguistic communication), • conjecture and hypothesis entertainment (and thus reasoning and mathematics), • value commitment (and thus romantic love), • rule adoption (and thus social interaction with rights and obligations and duties). And prominent among these there is also the capacity of • reasoned choice (free will). The capacity for deliberative choice is basic to our being what we are—even in matters of cognition in contrast to overt action, since knowing something involves accepting it as true and rejecting its denial as false. Evaluation, the discrimination of positive and negative, plus and minus, is crucial here—and pervasive as well, since it can appertain both to the doings and eventuations of nature (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, true/false) and the doings and actions of man (right/wrong, correct/incorrect, appropriate/in-appropriate). And such

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opposites are always the poles of an axis stretching between them as matters of degree, be it in matter of nature (phusis) or of the mechanations of man (nomos). And such evaluation regarding the doings of people brings to light the specifically nomological dimension coordinate with the evaluative norms that relate specifically to matters in the human sphere: “going by the rules” to do things in the right/wrong way, relating specifically to the evaluation of the doings and producing of people. And just here of course “the will” enters in, since the opportunities for appropriate or inappropriate proceedings, for good and bad action always arise here, and the will is free to choose, be it wisely and not properly or not. Freedom is freedom to do things that are foolish, ill-advised, counterproductive. The capacity for rational choice—the ability not only to choose but to do so on the basis of reasons—is what distinguishes man from the lower animals on this planet. Subhuman creatures can act. And they can act for good or ill. But they cannot act wisely or unwisely since they do not act rationally (i.e. for deliberative reasons) because the evaluative dimension of good vs. bad is missing. The thought control of action is the crux of free will. And free agency is therefore inherently bound up with the conviction of rationality. And two considerations are crucial here. (1) Cognitive rationality calls for the control of belief by thought, and (2) Practical rationality calls for the contrast of action by belief. Put together these two considerations mean that: With the development of rational creatures there have emerged beings who can control agency by thought. But just exactly this idea—that with the evolution of intelligent agents upon the world’s stage there will be creatures that are able to control their actions by means of thought—is the heart and core of the doctrine of free will. To deny the reality of free will is effectively to deny the evolutionary emergence of intelligent agents. Accordingly, a perfectly “naturalistic” case can be made on behalf of the freedom of the will through evolutionary considerations. To be sure, Charles Darwin thought that he had to negate free will to make room for the evolution of mind. But here he was being uncharacteristically near-sighted. For there is no good reason to refrain from acknowledging rather than being an impediment to survival, that free will, like intelligence itself,

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affords a significant advantage, and rather than being a roadblock to evolution should be regarded as one of its greatest achievements. This aspect of the matter is regrettably seldom heeded, but is nevertheless critically important to the case for free will. The dialectical intertwining of ideas along these lines thus lies at the basis of the conception of human freedom. Acts of will—choices and decisions—are eventuations of a special sort produced in, by, and for minds. They are a critical part of what developed minds do as they emerge within nature in the wake of evolution’s evolving complexity. It is thus only sensible to view free will, along with the emergence of intelligence, as one of evolution’s crowning glories. For the reality of it is that free agency is an optimally useful evolutionary resource for intelligent agents, and did this arrangement did not already exist in the world, evolutionary pressures would militate for its emergence. The evolution of homo sapiens has brought into being a creature whose action is governed by thought—one that acts on the basis of decisions emerging in the wake of deliberative thought. And just this—acting via thought—that is the crux of free will. The evolution of the capacity for bipedal motion, linguistic communication, and free decision is a matter not a kind but of extent of sophistication. 2. A TWO-SIDED COIN For centuries, the problem of mind-matter interaction has preoccupied philosophers. And recently modern science has added considerable fuel to the fire. But unfortunately, the bearing of most science-inspired theorizing on the topic is hopelessly muddied through mis-construing the brain-physiological gearing of bodily activity to mental thought. Granted, there is here a linkage with these two resources operating in unison with the result of what one recent writer refers to as: The Correlation Thesis … to the effect that there exists for each discriminable conscious state or occurrence [in the mind of an agent] a theoretically discernable [characteristically coordinate] brain correlate.2

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But even granting such a rigid, lock-step coordination there still remains the question of who is in charge of a given transaction? Who commands and who follows? Which is the dependent and which the independent variable? Clearly, the tighter the coordination between mind and body the more pressing this questions becomes. Unison of operation will not as such establish primacy of control. And this critical point is almost universally overlooked. For causation is potentially a two-way street here. Changes in psychological states carry changes in cerebral physiology in their wake: when the mind frets the brain buzzes. And conversely, changes in brain states carry changes in mind-states in their wake. And the coordination of mind and matter—however tight— does not put matter into the driver’s seat. It situates matters on a twoway street where things can go either way. One can think of mental activity as a matter of the mind’s awareness of what the brain is doing. And conversely one can think of brain activity as the brain’s response to or reflection of what the mind is doing. But there is no reason to think of either of these alternatives as an inevitable arrangement, excluding the prospect that sometimes the balance tilts one way and sometimes the other. In the end, any adequate mind/body theory must accommodate two facts of common experience: (1) That mind responds to bodily changes (drugs, fatigue, anesthetics). And (2) that the body responds to many of the mind’s demands (to stand up, walk about, hold one’s breath, etc.). Now consider in this light the following oft-maintained contention: An act can be free only if its productive source is located in the thoughts and deliberations of the agent. But this is never the case because the tight linkage of mind-activity to brain-activity means that the thoughts and deliberations of the agent’s mind are always rooted in and explicable through the processes at work in the agent’s brain.

The salient characteristic of free agency is the exercise of mental control over bodily movements. But how is this possible in view of the intimate interrelation of mind and matter—of mental processes and brain-physiological transactions? How can the deliberate choice of

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people possibly function independently of causal determination by brain processes? Given its apparent dependence on the brain, how can mind possibly exert dominance over matter? Even with a rigid, lock-step coordination there yet remains the question of who is in charge? Which is the dependent and which the independent variable? Who commands and who follows? And the tighter the coordination, the more pressing this questions becomes. Unison of operation will not as such establish primacy of control. And this critical point is almost universally overlooked. For coordination is a two-way street. Change in the psychological state carry changes in cerebral physiology in their wake: when the mind frets the brain buzzes. And conversely, changes in brain states carry changes in mindstates in their wake. To see what is amiss here think of the classic freshman-physics setup of a gas-containing cylindrical chamber closed off by a piston at one end. The temperature inside the chamber is lock-stop coordinate to the distance of the piston-wall from the fixed wall: when the piston moves the temperature changes correspondingly, and conversely when temperature-changes are induced the piston moves correspondingly. But this condition of functional lock-step correlation leaves the issue of initiative wholly open: one may either be changing the temperature by moving the piston, or moving the piston by changing the temperature. Thus lock-step coordination as such does not settle the question of the direction of determination of which of those coordinated variables is free and which is dependent. The fact that two parameters are lock-step coordinated does not settle—or even address—the issue of processual initiative. Consider a children’s teeter-totter or, alternatively, a pulley arrangement as per

Here the up-or-down motion of the one side is inseparably tied to the corresponding motion of the other. And this illustrates the larger

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point: however tight and rigid the functional coordination between two operative agencies may be, the issue of initiative and changeinauguration is something that yet remains entirely open and unaddressed. Mark Twain’s tendentious question “When the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” is perfectly appropriate. But then the inverse question “When the mind panics does the body remain calm?” is no less telling. The crucial thing about a free decision is that it be determined not FOR the agent but BY him, and that this determination proceeds from the agent’s motives and beliefs (so that no adequate explanation of its occurrence can bypass these). Moreover, those motives and beliefs themselves must be autonomously formed (i.e. not imposed upon the agent by externally manipulated undue influence). Then too the outcome of that decision must not be a foregone conclusion at some earlier stage that precludes the prospect of a “change of mind” on the agent’s part. Finally, even though agent-deliberation might possibly be subject to a complete 1-to-1 correlation between brain processes and thought processes the connection is subject to the further consideration of which is the dependent and which the independent variable in effecting the decision at issue. Subject to all these conditions, free will is altogether compatible with a coordinative “determinism” of sorts, viz. one in which the agent himself is the crucial inaugurating factor. Not coordination but dependency is the crux. Most versions of “psychophysical parallelism” see the two modes of operation at issue as two aspects of one single comprehensive process in the manner of inevitably aligned train tracks. This however is not the present position. For we view the matter in terms of two distinct albeit coordinated and interrelated modes of processuality where the initiative of change-inauguration sometimes lies on the one side and sometimes on the other. So what is at issue is two modes of (distinct albeit intercoordinated processality) and not two variant perspectives upon one single processual mode. 3. THE ISSUE OF INITIATIVE All of those myriad illustrations of a correlating connection between thought and brain activity are simply immaterial to the issue of who is

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in charge. For what is involved cannot settle the question of whether mind responds passively to brain-states changes or whether it actively uses the brain to its own ends. On such a perspective, the brain/mind is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization whose two interlinked domains permit that the impetus to change lies sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination so far remains something undecided and still unsettled. Given these interlocked variables, the question of the dependent-vs.-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. And the fact that mind and brain sail in the same boat, is no reason why mind cannot occasionally seize the tiller. What is at issue is a partnership of coordination not a state of inflexible master-servant subordination. In a particular situation the initiative can lie on one side or the other—all depending. But all depending on what? How does it get decided where the initiative lies? Consider a chamber and piston set-up. Move the piston and the situation in the chamber changes: pressure and temperature will respond. Conversely, change the situation in the chamber (by modifying its temperature/pressure condition) and the piston will respond. The processual interlinkage is rigorously fixed: pressure and temptation move in lock-step. But the direction of influence remains a wide-open issue which resolution depends on the overall modus operandi of the set-up. Or consider again the aforementioned pulley set-up. When the cube rises, is this because someone is pushing up on it or because a bird has alighted on the sphere? The system itself taken in isolation will not answer this for you, but the wider context—the overall synoptic processual context—will provide the information needed to decide where the initiative lies. It is all a matter of where the activity starts and what stands at the end of the causal line. And the free will situation is much the same. When I read, the mind responds to the body; when I write the body responds to the mind.3 Consider the following argument. “Our mental performances correspond to physico-mental processes in the brain which as such answer to nature’s laws of cause and effect. Ergo those fundamental processes of inert nature encompass the realm of thought as well.” There is a

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deep flaw in this reasoning—the flaw of a failure to realize that correspondence and correlation do not settle the issue of initiative. Irrespective of how tightly the operations of the mind are interlinked with those of the brain, this does not settle—or even address—the issue of initiation, the question of whether it is mind or brain that is what Moritz Schlick called the “original instigator.” With any system in which there are functionally coordinated factors (be they temperature/pressure or supply/demand or whatever) a change in the one can engender change in the other. The relationship of lock-step coordination at issue is open to a two way implementation according as it is a change in parameter No. 1 the conclusion is an accommodating change in parameter No. 2 or the very reverse. Lockstep coordination leaves the issue of control—of independent vs. dependent variable—entirely open. And there is no reason to think that the situation at issue with mind/brain coordination is any different from the general run in this particular respect. What we have here, then, is a situation of coordination and reciprocity rather than that of a unidirectional dominance/subordination. Being anxious can make the pulse race; but then again, sensing one’s pulse racing can induce anxiety. The interconnection and interaction of mind and body can work both ways. Granted, where the brain is dead the mind no longer works. But then as long as the mind is working the healthy brain responds. Thought is not an epi-phenomenon to physical processes but a co-phenomenon coordinate with certain ones among them. Thinking is not something the brain does: it is done by a mind that uses the brain as its instrument. There is good reason to see the mind-brain interlinkage in just these terms. And here too the linkage as such does not set a fixed direction to the initiative and control of changes. Anger the individual and characteristic patterns of brain activities will ensue; create a characteristic pattern of activity in the brain (say by electrical stimulus), and the person will respond with anger. Yes, there indeed is a tight correlation, but productivity functions along a two-way street. The correlation of mind and brain is no more an obstacle to thought-initiated physical responses than it is an obstacle to the evocation through thought responses of physical stimuli. My annoyance at the pin-prick is a tri-

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umph of matter over mind; my extraction of the pin a triumph of mind over matter. When my finger wiggles because I decide to move it, for the sake of illustration, then the mind-side of the mind/brain configuration sets the brain-side into motion. By contrast, when I hear the alarm clock ring, it is the brain-side of the mind/brain configuration that alerts the mind-side to a wake-up call. The interlinkage at issue with the mind/brain amalgamation leaves the issue of the direction of motivation—be it brain-initiated mind receptivity or mind-inaugurated brain responsiveness—as an issue open to further resolution. With agent causation originating in the mind, the agent is active; with physical considerations originating in the brain the agent is passive. Both are perfectly possible. And each happens some of the time with neither enjoying a monopoly. Mind clearly cannot do the work of matter: it cannot on its own produce snow or ripen tomatoes. Nor, it would seem, can matter do the work of mind: it cannot read books or solve crosswords. And yet the two are clearly connected. When the mind decides to raise the hand, that hand moves. And on the other side there is Mark Twain’s question “When the body gets drunk, does the mind stay sober?” Clearly, there is interaction here. For the scientistic determinist, to be sure, agents are productively inert—what they do is always the product of what happens to them: they simply provide the stage on which the impersonal causality of nature performs its drama. The voluntarist, by contrast, sees intelligent agents as productively active participants in the drama of the world’s physical processuality. And the facts of mind-brain correlation cannot effectively be used against him. It is simply fallacious to think that the intimate linkage between brain activity and thought invariably puts the brain in charge of the mind. Any mere coordinative correlation between brain-state physiology and mind-state conceptuality will still leave open and unresolved the issue of which variable functions independently and which dependently—which induces changes and which responds. Be the coordination or amalgamation ever so tight-woven, the questions change-initiation remains open. And there is no reason at all why this cannot be a twoway street with some transactions going in the one direction and oth-

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ers in the other. Mind-body coordination does not, as such, endow either party with an invariable initiative. This is not the place to articulate a full-scale philosophy of mind.4 The extensive detail of mind-brain coordination will not preoccupy us here. All that is requisite for present purposes is (1) that there is a tight linkage of mind-brain coordination, and (2) that when a state-change occurs in this context the initiative for it can lie on either side. We need not here enter into detail at a level that transcends these rudimentary basics. That said, it must be acknowledged that the conception of a mindbrain partnership of coordination in which a process of a change in psychophysical states can be initiated on either side is critically important in the present context. For it opens the way to seeing those free decisions as a crucial productive contribution of mind to the world’s panoply of occurrence. What we have with mind-body coordination is not a mysteriously imposed pre-established harmony, but an internally assured coestablished alignment—a dual-aspect account if you will. Even as what is for the paper a squiggle of ink is for the reader a meaningful word, so one selfsame psychophysical process is for the brain a signal (a causal stimulus) and for the mind a sign (a unit of meaning). Or again, one selfsame process, the ringing of the dinner gong, has one sort of significance ever-obvious of the guests and another for their mind-set. Such analogies, while imperfect, should help to convey the general idea of phenomena that have an inherent duality. In our piston example, the mode of the piston manifests itself in changes of the chamber area and heatwise in a change of temperature. That piston set-up is a thermodynamic engine; the mind is a hermeneutical engine. For only a mind can operate the symbolic process that transforms stimuli into meanings. Those physical inclinations are the occasion and perhaps even in some sense the productive cause of the interpretations at issue, but they are not the bearers of its substantive meaning-content. For that requires a very different level of understanding and a very different framework of conceptualization. All the same, the mind no more functions independently of the brain than the expressive mood of the visage can smile Cheshire-catlike without the physical face. And yet that physical face can achieve

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no expression in the absence of there being a psychological mood to express. Rigid materialism sees mental action as a systemically subordinate response to the functioning of matter. Rigid idealism sees matter as somehow engendered through the productive activity of mind. But more realistic than either is a theory of mind-matter coordination that sees the two as reciprocally conjoined functioning expressive of different facets of complex, two sided interaction where the ball of state inauguration and change production sometimes are in one court and sometimes in the other. On the issue of who is in charge, mind or brain, thought or matter traditional philosophizing has almost always taken an all-or-nothing approach. Materialistic determinists from classical atomism to the time of Hobbes, La Mettrie, and Laplace put matter in charge5; idealists from Socrates to Berkeley and Lotze put mind in charge. For some reason the common-sensical idea that in some transactions the one is in control and in others the other had little appeal for philosophy’s endless succession of absolutists. But in the end, there is really no telling reason to opt for an all-or-nothing resolution. The issue is one of which side carries the can in given cases. 4. MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION WORKS BY COORDINATION NOT BY CAUSALITY With mind-brain coordination in place, mind as well as matter can seize the initiative with respect to human action so that we can act in the mode of agent causality, while nevertheless all human actions can be explained on the side of natural causality. And so we confront Kant’s paradox of reconciling the two modes of causality.6 However, when thought leads to action it is not that two different kinds of causality at work. The causality of agency (thought control) and the causality of nature (brain control) are two sides of the same coin as it were, two inseparably conjoined aspects of one comprehensive causal process. The changes at issue flow from one unified sort of “causality.” It is just that the actuating impetus to those changes in the one case lies at the pole of thought-processes and in the other case at the pole of brain processes. And so when the mind has the initiative, the

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brain does not react but rather responds—and conversely. So strictly speaking rather than causal influence is at work. (After all, a suggestion can induce or occasion on ideas in someone’s mind without “producing” it in some manufacture-analogous sense of the term.) But how on such a view does mind come to exercise physical causality? When I mentally decide to wiggle my fingers a few seconds hence for the sake of an example, how is it that my body responds to this purely mental transaction? The answer is that doesn’t because no “purely mental” transaction is at issue. Thought always has its correlative in the domain of brain psychology.7 And so an individual’s socalled “purely mental intention” is not really purely mental at all because it stands coordinate with a mind-brain amalgamating psychophysiological intention-state in something of the same manner at issue with the mood/configuration duality of those smiley/frowny faces considered above. And the physical cause of that wiggling response is not something “purely mental” but the physical side of that double aspect amalgam. What actually occurs in such transactions is a matter less of causality than of coordination. In his classic paper of 1934, Dickinson Miller saw the matter quite clearly: [In choosing or deciding] the mental process is paralleled in the brain by a physical process. The whole [two-sided] psycho-physical occurrence would then be the cause of what followed, and the psychic side of it—the mental struggle proper—a con-cause or side of the [overall, two-sided] cause. Tomorrow’s configuration of matter [i.e., the physical result of an action] will [then] have been brought about by a material [i.e., physical] process with which the mental process was inseparably conjoined.8

When an agent acts there is no need to dream up a Cartesian categorytranscending impetus of thought upon matter. The material eventuations are produced materially, by the physical side of the two-sided mind-matter amalgam at issue in psychophysical processes. And the same with thought processes. Each component functions in its own order, but the coordinate linkage of the two moves in lock step, thus automatically answering Mark Twain’s question “What the body is

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drunk, does the mind stay sober?” The one thing this account leaves out—and it is a crucial omission—is the key point that the actuating initiative for change can lie on either side. But what could account for the fact that on this occasion the initiative lies with the mind and on that occasion it lies with the brain? Here we need to look to the temporal context of occurrence in its more comprehensive Gestalt. If what I do comes in response to drink or drugs then it is clearly the brain that is in charge. On the other hand if it is a matter of careful deliberation and in painstaking weighing of alternatives, then it is clearly the mind that is in charge. It all depends on the structure of occurrence subject to pretty much the same sort of contextual analysis that is at issue with the discrimination between dependent and independent parameters in physical-process situations. For here as elsewhere the wider context of occurrence can settle the question of productive priority and initiative. The causal deliberations of the ancient Greeks were predicated on the idea that only like can cause like. The idea that factors which are as different conceptually as night and day could nevertheless influence on another causally was anathema to them. But the reality of it stands otherwise. Motion creates heat via friction; sounds engender salivation (by Pavlonian conditioning). Yet not only was this considerations rejected by the Greeks, but it continued to exert influence as late as Descartes continued with his Chinese-wall separation of mind from matter. However, the revolution in causal thinking launched by David Hume changed all that. The idea of cross category causation no longer seems all that odd to us. And we nowadays do not—or should not— see any inherent impossibility that in the order of causal production physical processes should engender mental responses—or the other way around.9 In the end then regardless of how tight the correlation of mind and matter may be, there is no ground for construing this circumstance as precluding the efficacy of mind in effecting change, and no reason to refrain from maintaining that it is sometimes mind rather than matter that affords the independent variable that take intuition in the inauguration of change. The tighter the interrelatedness of brain and matter, the ampler the prospects of transactions where mind has the initiative.

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It is not functional coordination as such that is the pivotal consideration but the difference in the direction of the dependency at issue. If mind were “nothing but” the machinations of matter, if brain psychology were all there is to it, then mind would be unable to accomplish its characteristic work of providing a bridge from the domain of physical processes to the domain of thought. We would never get from here (physicality) to there (thought): all possibility of achieving meaning, significance, information would be lost. Whoever insists on seeing mind as altogether “reduced” to matter—dismissing mental options as “nothing but” the machinations of matter—thereby excludes himself excluded from the conceptual domain, seeing that he has nowhere to get there from his position. The vocabulary of the mental is conceptually inaccessible from a basis confined to the vocabulary about physical reality. There is no way to recast mind-talk seamlessly into matter-discourse. But of course the reverse holds as well. Our knowledge about the material world lies in coordinating the two and this requires work that is evaded rather than accomplished by ignoring the conceptual duality at work here.10 In sum, the fabric of nature is seamless. The mental realm is not something separate and disparate from physical nature, but an emergently developed—and accordingly coordinated—department thereof. Whatever conceptual distinctions we may draw between the mental and the physical, they remain interconnected departments of nature connected in operational terms through the intermediation of developmental—and thereby evolutionary—processes. NOTES 1

Roy Weatherford, The Implications of Determinism (London and New York:

Routledge, 1991), p. 125. 2

Theodore Honderich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 189. However the author emphatically declines to take a position on the issue of whether brain-state causes the mind-state (p. 190), and also passes the reverse idea over in discrete silence. But it is just this prospect—not so much of causation as of state-change initiation—that lies at the heart of the present deliberations.

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NOTES 3

And note that even were physical (muscular) action sometimes be initiated prior to conscious awareness of a decision, this decision’s subconscious vanguard may nevertheless still provide the initiating mental correlate of action.

4

There is a vast number of fine books on the subject—far too many for listing here.

5

“Das Verhältnis der Seele zum Leib ist stets das einer Herrschaft,” Herrman Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), p. 289.

6

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A803 = B831.

7

The reverse will not of course be the case.

8

R. E. Hobart, (= Dickinson Miller), “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without it,” Mind, vol. 43, No. 169 (1934), pp. 1–27.

9

John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (London: John W. Parker, 1843) is one of the earliest works that is altogether sound on the issues of this paragraph.

10

This essay originated in a Luncheon Lecture at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the autumn of 2010.

Chapter 7 EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN Synopsis (1) It is one thing to be designed intelligently and quite another to be designed by intelligence. (2) The cosmos is by nature noophelic—i.e., intelligence-friendly. For there is not just the evolution of intelligence but also intelligence in the operation of evolution itself. (3) Evolutionary explanation is productive not reductive. (4) Evolutionary development implements rather than contravenes intelligent design. Intelligent design is not the moving cause of evolutionary development but rather is its consequence.

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ven as something that is diabolically complicated need not have been made so by Old Nick himself, so something that is intelligently arranged need not have been produced by an intelligent being. Nor need a simple arrangement have been produced by a simpleton. Two key ideas guide the present deliberations: (1) that there is a substantial difference between being designed intelligently and being designed by intelligence, and (2) that evolution, broadly understood, is in principle a developmental process through which the former feature— being designed intelligently—can actually be realized. The conjoining of these items means that, rather than there being a conflict or opposition between evolution and intelligent design, evolution itself can be conceived of as an instrumentality of intelligent design. The distinction between being designed by intelligence (“intelligent design” in its productive sense) and being designed intelligently (“in-

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telligent design” in its descriptive sense) is thus crucial to sensible deliberation. For it is one thing to claim that things are the product of the machinations of an intelligent being, and something quite different to claim that they are “as though” or “as if” this were so. And there is a crucial difference between being intelligently designed and being designed by an intelligent agent. After all, being badly designed is not a matter of being designed by someone bad, nor is being cleverly designed a matter of being designed by someone clever. Our language works in such a ways that those design-qualifying adjectives (clever, awkward, etc.) describe the product and neither the producer nor the mode of production. But can the “blind” operation of impersonal natural forces possibly engender an intelligently designed product? To address this we need some insight into what it is that intelligent design calls for. As a first approximation let us say that it is efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of operation in natural processes. And note that on this basis • There are innumerable instances of efficiency in biodesign. (Note how effectively the whale’s shape has approximates that of computer-designed submarines. • There are innumerable instances that pertain of such principles as those of least action, economy, and conservation in the functioning of physical process. Natural history and natural science affords a myriad of examples of the operation of processes that achieve efficient and effective means of operation. In particular, it must be emphasized that evolution by natural selection is a totally natural process accounting for the state of things on the basis of nature’s laws. There is no appeal here to the purposes of an intelligent agent, and being intelligently designed is merely descriptive of the way in which something functions. Nothing is here claimed about being designed BY intelligence. The whole idea of purposive production by an intelligent agent is absent from the evolutionary picture. It is much like saying that “Water seeks its own level” or

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“Magnets attract iron filings.” It describes how these things behave. It does not anthropomorphize the matter by holding that this is something that water consciously tries to do or that those iron filings somehow feel an attraction. Top abstain from anthropomorphizing the operations of nature does not call for denying their efficacy and effectiveness—their functioning as though a guiding intelligence were at work and as if deliberation were at work. And it is merely this latter sort of thing that matters when intelligence OF design rather than BY design is at issue. Nor is saying that certain arrangements are favorable to intelligence quite the same as saying that they favor it. For the latter involves an anthropomorphism that the former leaves entirely aside. But beyond the issue of the evolution OF intelligence there is also that of intelligence IN evolution. The question from which we set out was: Is the world so constituted that its natural development leads with effectiveness and efficacy to the emergence of intelligent beings able to achieve some understanding of its modus operandi? And the answer to this question as we have envisioned it lies in the consideration that a world in which intelligent creatures emerges through evolutionary means—as ours actually seems to be—is pretty much bound to be so constituted. Insofar as the world’s arrangements are designed intelligently what we have are descriptive features of the product. And the key question now is: Could evolution by natural selection among randomly produced alternatives possibly do the job? And the answers seem straightforward enough: a developmental process that can produce beings capable of the exercise of intelligence can and will also produce items that exhibit the characteristics of intelligence in their make-up. One would certainly expect on general principles that the nature’s processes should proceed in a maximally effective way—on the whole and with everything considered comporting itself intelligently, subject to considerations of what might be characterized as a rational economy of effort. And so, with rationality understood as being a matter of the intelligent management of appropriate proceedings, we would view nature as a fundamentally rational system. However, our expectation of such processual rationality is not based on personifying nature, but rather—to the contrary on naturalizing intelligence. For to

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say that nature comports itself intelligently is not so much to model nature in our image as it is as to position ourselves within the manifold of process that is natural to nature itself. Here there is no projection of our intelligence into nature, but rather of envisioning a (minute) manifestation of nature’s intelligence in ourselves. Nature’s nootropism is thus to be seen as perfectly naturalistic—an aspect of its inherent modus operandi. For in seeing its workings to proceed as though intelligent agency were at work, we not so much conceive of nature in our terms of reference as conceive of ourselves as natural products of the fundamentally rational comportment of nature. Our rationality insofar as we possess it is simply an inherent part of nature’s ratiotropism, so that the result is not an anthropomorphism of nature but rather a naturomorphism of man. 2. INTELLIGENCE AS A SELECTIONIST ADVANTAGE: NATURE’S NOOPHELIA Why intelligent beings? What accounts for their existence on the cosmic stage? The general direction—at any rate—of the answer to this query about intelligence is relatively straightforward. Basically, we intelligent beings are here because that is our assigned place in evolution’s scheme of things. Different sorts of creatures have different ecological niches, different specialties that enable them to find their evolutionary way down the corridor of time. Ultimately intelligent beings emerged—presumably because there was a viable niche for creatures whose survival advantage came through intelligence rather than various alternatives. Some are highly prolific, some very hard, some swift of foot, some hard to spot, some extremely shy. Homo sapiens is different. For the selective advantage that is the evolutionary mainstay of our species is intelligence with everything that this involves in the way of abilities and versatilities. If intelligence were not of evolutionary advantage, intelligent beings would not occupy the place they have achieved in nature’s scheme of things. The complexities of information management and control pose unrelenting evolutionary demands. To process a large volume of information nature must fit us out with a large brain. A battleship needs

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more elaborate mechanisms for guidance and governance than a row boat. A department store needs a more elaborate managerial apparatus than a corner grocery. To operate a sophisticated body you need a sophisticated brain. The evolution of the human brain is the story of nature’s struggles to provide the machinery of information management and control needed by creatures of increasing physical versatility. A feedback cycle comes into operation—a complex body requires a larger brain for command and control, and a larger brain requires a larger body. And this body of operational efficiency in its turn places greater demands on that brain for the managerial functions required to provide for survival and the assurance of a posterity. Of course, a brain that is able to do the necessary things when and as needed to sustain in the life of a complex and versatile creature will mostly remain underutilized. To cope at times of peak demand, it will have a great deal of excess capacity to spare for other issues at slack times. And so, any brain powerful enough to accomplish those occasionally necessary tasks will have the surplus capacity at most normal times to pursue various challenging projects that have nothing whatever to do with survival. Granted, for evolution to do its work, the survival problems that creatures confront have to be by and large easy for the mechanisms at their disposal. And this fundamental principle holds just as true for cognitive as for biological evolution. If cognitive problem-solving were too difficult for our mental resources, we wouldn’t have evolved as problem solving creatures. If we had to go to as great lengths to work out the sum 2 + 2 as to extract the cube root of a number, or if it took us as long to discriminate 3- from 4-sided figures as it takes to discriminate between 296- and 297-sided ones, then these sorts of issues would simply remain outside our cognitive repertoire. The “average” problems to be solved for survival and thriving that are posed by our lifestyle must be of the right level of difficulty for us—that is, they must be rather easy. And that calls for excess capacity. For if our problem-solving resources were generally strained to the limit, usually groaning under the burden of difficulty of the problems they are called on by nature to resolve in the interests of our lifestyle, then we just wouldn’t have those cognitive resources at all.

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And so, creatures of our sort owe their presence on the world stage to their intelligence. And once intelligent creatures are there, their presence makes a difference. From this perspective, intelligent design calls for the prospering of intelligence in the world’s scheme of things. But just what would this involve? Of course the emergence of living organisms is a crucial factor here. And an organically viable environment—to say nothing of a cognitively knowable one—must incorporate orderly experientiable structures. There must be regular patterns of occurrence in nature that even simple, single-celled creatures can embody in their make-up and reflect in their operations. Even the humblest organisms, snails, say, and even algae, must so operate that certain types of stimuli (patterns of recurrently discernible impacts) call forth appropriately corresponding types of response—that such organisms can “detect” a structured pattern in their natural environment and react to it in a way that proves to their advantage in evolutionary terms. Even its simplest creatures can maintain themselves in existence only by swimming in a sea of regularities of exactly the sort that would be readily detectable by intelligence. And so nature must cooperate with intelligence in a certain very particular way—it must be stable enough and regular enough and structured enough for there to be appropriate responses to natural events that can be “learned” by creatures. If such “appropriate responses” are to develop, nature must provide suitable stimuli in a duly structured way. Nature must thus present us with an environment that affords sufficiently stable patterns to make coherent “experience” possible, enabling us to derive appropriate information from our structured interactions with the environment. Accordingly, a world in which any form of intelligence evolves will have to be a world whose processes bring grist to the mill of intelligence. To reemphasize: A world in which intelligent creatures emerge in a natural and efficient way through the operation of evolutionary processes must be a substantially intelligible world. But there is another side to it above and beyond intelligible order. For the world must also be varied and diversified—it cannot be so bland and monotone that the stimulation of the sort of challenge-andresponse process required for evolution is not forthcoming. Evolution

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itself requires that a universe containing intelligent creatures must be intelligence-congenial: it must be just the sort of universe that an intelligent creature would—if it could—endeavor to contrive, a universe that is intelligently designed with a view to the existence and flourishing of intelligent beings. A world in which intelligence emerges by anything like standard evolutionary processes must be a realm pervaded by regularities and periodicities regarding organism-nature interaction that produces and perpetuates organic species. And so, to possibilize the evolutionary emergence of intelligent beings the universe must afford a manifold of lawful order that makes it a cosmos rather than a chaos. In sum, then, a complex world with organisms that develop by natural selection is going to be such that intelligent beings are likely to emerge, even as a world which permits the emergence of intelligent beings by natural diverseness success is going to be an intelligently designed world. Accordingly four facts speak most prominently on behalf of a noophelic cosmos: • the fact that the world’s realities proceed and develop under the aegis of natural laws: that it is a manifold of lawful order whose doings exhibit a self-perpetuating stability of processual function; • the fact of a course of cosmic development that has seen an evergrowing scope for manifolds of lawful order providing step by step the materials for the development front of the laws of physics, their theme of chemistry, their biology, their sociology, etc.; • the fact that intelligent beings have in fact emerged—that nature’s modus operandi has possibilized and facilitated the emergence of intelligence; • the fact of an ever-deepening comprehension/penetration of nature’s ways on the part of intelligent beings—their ongoing expansion and deepening of their underlying of the world’s events and processes.

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And so, the key that unlocks all of these large explanatory issues regarding the nature of the world is the very presence of intelligent beings upon its stage. For if intelligence is to emerge in a word by evolutionary means, it becomes a requisite that that world must be substantially intelligible. It must comport itself in a way that intelligent beings can grasp, and thereby function in a way that is substantially regular, orderly, economical, rational. In sum it must be the sort of world that intelligent beings would contrive if they themselves were world contrivers, so that the world must be “as though” it were the product of an intelligent agent or agency; although there is no way to take the iffiness of that “as though” out of it. In the event then, evolutionary noophelia is a position for which there is plausible basis of evidential substantiation. Intelligence too needs its nourishment. In a world without significantly diversified phenomena intelligent creatures would lack opportunities for development. If their lifespan is too short, they cannot learn. If too long, there is too slow a pace of generational turn-over for effective development—a sort of cognitive arteriosclerosis. Accordingly, nature’s own contribution to the issue of the intelligibility of nature has to be the possession of a relatively simple, uniform, and systematic law structure with regard to its processes—one that deploys so uncomplicated a set of regularities that even a community of inquirers possessed of only rather modest capabilities can be expected to achieve a fairly good grasp of significant parts of it. On this line of deliberation, then, nature admits cognitive access not just because it has laws (is a cosmos), but because it has relatively simple laws, and those relatively simple laws must be there because if they were not, then nature just could not afford a viable environment for intelligent life. But how might an intelligence-friendly noophelia world come about? At this point evolution comes upon the stage of deliberation. In order to emerge to prominence through evolution, intelligence must give an “evolutionary edge” to its possessors. The world must encapsulate straightforwardly “learnable” patterns and periodicities of occurrence in its operations—relatively simply laws. A world that is too anarchic or chaotic for reason to get a firm grasp on the modus operandi of things will be a world in which intelligent beings cannot

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emerge through the operations of evolutionary mechanisms. In a world that is not substantially lawful they cannot emerge. In a world whose law structure is not in many ways rather simple they cannot function effectively. There are many ways in which an organic species can endure through achieving survival across generations—the multiplicity of sea turtles, the speed of gazelles, the hardness of tortoise shells, and the simplicity of micro-organisms all afford examples. But among these survival strategies intelligence—the resource of intelligent beings—is an adaptive instrumentality of potent and indeed potentially optimal efficacy and effectiveness. So in a universe that is sufficiently fertile and complex, the emergence of intelligent beings can be seen as something that is “only natural” under the pressure of evolutionary processes. In sum, for nature to be intelligible there must be a coordinative alignment that requires cooperation on both sides. The analogy of cryptanalysis is suggestive. If A is to break B’s code, there must be due reciprocal alignment. If A’s methods are too crude, too hit and miss, he can get nowhere. But even if A is quite intelligent and resourceful, his efforts cannot succeed if B’s procedures are simply beyond his powers. (The cryptanalysts of the 17th century, clever though they were, could get absolutely nowhere in applying their investigative instrumentalities to a high-level naval code of World War II vintage.) Analogously, if mind and nature were too far out of alignment—if mind were “too unintelligent” for the complexities of nature or nature “too complex” for the capacities of mind—the two just couldn’t get into step. It would be like trying to rewrite Shakespeare in a Pidgin English with a 500 word vocabulary or like trying to monitor the workings of a system containing ten degrees of freedom by using a cognitive mechanism capable of keeping track of only four of them. If something like this were the case, mind could not accomplish its evolutionary mission. The interests of survival would then have been better served by an alignment process that does not take the cognitive route. And so, if the development of intelligent beings is the aim, then evolution is a pretty effective means for it realization. What we have is a hermeneutic circle in which evolution productively explains the operandi of intelligence, while nevertheless intelligence functionally

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explains the operation of evolution. On this perspective, the key to resolving those large explanatory questions regarding the nature of the world is the very presence of intelligent beings upon its stage. For if intelligence is to emerge in a word by straightforward evolutionary means, it becomes a requisite that that world must be substantially intelligible. It must comport itself in a way that intelligent beings can not only grasp but deploy to their survivalistic benefit, and must therefore, and thereby function in a way that is. It must thus be the sort substantially regular, orderly, economical, rational world that intelligent beings would contrive if they themselves were world contrivers, so that the world must be “as if” it were the product of an intelligent agent or agency. And so what evolution by natural selection does is to take some of the magic out of intelligence—to help de-mystify that presence of intelligent in the cosmos. It is no more surprising that nature provides grist for the mind than that it provides food for the body. But it manages to do this precisely to the extent that it itself qualifies as an intelligently construed instrumentality for the realization of intelligence. 3. INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY IS NOT TELEOLOGICAL In the popular mind intelligent design theory is portrayed as holding that the presence of intelligent life in the universe is to be explained as the product of an intelligent agent—usually conceived of as in extramundane agency or of (perhaps even a deity)—rather than through evolution by natural selection. But this view begs some pretty big questions. In particular it assumes (1) that evolution by natural selection cannot itself produce intelligent agents and (2) that an intelligence-engendering force or agency must be intra mundane but must somehow be extra-natural or even divine in nature. But all this is deeply problematic and very questionable. To be intelligently designed is to be constituted in the way an intelligent being would arrange it. To this end, it need certainly not be claimed that an intelligent being did do so. Being intelligently designed no more requires an intelligent designer than being designed awkwardly requires an awkward one. Being intelligently designed is a

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descriptive feature of the product, not a claim about the producer in the mode of production. At bottom, intelligent design is a matter of fundamental efficiency and effectiveness. But what then when the entire universe is at issue? How are we then to conceive of this matter of aims and goals? The crux at issue here is not afforded by the question “Does the universe have a goal?” but rather by the subtler, purely conditional and strictly hypothetical question: “If we were to think of the universe as having a goal, then what could this reasonably be taken to be?” The issue here is one of a figuratively virtual rather than an actually literal goal. So to begin with we must ask whether or not it is reasonable to expect an intelligent agent or agency to produce a certain particular result. Clearly and obviously, this issue will depend on the aims and purposes this agent or agency could reasonably be expected to have. And this leads to the question: What is it that one could reasonably expect regarding the productive aims and purposes of an intelligent agent or agency? Now what would obviously have pride in place in the evaluative pantheon of such an intelligence is intelligence itself. Surely nothing has higher value for an intelligent being than intelligence itself and there is little that would be worse for a being than “losing its reason.” Intelligence and rationality is the paramount value for any rational creature: a rational being would rather lose its right arm than lose its reason. But of course a rational being will thereby only value something it regards as having value; it would not value something that it did not deem valuable. It will thus only value rationality in itself if it deems rationality itself to be something of value. And so in valuing their rationality, truly rational creatures are bound to value rationality in general—whenever it may be found. The result of this will be a reciprocal recognizance among rational beings—as such they are bound to see themselves as the justly proud bearers of a resource of special value. Accordingly, the most plausible response to the question of a goal for world-development would have to take the essentially Hegelian line of locating the crux of intelligent design in the very factor of intelligence itself. Implementing this idea calls for locating the “virtual” goal of the universe in its providing for the development of intelligent

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beings able to achieve some understanding of its own ways and operations. One would accordingly inquire whether the world’s nature and modus operandi are so constituted as to lead with efficiency and effectiveness to the emergence of intelligent beings. Put in technical jargon the question is: Is the universe noophelic in favoring the interests of intelligence in the course of its development? The most eloquent exponent of nootropism in nature is Teilhard de Chardin. Whether the evolutionary emergence of what he calls the noosphere will go as far as to reach the ultimate “omega state” that he envisions could be seen as speculative and eschatological. Yet the fundamental process of ratiotropic evolution that he envisions is there for all to see presently, irrespective of how far they may be prepared to venture into its speculative projection into a yet uncertain future. While in their detail the present deliberations differ substantially from those of Teilhard, nevertheless their tendency and motivating spirit is unquestionably akin to his. A positive response here has deep roots in classical antiquity— originally in Plato and Aristotle and subsequently in the Aristotelianizing neo-Platonism of Plotinus and Proclus. And it emerges when two ancient ideas are put into juxtaposition—first that it is love that makes the world go ‘round, and the second is that such love is a matter of understanding, so that its crux lies in an amor intellecualis of sorts.1 On this perspective, self-understanding, the appreciation through intelligence of intelligence would be seen as definitive aim and telos of nature’s ongoing self-development. Such a position is, in effect, that of an updated neo-Platonism. And it represents a tendency of thought that still has potential relevancy. 4. EVOLUTIONARY EXPLANATION IS NOT REDUCTIVE The fact that intelligent creatures evolve from sub-intelligent organic beings under the aegis of natural processes certainly does not “reduce” mind to matter. Developmental emergence is not reductive. Explaining how it is that a certain sort of thing has come into existence will not—or need not—account for how those things will operate and function once they get there. Evolution can explain how it is that we intelligent creatures come to be there with the possession of certain

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capacities. But it leaves untouched the issue of how we can and do use them. Explaining the origins of the agent does not “reduce” the products of agency in any meaningful sense. A vast amount of philosophical milk has been spilled over the topic of reduction. But here it is best to keep things simple. For present purposes one group of phenomena is reducible to another if the comportment of the former (reduced) phenomenon can be adequately explained in terms of the latter (reducing) ones. But adequate explanation overall is a two sided matter. For it makes existing both the existence of what is at issue and its doings (its modus operandi). True reduction is thus a matter of accounting both for how something comes to be and for its operations thereafter. It is accordingly important here to distinguish two modes of socalled “reductive” explanation with respect to capacities and facilities namely existence explanation and performance explanation. The former deals with how a certain facility, capacity, faculty comes into being, the second deals with what it achieves and also accomplishes once it gets there. And this distinction is never more important than with respect to thought and intelligence. With respect to the capacity for intelligence and the general nature of its operations, evolutionary processes can and should be placed front and center. But what gets to be done by their means is something else again. The works and products of intelligence are factors with regard to which evolutionary explanation with its reductive impetus has no traction. No doubt the existence of intelligent beings can be explained on bio-evolutionary principles. But even if—and one is tempted to say even though—evolution can account for the emergence of intelligence-capable beings, the matter of intelligent actions—of how these beings make use of their intelligence once they emerge—is something that lies above and beyond the reach of bio-evolutionary considerations. Existentential dependency does not provide for explanatory dependency. The existence of the children depends on that of their parents, but their deed are not pervasively explicable in terms of parental machinations. The phenomena of nature are doubtless organized into distinct levels of complexity (subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, molecular complexes, etc.), but the processes (modes of operation, laws) obtain-

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ing at one level cannot always be derived from (are underdetermined by) those that operate at the lower levels. Those lower levels possibilize the operation at the higher levels existentially or ontologically, but they do not explain them hermeneutically and functionally. They may account for the existence of certain capacities but certainly not for their use in regard to the things they manage to do. Neither hardware nor software explains the issue of modus operandi through programming. The idea that the evolutionary origin of intelligence somehow diminishes its status and significance is thus clearly inappropriate. The sort of evolution at issue is emergetist. It brings into existence new forms of being which carry emergently new modes of process in their wake. In sum, then, what those evolutionary processes cannot explain are the works of intelligence themselves. For what intervenes between the intelligence that is evolution’s product and the product of intelligence are the deliberations and decisions that canalize the production of intelligence’s products. Granted those products would not exist if intelligence itself did not. But that no more reduces those products to evolution’s operations than that fact that clouds would not exist in the universe if there were no stable atoms reduces meteorology to atomic physics. NOTES 1

The neo-Platonists Plotinus and Proclus differentiated natural phusikôs love (amor naturalis), and psychic (psychikôs) love (amor sensitivus) from intellectual love: erôs noerôs (amor intellectualis or rationalis). In the end their rendition of the Aristotelian idea that “love makes the world go ‘round” comes down to having a world developed conformably and sympathetically to the demands of the intellect in relation to intelligibility. This idem found historical traction with Leibniz in the 17th century and Gödel in the 20th.

Chapter 8 MEETING THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION SYNOPSIS (1) Evolution is an inventive process that provides for an ongoing emergence novelty on the world’s stage. It is a prime vehicle to establishing the exceptionalism of intelligent agents. (2) And this circumstance stands in the way of various theological objections, for example that evolution is slow, wasteful and inefficient, and cruel. (3) Evolution deserves to be seen as productive, inventive, and creative.

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ranted that if the world is intelligently designed there yet remains the pivotal question: how did it get that way? And at this point there comes a forking of the way into two available routes, namely: by natural means or by super- or supra-natural means. There is nothing about intelligent design as such that constrains one route or the other. Intelligent design does not require or presuppose an intelligent designer—any more than an oddly designed reality would require an odd designer. A naturally emerging object is not made into artifact by its possession of a feature whose artifice might also produce. Being intelligently designed no more demands an intelligent designer than saying it is harmoniously arranged requires a harmonious arranger or saying it is spatially extended requires a spatial extender. Against this background it would appear that there is thus nothing mystical about a revivified neo-Platonism. It is strictly geared to nature’s modus operandi. Insofar as teleology is at work, it is a naturalistic teleology.

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Here many participants in the debates about intelligent design get things badly confused. Deeply immersed in a theism-antipathetic odium theologicum they think that divine creation is the only pathway to intelligent design and thereby feel impelled to reject the idea of an intelligently designed universe in order to keep God out of it. They think that intelligent design can only come to realization through the intermediation of an intelligently designing creator. But this view sees matters askew. A perfectly natural impetus to harmonious coordination could perfectly well issue in an intelligently designed result. And so could the natural selection inherent in some macro-evolutionary process. It would be a profound error to oppose evolution to intelligent design—to see them as somehow conflicting and incompatible. For natural selection—the survival of forms better able to realize selfreplication in the face of challenges and overcome the difficulties posed by the world’s vicissitudes—affords an effective means to establishing intelligent resolutions. (It is no accident that whales and sophisticated computer-designed submarines share much the same physical configuration or that the age of iron succeeded that of bronze.) The process of natural selection at work in the unfolding of biological evolution is replicated in the rational selection we encounter throughout the history of human artifice. On either side, evolution reflects the capacity to overcome obstacles and resolve problems in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. Selective evolutionary pressures—alike in natural (biological) and rational (cultural) selection— are thus instrumentalities that move the developmental course of things in ways selective of increasing rationality. Yet why should it be that the universe is so constituted as to permit the emergence of intelligence. Three possible answers to the problem of nature’s user friendliness toward intelligence suggest themselves: • The universe is itself is the product of the creative agency of an intelligent being who, as such, will of course favor the interests of intelligence. • Our universe is simply one item within a vast megaverse of alternatives—and it just so happens (fortuitously, as it were) that

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the universe that we ourselves inhabit is one that exhibits intelligent design and intelligence-friendliness. • Any manifold able to constitute a universe that is self-propagating and self-perpetuating over time is bound to develop in due course in the direction of an intelligence-favoring dimension. The same sort of selective developmental pressures that make for the emergence of intelligent beings IN the universe make for the emergence of an intelligent design OF the universe. Note that the first and the last of these prospects are perfectly compatible, though both explanations would be incompatible with the middle alternative whose bizarre character marks its status as that of a decidedly desperate recourse. The hypothetical and conditional character of the present line of reasoning must be acknowledged. It does no more than maintain the purely conditional thesis that if intelligent creatures are going to emerge in the world by evolutionary processes, then the world must be ratiophile, so to speak—that is, user-friendly for rational intelligences. It is not, of course, being argued that the world must contain intelligent beings by virtue of some sort of transcendental necessity. Rather, a conditional situation—if intelligence-containing then intelligible—is quite sufficient for present purposes. For the question at hand is why we intelligent creatures present on the world’s stage should be able to understand its operations in significant measure. And the conditional story described above fully suffices to accomplish this particular job in view with linking evolution and intelligent design. The theory of intelligent design could provide an occasion for teaching some very important aspects of critical thinking in school, specifically with regard to the indispensability of drawing distinctions in the interests of clarity of thought. One key distinction here is that between being designed intelligently and being produced by an intelligent agency—that is between process and product. The previous discussion has already dealt with this as some length. Yet another key distinction is that between issues settled by a body of fact and those that are left open by it. If I tell you that there is

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someone in the room next door, the question “Is the room next door occupied?” is settled. The information at hand demands an affirmative answer. But the question “Is there a woman in the room next door?” is left open. The information at hand permits an affirmative answer but does not require it. And just this is the situation between being intelligently designed and being the product of an intelligent design. For the fact is that intelligent design as such is neutral, indecisive, and agnostic with respect to theology. It certainly does not authorize the step from “could be the product of an intelligent agency” to “could only be the product of intelligent agency.” The present discussion has argued that evolution is not at odds with intelligent design, because the efficiency-tropism inherent in the modus operandi of evolutionary development actually renders it likely to issue in an intelligently designed product. Accordingly, evolution should not be seen as the antithesis of intelligent design. Nor yet is it inimical to a theology of an intelligent designer. In arranging for a developmental pathway to an intelligently designed world a benign creator could well opt for an evolutionary process. So in the end evolution and intelligent design need not be seen as antagonistic. And so the fact remains that intelligent design as such is neutral, indecisive, and agnostic with respect to theology. It certainly does not authorize the step from “could be the product of an intelligent agency” to “could only be the product of intelligent agency.” Noophelia and intelligent design are inherently naturalistic theories. They dispense with theology. Nevertheless they are not antipathetic to theology either. There is no reason of necessity why a universe that is intelligently designed as user-friendly for intelligent beings must be the result of the agency of an intelligent being any more than a universe that is clumsily designed for accommodating clumsy beings would have to be the creative product of a clumsy being. But while this is so, nevertheless, such a universe is altogether harmonious to theistic cosmogony. After all, an intelligently construed universe is altogether consonant with a cosmogony of divine creation. And so: noophelia is not only compatible with but actually congenial to theism. After all, one cannot but think that the well-being of its intelligent creatures will rank high in the value-scheme of a benign creator. As should really be the case in general,

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approaches based on the study of nature and the reflections of theology can here be brought into alignment.1 The present account of intelligent design through productive evolution is virtually certain to come to grief through intervening in domestic dispute between science and religion. Religionists will be dissatisfied with its enthusiastic endorsement of evolution. The aficionados of scientism will be dismayed about its approving courses on behalf of intelligent design. The next two sections will attempt to meet these two challenges, first by dealing with theological objections to evolution, and in the next chapter by addressing scientistic challenges to intelligent design. 2. DERAILING THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTIONISM Theologians over the years have made a considerable array of objections against the theory of evolution, viewing it as unworthy of a diversely constitutional world institution. In particular they have complained that evolution is slow, wasteful, cruel, and incapable of engendering the sort of world produced by a benign creator. Let us take these objections up in turn. Slowness First as regards slowness. Surely the proper response to the lethargy objection is to ask: What’s the rush? In relation to a virtually infinite vastness of time, any finite initial timespan is but an instant. Of course there must be time enough for evolutionary processes to work out. There must be sufficiency. But nothing patent is achieved by minimality unless there is some mysterious collectively reason way this particular benefit—an economy of time—should be prioritized over desiderata such as variety, fertility, or the like. Wastage Next on to wastefulness. “Is evolution by variation and survivalistic selection not an enormously wasteful mode of operation? And is it not

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cumbersome and much too slow?” Does this sort of moving not rule intelligence out of it? Not really. For where the objector complains of wastage here, a more generous spirit might see a Leibnizian Principle of fertility at work that gives a wide variety of life forms their chance for a moment in the limelight. (Perhaps the objector wouldn’t think much of being a dinosaur, but then many is the small child who wouldn’t agree.) Anyway, perhaps it is better to be a microbe than to be a Wasn’t that just Isn’t—to invoke Dr. Seuss. Or again, one person’s wastings is another’s fertility—to invoke Leibniz. Cruelty But what of all that suffering that follows to the lot of organic existence? Perhaps it is just collateral damage that is in the cosmic struggle towards intelligent life. But this is neither the place nor the time for producing a Theodicy and address the theological Problem of Evil. The salient point is simply that the Wastage Objection is not automatically telling and that various lines of reply are available to deflect its impact. But is evolution by natural selection not crass and materialistic. Is its favoring of the fit, the successful, the lucky not inherently unworthy? The modus operandi of evolution is indeed materialistic and mechanistic. But its transcendental nature lies in what it can produce by these mundane means. In the development perpetuation, and diffusion of intelligent and purposively driven beings that evolution produces something fundamentally new and different—something in which its materialistic and mechanistic features are transcended even as the work of the poet transcends the crude needs of practical communication from which his language emerged. The mechanisms at work in evolution by eliminative selection have effected a transit from the primitive automaticity of microorganisms to sophisticated rationality, from crude reactivity to complex intelligence. Yet although the mechanism of this transit is merely random variation plus survivalistic selection, the fact remains that this mechanism has been effective and sufficient in bringing this remarkable

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transformation about. And the remarkableness of this transit lies not only in the vast distance that it has transversed, but also in the fact that so simple and crude a mechanism has sufficed to realize this transit. 3. A RETROSPECT The idea of biological evolution as a fundamentally productive and creative process dates back to Darwin himself and has subsequently been an ongoing theme in evolutionary theorizing, with Bergson and Teilhard as its most eminent and influential exponents. This tendency of thought prioritized the product of evolution over its process and viewed evolution as nature’s crude means to a splendid end—the emergence and diffusion of intelligence in the cosmos. Where reductionists envisioned natural selection as a problematic process (“nature red in tooth and claw”), these emergentists emphasized the positive result towards which this process provides a natural pathway. In the wake of Darwin’s great discovery of evolution by natural selection many people came to believe that science had fully won its battle with religion. Man—homo sapiens—was now seen not as a special creation planted in the Garden of Eden, but a mode of animal life evolved over eons through natural selection here on earth—a type of creature gradually clambering out from the primal slime under the pressure of random variation and survivalist selection. Chance and brutal chaos rather than planning provided our reason for being. But various theorists favored seeing evolution not from the top down to crude mechanisms but from the bottom up to splendid results. They insisted upon seeing evolution as productive and not reductive in its bearing. Man is an animal. His entryway into this world is that of other primates. He is born, grows, lives, ails, dies. He must breathe and eat and sleep, procreate, age, and die. And meanwhile he can act. For man is an extraordinary animal. Evolution has put at his disposal a distinctive manifold of unique capacities and capabilities: • intelligence, • linguistic communication,

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• symbolic information processing, • reasoning in thought not in action, • questioning, • imagination, • self-apprehension and reflexivity (self-involvement): self-conceptualism or other-conception, • empathy, love (caring, other-concern), • valuing (prizing, loving) and appreciation, • spiritual insight (awe, wonder, worship). All of these capacities interact: they build on one another and thereby extent their reach and range. But it is evolution that has given us the faculties and capacities that has made it all possible. In sum, intelligent beings (on earth and perhaps elsewhere) occupy a special place on the world stage. They possess unquestionably— thanks to evolution—a variety of absolutes that render them distinct from and (dare we say it!?) superior to the rest of the world’s denizens. Does the idea of productive evolution not commit the “pathetic fallacy” of personifying evolution as something inherently purposive?2 Evolution is not the instrument of a purposive agent. But evolution while not purposive is nevertheless directional, and while not geared to the production of hominids is geared to the production of intelligent beings. For intelligence is the most efficient and effective of survival strategies.

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NOTES 1

As regards the Catholic ramifications of the issue, it is certainly true that the Church emphasizes the distinction between body and soul, and views the former, soul, not as a product of the physical causality of nature, but of a special act of creation on the part of God. But this of course need not (and indeed should not) be construed as creating an unbridgeable gap between doctrine and evolution, since there simply is no need to claim that evolution creates souls rather than saying that it affords fitting occasions for the creation of souls.

2

As Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion held that “it is man or some other being of like significance that is the purpose of the entire process of evolution” (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1935), p. 293.

Chapter 9 MEETING SCIENTISTIC OBJECTIONS TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN (1) It appears to be a cogent objection to Intelligent Design theory that the world would be far better than it is if it did actually manifest intelligent design. (2) However, the idea of the world’s improvability is deeply problematic. (3) Suggestions of world-improvement founder on the Butterfly Effect. (4) The world, after all, is a package deal where limitary is impracticable. (5) Nor can the shift from improvement to replacement mend matters. (6) With world, perfect is not in prospect. And these considerations block the idea that if Intelligent design prevailed, the world would have to be far better than it actually is.

1. THE TURN TO OPTIMALISM

T

he objections to intelligent design theory from the side of science—or perhaps better scientism—are principally two: supernaturalism and unrealism. The first objection—supernaturalism—turns on the supposed fact that intelligent design presupposed an intelligent designer. The falsity of this erroneous presupposition has already been dealt with at considerable length in the preceding chapters. The second objection—unrealism—turns on the supposed fact that if intelligent design were indeed at work, the world would be a great deal better than it is. We shall refer to this as the world-improvability objection. It too can be overcome—as will now be shown. The claim that this is the best possible world may seem to be absurd because a great deal seems to be amiss with the reality’s prevailing arrangements. After all, Voltaire was not alone in thinking it ab-

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surd of Leibniz to deem this vale of tears to be the best of possible worlds. From his day onwards, such optimalism has faced the charge of representing a Dr. Pangloss who will acknowledge no evil in the world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” Nevertheless, the idea that the world is improvable is not without problems, and the present deliberations will endeavor to cast doubt upon this idea of the world’s improvability. King Alfonzo X, The Learned (El Sabio), who ruled Castile in the middle of the 13th century, when studying the Ptolemaic system of astronomy with its profusion cycles and epicycles, remarked, “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on his creation, I would have recommended something simpler.” Many have been the theorists who, walking in Alfonzo’s footsteps, have thought that improvements could be made upon the Creator’s handiwork. In attempting to cast doubt upon this idea of the world’s improvability one important preliminary must be noted. Both improvementists and their optimalist opponents must be in agreement on one fundamental point, namely that there is a cogent and objective standard for world assessment. Claiming that the world is improvable and claiming that it is optimal both alike require a standard of assessment. Now, for present purposes, we will take this standard to be the best real interests of the world’s intelligent beings—emphatically including their interest in the world’s intelligibility along with their own welfare and wellbeing. The pivotal idea here is that for an alternative world to constitute an improvement over this one would thus mean that its intelligent beings on balance and on the whole fare better. It is, to be sure, theoretically possible to contemplate a different standard of world-merit, one which looked, for example, to the proliferation of the different varieties of organic life, but this is not the sort of thing that those who complain about the world’s imperfection have in mind. They tend to be much more parochial about it and see our human condition as pivotal. The shift from humans to intelligent creatures at large is doubtless as far as they would be prepared to go, and for dialectical purposes this is the view to be adopted here.1

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2. ON THE INFEASIBILITY OF LOCAL TINKERING: BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE AS A LOGICAL OBSTACLE One key obstacle that stands in the way of the Improvability Argument is the pervasive interconnectedness of things. Man is, as the ancients have it, by nature an intelligent animal, and this automatically carries with it the inherent limitation of the frailties of the flesh. If you want animals, you must provide them with organic food, and a food chain brings with it a Nature rough in tooth and claw. All worldly arrangements have a down-side that involves imperfection. Imperfections of various sorts accompany any class of items, so that a world cannot be devoid of imperfections—if imperfection indeed is, as it must be, an involvement with limitations of some sort. Consider a somewhat more drastic alternative. What if we lived in a Berkeleyan world whose nature is not material and whose intelligences are disembodied spirits? Such a world would of course dispense with physical evils and injuries (and with physical pleasures as well). All the same, affective anguish and psychic distress would certainly remain. Alienation of affection can cause greater anguish than physical injury. Furthermore, who is to say that in a psychical world spiritual injuries are not felt even more acutely, and that disembodiment would do finite beings a disfavor. There just is no real prospect of local tinkering with the world without wider ramifications. In this world—and indeed in any possible world—states of affairs are interconnected and local changes always have pervasive consequences. Any local fix always has involvements throughout, and in consequences no tweaking or tinkering may be able to effect an improvement. This very important fact can be seen from two points of view—the logico-theoretical and the empricosubstantive. Let us begin with the former. As Walter Burley already noted in medieval times,2 the logical interlinkage of the facts regarding reality is such that contriving counterfactual suppositions always function within a wider setting of related facts F1, F2, …, Fn such that, when one of them—for simplicity say F1—is abandoned via a hypothetical endorsement of its negation, nevertheless the resulting group ~F1, F2, …, Fn still remains collectively inconsistent. The reason for this lies in the logical principle of the sys-

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temic integrity of fact. For suppose that F1, then let F2 be some arbitrary falsehood that ~F2. Since F1 obtains so does F1 -or- F2. Now consider, however, the group F1, F1 -or- F2, not-F2. When we drop F1 here and insert ~F1 in its place we obtain ~F1, F1 -or- F2, ~F2. This group is still inconsistent, and reasoning from not- F1 and F1 - or- F2 to F2 now establishes an arbitrary fact. The structure of fact is an intricately woven fabric. One cannot sever one part of it without unraveling other parts of the real. Facts engender a dense structure, as the mathematicians use this term. Every determinable fact is so drastically hemmed in by others that even when we erase it, it can always be restored on the basis of what remains. The logical fabric of fact is woven tight. Facts are so closely intermeshed with each other as to form a connected network. Any change anywhere has reverberations everywhere.3 Once you embark on a reality-modifying assumption, then as far as pure logic is concerned, all bets are off. At the level of abstract logic, the introduction of belief-contravening hypotheses puts everything at risk: nothing is safe anymore. To maintain consistency, you must revamp the entire fabric of fact, which is to say that you confront a task of Sisyphusian proportions. (This is something that those who make glib use of the idea of other possible worlds all too easily forget.) The world is something too complex to be remade more than fragmentally by our thought, which can effectively come to terms only with piecemeal changes in reality, but not with comprehensive changes of reality. Reality’s reach has a grip that it will never entirely relax; it is a tightwoven web where the cutting of any thread leads to an unraveling of the whole. 3. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AS A SUBSTANTIVE OBSTACLE TO TINKERING “But how can one possibly claim the world to be all that meritorious and benignly contrived. Surely, envisioning a better world would not be all that hard. After all, it would not have taken much to arrange some small accident that would have removed a Hitler or a Stalin from the scene. To figure out how this sort of thing could be arranged—to the world’s vast improvement!—is not Rocket Science!”

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Alas, dear objector, even Rocket Science is not good enough. For what stands in the way here is the massive obstacle of what is known as the Butterfly Effect. This phenomenon roots in the sensitive dependence of outcomes on initial conditions in chaos theory, where a tiny variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can issue in immense variations in the long term behavior of the system. E. N. Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a pioneering 1963 paper, leading to the comment of one meteorologist that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.4 With this process, changing even one tiny aspect of nature—one single butterfly flutter could have the most massive repercussions: tsunamis, droughts, ice ages, there is no limit. With this phenomenology in play, rewriting the course of the cosmos in the wake of even the smallest hypothetical change is an utter impracticability.5 A chaotic condition, as natural scientists nowadays use this term, obtains when we have a situation that is tenable or viable in certain circumstances but where a change in these circumstances—even one that is extremely minute—will unravel and destabilize the overall situation with imponderable consequences, producing results that cannot be foreseen in informative detail. And similarly, any hypothetical change in the physical make-up of such a world—however small— sets in motion a vast cascade of further such changes either in regard to the world’s furnishings or in the laws of nature. For all we can tell, reality is just like that. Now suppose that we make only a very small alteration in the descriptive composition of the real, say by adding one pebble to a river bank. But which pebble? Where are we to get it and what are we to put in its place? And where are we to put the air or the water that this new pebble displaces? And when we put that material in a new spot, just how are we to make room for it? And how are we to make room for the so-displaced material? Moreover, the region within six inches of the new pebble used to hold N pebbles. It now holds N + 1. Of which region are we to say that it holds N – 1? If it is that region yonder, then how did the pebble get here from there? By a miraculous instantaneous transport? By a little boy picking it up and throwing it? But then, which little boy? And how did he get there? And if he threw it, then what happened to the air

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that his throw displaced which would otherwise have gone undisturbed? Here problems arise without end. As we conjure with those pebbles, what about the structure of the envisioning electromagnetic, thermal, and gravitational fields? Just how are these to be preserved as was given the removal and/or shift of the pebbles? How is matter to be readjusted to preserve consistency here? Or, are we to do so by changing the fundamental laws of physics? Limits of necessity can be rooted not only in the fundamental principles of logic (logical impossibility) but also in the laws of nature (physical impossibility), for every scientific law is in effect a specification of impossibility. If it indeed is a law that “Iron conducts electricity,” then a piece of nonconducting iron thereby becomes unrealizable. Accordingly, limits of necessity are instantiated by such aspirations as squaring the circle or accelerating spaceships into hyperdrive at transluminal speed. Many things that we might like to do—to avoid ageing, to erase the errors of the past, to transmute lead into gold—are just not practicable. Nature’s modus operandi precludes the realization of such aspirations. We finite creatures had best abandon them because the iron necessity of natural law stands in the way of their realization. “But is the Butterfly Effect not an artifact of the laws of nature— the rules by which Nature plays the game in the production of phenomena: And would not an omnipotent God alter those rules so that the world’s occurrences are no longer inextricably intertwined?” This is a tricky question that requires some conceptual unraveling. An omnipotent creator could ex hypothesi create a chaos, but he could not create a Cosmos that affords a user-friendly home for intelligent beings without thereby creating the sort of coordinated fabric of intelligible lawfulness that carries a Butterfly Effect in its wake. For how else could those intelligent agents make their way in the world? An existential manifold could possibly dispense with the lawful coordination that underpins the Butterfly Effect, but an intelligence-supportive (“noophelic”) Nature could not possibly do so. We then have to reckon with the prospect that the lawful order inherent in the Butterfly Effect could not be abandoned without massive collateral damage to the intelligible order of things.

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“But could not the amount of human suffering that there is in the world be reduced?” Surely it could, but the question is: At what cost? At the price of there being no world at all? At the price of there being no humans in the world? At the price of having all humans be ignorant, dull, and unintelligent? At the price of having only humans without empathy, sympathy, and care for one another? The proper response to all of these questions is simply: Who knows? No one can say with any assurance that the cost of such a putative improvement would be acceptable. It is, no doubt regrettably, entirely possible for the removal of even a Hitler or Stalin from the world stage to be achievable only at the price of visiting upon mankind an even greater disaster. To render this idea graphic, one should consider W. W. Jacobs’s chilling story of The Monkey’s Paw, whose protagonist is miraculously granted wishes that thereupon actually come true—but always at a fearsome price.6 The salient point at issue here is straightforward. Granted, the world’s particular existing negativities are in theory remediable, but to arrange for this would likely require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall—The Monkey’s Paw effect. The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger volume of misfortune. What the Butterfly Effect means is that we can no longer be glibly facile about our ability to tinker with reality to effect improvements in the world by somehow removing this or that among its patent imperfections through well-intentioned readjustments. For what would need to be shown is that such a repair would not yield unintended and indeed altogether unforeseen consequences resulting in an overall inferior result, and this would be no easy task—and indeed could prove to be one far beyond our feeble powers. To “fix” some negative aspect of the world would involve a change of how things happen within it, that is, altering the laws of nature under whose aegis things happen as they do, and the effects of this will prove imponderable. As one recent writer has cogently argued: If water is to have the various properties in virtue of which it plays its beneficial part in the economy of the physical world and the life of mankind, it cannot at the same time lack its obnoxious capacity to

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drown us. The specific gravity of water is as much a necessary outcome of its ultimate constitution as its freezing point, or its thirst-quenching and cleansing functions. There cannot be assigned to any substance an arbitrarily selected group of qualities, from which all that ever may prove unfortunate to any sentient organism can be eliminated especially if … the world … is to be a calculable cosmos.7

What is crucial in this regard is the operation of natural laws. Our universe is an orderly cosmos instead of an anarchic jumble, and only this can provide a home for beings whose actions are grounded by thought. Only through some degree of understanding of the orderly modus operandi of a world can an intelligent being whose actions are guided by beliefs come into operation. In a realm in which what happens proceeds in accord with natural laws, a finite embodied being is inevitably at risk of mishap. Bruce Reichenbach has it right: “Natural Evils are a consequence of natural objects acting according to natural laws upon sentient, natural creatures.”8 And those natural laws make the world a package deal. “But matters could surely stand otherwise, seeing that the Butterfly Effect is the result of the fact that, in certain respects, the laws of nature have yielded a system of the sort that mathematicians characterize as chaotic. Surely one could change the laws of nature to avoid this result.” It is no doubt so, but now we have leapt from the frying pan into the fire. This is the case because in taking this line we propose to fiddle not merely with this or that specific occurrence in world history, but are engaged in conjuring with the very laws of nature themselves. This embarks us on the uncharted waters of a monumental secondorder Butterfly Effect—one whose implications and ramifications are incalculable for finite intelligences. The point is simple: Yes, the world’s particular existing negativities are indeed remediable in theory, but to avert them in practice might well require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger mass of misfortune, and the very possibility of this prospect shows that the Improvability Argument does not suffice to accomplish its aim.

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4. THE PACKAGE-DEAL PREDICAMENT: THE TEETER-TOTTER EFFECT “But surely if one effected this-or-that modification in the world without changing anything else one would improve matters thereby.” The difficulty here lies in that pivotal phrase “without changing anything else.” In anything worthy of the name “world” the constituent components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change one without changing innumerable others. The situation is not unlike that of language. Change the “U” of “GUST” to “I” and you do not leave the rest unchanged. Everything changes: shape, meaning, pronunciation. Most of us would have little difficulty in bringing to mind a few of our fellows without whom the world would be better off—or so we think—but the problem is that, in a lawful world, getting rid of them would have to be achieved in a way that effects broader changes— more virulent diseases, more enterprising murderers, stronger impetus to suicide—all of which have wider and potentially deleterious consequences. A world is an infinitely complex arrangement of interrelated features and factors, and it is bound to have these coordinated in a complexly interrelated harmony. Modify this and you disturb that. After all, changes to the existing order of things do not come costfree. Could Homo sapiens be improved by yet another pair of eyes at the back of the head? Presumably not. The redesign of this biosystem could not be effected without incurring additional vulnerabilities, and the mechanisms for processing the additional information provided would involve added complications that would doubtless not be costeffective in added benefit. Nature has doubtless seen to it that we are as well adjusted to our bio-niche as the world’s fabric of natural law permits. There is no reason to refrain from seeing this sort of situation replicated on a cosmic scale. Now if the world indeed is a package deal, then the prospect is open that those natural evils are simply the price of achieving a greater balance of positivity over negativity—be it by way of causal facilitation (as the extinction of earlier species paved the way for the rise of Homo sapiens) or by way of outright substation (as the fixing of those initial conditions of cosmic evolution has possibilized a world featur-

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ing organic existence). Either way, this world’s natural evils are actually a means towards the greater good—as per the traditional theodicies. The upshot of these considerations is thus clear. The idea that the world’s defects can be fixed by tinkering is decidedly implausible. Furthermore, given the fact that reengineering the world-as-a-whole lies beyond our feeble powers, we have to face up to the consideration that—for all we can tell—this is indeed the best of possible worlds, and that changing the existing condition of the universe in any way whatsoever—would diminish the sum-total of its positivities. We have to face the prospect that there is no quick fix for the negativities of this world. 5. MOVING FROM IMPROVEMENT TO REPLACEMENT The world we actually have—and indeed any possible alternative to it—is a package deal. Once we start to tinker with it, it disappears on us. For in seeking to change it, we create conditions where there is no longer any anaphoric it to deal with. To tinker with a world is to annihilate it. Perhaps something else, something altogether different might take its place, but this something else could readily prove to be worse overall. Consider the following diagram: • • A B

Think of this as the cross-section of a mountainous terrain. Note that in whatever direction you move away from the peak of A, you go downhill, but nevertheless A’s peak is no more than a local maximum. If you abandon A altogether and shift to B, you can achieve a greater height. The situation that is now under considerations is analogous, for it can transpire that: When one “fiddles” with the description of the actual world (A) by changing some of its features in any direction, one indeed makes matters worse, but nevertheless matters improve by

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abandoning this world altogether and shifting over to some entirely different world (B). So, even a world that cannot be improved by change might nevertheless be improved upon by all-out replacement. Thus the fact that this world may not be improvable though change does not automatically mean that it is “the best of all possible worlds.” Nonimprovability is not the same as all-out optimality. Thus alteration-optimality notwithstanding, one could nevertheless argue that another world—one radically different from ours—might be superior to it. To bring this line of thought to a convincing conclusion, however, would require initiating some world or other that could reasonably be seen as superior to ours. This is a task that confronts us with impossible difficulties, for how could such a world possibly be put on the agenda of consideration? Improving upon the actual world calls for identifying some other, different and alternative nonexistent world that is demonstrably superior. It is just this task which—as we shall now go on to argue—cannot possibly be effected by finite intelligences. 6. PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE WORLDS “But surely it is possible for there to be a world without earthquakes!” Indeed so, but the move from a descriptive possibility (no earthquakes) to an authentic world requires a lot of fleshing out (for example—no earth no earthquakes). The problem here lies in the move from possible states (no earthquakes) to possible worlds. At this juncture an important point comes into play with respect to actual versus possible. With actuals there is a crucial difference between generic and specific knowledge—between knowing that something has a feature and knowing which item has that feature. Here K(∃x∈S)Fx—that is, knowing that some x in S has the property F—is possible without knowing of some specific x that it has F: (∃x∈S)KFx. With mere possibilities, however, the preceding distinction does not apply. The only way of knowing that some mere (nonexistent) possibility has a certain feature is by specifying the possibility that possesses this feature. Real objects have an identity apart from their specification, but mere possibilities do not. This renders the task of specifying a superior world inachievable for us.

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“But surely some alternative world would be superior to ours— though I concede an inability to provide an illustrative example.” This sounds plausible enough. Surely some general officer is in the Pentagon right now—though I do not have a clue as to who that individual might be. This sort of response will not work, however, being based on a seriously flawed analogy, for one knows a great deal about the Pentagon and its general modus operandi. There is nothing comparable going on with respect to merely possible worlds—no general principles of functioning that would lead to a comparable result. Granted, it is in a broad sense conceivable that optimalism fails and that some alternative world might be superior to this one, but this does not bear in the dialectical situation at issue for the argumentation at issue here is that of the atheist who insists that this world cannot be a divine creation on grounds of its imperfection. “Even I,” he says, “with my imperfect intellect can come up with ways of improving upon this world.” In this dialectical context the mere possibility invoked above will not do the job. To meet the dialectical needs of the situation, it will not do to invoke the mere possibility of a superior world. The objector will have to make good his challenge by specifying one in detail, and herein lies the insuperable difficulty. As contemporary possible world theorists generally see it, there can and should be a shift to altogether different worlds, worlds removed from and indeed incompatible with our own in their makeup and modus operandi.9 What do such worlds involve? For one thing, they must be worlds. As such they will have to be manifolds of concrete reality. To qualify as such, its constituent individuals must also be concrete as regards the definiteness of its makeup. Specifically, a world must be descriptively definite and complete—that is, any descriptively specifiable feature either must hold of the world or fail to hold of it; there is no other alternative, no prospect of being indecisive with regard to its makeup.10 A world must make up its mind about what to be like. In consequence, the Law of Excluded Middle must apply: the world and its constituents must exhibit a definiteness of composition through which any particular sort of situation either definitely does or definitely does not obtain. A possible world must be decisive in its composition: its leaves cannot just be greenish—they have to pick out a particular shade; its rooms cannot

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contain around a dozen people—they have to commit to a definite number. Such a possible world is therefore a saturated (or complete or maximal) state of affairs—one which must either include or preclude any state of affairs that can be described coherently.11 After all, a world is not just some sketchily described state of affairs, but will have to be a saturated or maximal state of affairs-at-large—a state that affairs-in-toto can assume, a synoptic totality that suffices to resolve, if not everything, then at least everything that is in theory resolvable.12 Unlike the state of affairs that “A pen is writing this sentence” a world cannot leave unresolved whether that pen is writing with black ink or blue. If an authentic world is to be at issue (be it existent or not) this entity must make up its mind, so to speak, about what features it does or does not have.13 Any assertion that purports to be about it must thus be either definitively true or definitively false—however difficult (or even impossible) a determination one way or the other may prove to be for particular inquirers, epistemologically speaking. Authentic worlds do and must accordingly have a wholly definite character.14 And just here lies the problem for we can never manage to identify such a totality. Consider a state of affairs indicated by such a claim as “The pen on the table is red.” An item cannot just be red: it has to be a definite shade of red—generic redness will not do. Similarly, consider a state of affairs that “There are two or three people in the room”— that state of affairs has to make up its mind. Again, it is not a state of affairs that “The butler did not do it”—a definite example is needed, say the wicked gardener. No matter how much we say, the reality of concrete particulars will go beyond it. As regards those merely possible worlds, we simply have no way to get there from here. Seeing that we can only get at unreal possibilities by way of assumptions and hypotheses, and that such assumptions and hypotheses can never succeed in identifying a concrete world, it follows that we can only ever consider such worlds schematically, as generalized abstractions. Once we depart from the convenient availability of the actual we are inevitably stymied, regardless of the identification of nonexistent particular worlds. Whatever we can appropriately say about such worlds will remain generic, able to characterize them only insofar as they are of a certain general type or kind. Possible-world theorists have the audacity to employ a machinery of clarification that uti-

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lizes entities of a sort of which they are unable to provide even a single identifiable example.15 Even when viewed epistemically as mere methodological thoughttools, possible worlds remain deeply problematic. As we saw in the preceding discussion of Burley’s Principle, once we start to play fast and loose with the features of the world we cannot tell with any assurance how to proceed. Consider its law-structure, for example. If electromagnetic radiation propagated at the speed of sound how would we have to readjust cosmology? Heaven only knows! To some extent we can conjecture about what consequences would possibly or probably follow from a reality-abrogating supposition. If the law of gravitation were an inverse cube law, their significantly lesser weight would permit the evolution of larger dinosaurs, for example. However, we cannot go very far here. We cannot redesign the entire world—too many issues would always be left unresolved. In a well-articulated system of geometry, the axioms are independent—each can be changed without affecting the rest. But we have little, if any, knowledge about the interdependency of natural laws, and if we adopt a hypothesis to change one of them, we cannot concretely determine what impact this will have on the rest. The specification of alternative possible worlds is an utterly impracticable task for us finite mortals. Their limitless comprehensiveness makes it impracticable to get a descriptive grip on the identifactory particularity necessary for anything worthy of being characterized as a nonexistent world. This consideration is productively crucial because in order to provide a cogent refutation of optimalism it will not do to maintain that there might possibly be some alternative world superior to the actual. The opponent has to make good on that putative improvability by presenting a cogent case for contending that some definitely identified possibility would be superior; however, world design is too big a job for us. Actually identifying alternative worlds is impracticable for us as a matter of basic principle.

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7. WITH WORLDS, PERFECTION IS NOT A PROSPECT The objection to be addressed arises along the following lines: “Does not reality’s all too evident imperfection constitute a decisive roadblock to intelligent design? For if optimal alternatives were always realized would not the world be altogether perfect in every regard?” The proper response here is that this is by no means so. After all, the best achievable result for a whole will, in various realistic conditions, require a less-than-perfect outcome for the parts. A game with multiple participants cannot be won by every one of them. A society of many members cannot put each of them at the top of the heap. In an engaging and suspenseful plot things cannot go with unalloyed smoothness for everybody in every character. Moreover, there are generally multiple parameters of positivity that function competitively so that some can only be enhanced at the cost of other—even as to make a car speedier we must sacrifice operating cost. With an automobile, the parameters of merit clearly includes such factors as speed, reliability, repair infrequency, safety, operating economy, aesthetic appearance, road-handle ability. But in actual practice such features are interrelated. It is unavoidable that they trade off against one another: more of A means less of B. It would be ridiculous to have a supersafe car with a maximum speed of two miles per hour. It would be ridiculous to have a car that is inexpensive to operate but spends three-fourths of the time in a repair shop. Invariably, perfection—an all-at-once maximization of every value dimension—is inherently unrealizable because of the inherent interaction of evaluative parameters. In designing a car you cannot maximize both safety and economy of operation, and analogously, the world is not, and cannot possibly be, absolutely perfect—perfect in every respect—because this sort of absolute perfection is in principle impossible of realization. In the context of multiple and potentially competing parameters of merit the idea of an all-at-once maximization has to give way to an on-balance optimization. And the fact of it is that every object of value will have a plurality of evaluative features some of which will in some respects stand in conflict. Where interest rots in complexity, we sacrifice simplicity;

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where beauty lies in simplicity we sacrifice complexity. And this being so, absolute perfection becomes in principle infeasible. For what we have here is a relation of competition and tradeoff among modes of merit akin to the complementarity relation of quantum physics. The holistic and systemic optimality of a complex whole will require some of its constituent comportments to fall short of what would be content for it if abstractly considered in detached isolation. This suffices to sideline the objection: “If intelligent design obtains, why isn’t the world absolutely perfect?” Whenever the overall merit of a complex whole requires a harmonization among different and systematically competitive aspects of merit, it makes no sense to require perfection (that is, maximization with respect to every aspect of merit). We will have to settle for optimization—the optimal harmonization among those different aspects represented by their holistically best-achievable overall combination. Accordingly, optimalism emphatically does not demand that everything must be perfect—it only requires that things be as perfect as the circumstances of their situation permits. This should not seem all that shocking. Already the medieval schoolmen inclined to look on perfection as a matter of completeness. For them, “perfect” and “whole” were virtually identical concepts.16 However, they went on to insist that a perfect whole need not be perfect in each of its constituent aspects, and that increasing the perfection of some part or aspect will throw the whole out of balance. As St. Thomas put it, “God permitted imperfections in creation when they are necessary for the greater good of the whole.”17 Moreover, as the medieval schoolmen already emphasized, God’s omnipotence consists in an ability to do anything that is possible— doing the impossible is not at issue. Neither can God make one selfsame proposition both true and false, nor can he make 2 plus 2 come out 5, nor can he forget facts. Again, neither can God make the lesser number exceed the larger, nor turn virtue into vice, nor make an inferior state of things into a superior. The truths of logic and mathematics, and the conceptual truths about the nature of things are not alterable and this holds for God as much as anyone. But—and this is crucial—the impossibility of God’s doing the impossible is not an obstacle to his omnipotence. God can certainly create a good world,

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and indeed an optimal one, but even He cannot make a manifold of finite being that is flawless and perfect. Given the inherent tension between various modes of merit, a natural world cannot be perfect and exhibit all possible possibilities in maximal degree. As Plato already insisted, the imperfectability of the natural universe is an inevitable aspect of its physical materiality, its embodiment (somatoeides: Politikos 273B), and he is followed in this view by the entire neo-Platonic tradition.18 Imperfection is built into the very nature of things. Limitedness is unavoidable with finite beings. Humans cannot be super-human—to be humans they have to have the features it takes to qualify as such. In an organically complex world, the interests of some species may have to be subordinated to those of others (for example, as providers of food). Moreover, the interest of particular individuals may have to be subordinated to those of the entire species, as a fire that destroys some trees may nourish the soil for the ampler development of others later on. Perfection is unattainable with respect to created worlds. One salient reason for this is the phenomenon of what might be called desideratum conflicts where in advancing with one positivity we automatically diminish another. What we have here is vividly manifested in the phenomenon of positivity complementarity that obtains when two parameters of merit are so interconnected that more of one automatically means less of the other, as per the following diagram:

Positivity 1

Positivity 2

The crux here is that one aspect of merit can be augmented only at the price of diminishing another. We shall characterize as a Teeter-Totter Condition any arrangement where an improvement in regard to one aspect can only be achieved at the cost of worsening matters in another respect. Whenever two inher-

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ently positive factors are (like familiarity and novelty) locked into such a teeter-totter relationship we cannot have it both ways. Whenever this situation is in play, it stands decisively in the way of absolute perfection. Consider a simple example, the case of a domestic garden. On the one hand we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. On the other hand we also want the garden to be small—affordable to install, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we cannot have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small. The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict. Again, any criminal justice system realizable in this imperfect world is going to have inappropriate negatives through letting some of the guilty off while also admitting false positives by condemning some innocents, and the more we rearrange things to diminish one flaw, the greater scope we give to the other. So it goes in other situations, without number. The two types of errors are locked together in a seesaw balance of complementarity that keeps perfection at bay. Throughout such cases, we have the situation where realizing more of one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways so that the ideal of an absolute perfection that maximizes every parameter of merit at one and the same time is out of reach. In the interest of viability, some sort of compromise must be negotiated, seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now unavoidably unrealizable. All the same, imperfection does not preclude optimality. All that is required here is that—notwithstanding whatever imperfections there are and whatever positivities there might be—no other possible world arrangement ranks higher overall. An imperfect world is not thereby automatically improvable. For the reality of it is that the project of improvement faces major obstacles. World optimization is always maximization under various existential constraints imposed by the taxonomic nature of the things whose realization is being contemplated. Such constraints mean that while the world may well be as good as it can be as a whole—that is, is aggregatively merit-maximizing—nevertheless, it is not correspondingly merit-maximizing in its parts taken distributively. The condition of

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many of these parts is far from optimal and can certainly be improved. It is just that the merit of the parts is so interconnected and intertwined that improvement in one area is bound to carry with it diminution in another. As Leibniz acutely maintained, optimality is one thing and perfection another, and our world can abandon any claims to the latter without compromise to its claims to the former. To summarize. The argument that Intelligent Design is at odds with the world’s evident imperfections—that if Intelligent Design indeed obtained the world will have to be a far better place than it is—just does not in the end hold water. This is something about which science has to take a realistic stance in the world’s all too evident imperfections just do not constitute a telling argument against intelligent design. CODA One further consideration deserves emphasis at this point. At the behest of scientism it has been argued at length here that intelligent design does not require theology, that an intelligent designed and intelligently-friendly universe does not need to be the product of an intelligent designer. It is, however, no less true that intelligent design certainly permits theism, and that there is nothing in its nature to countervail against the idea that it is an intelligent agent or agency that makes for the existence of an intelligently designed universe. Intelligent design does not mandate theology, but it certainly does permit and perhaps even invites it. NOTES 1

Admittedly cashing in this loose reference to “the condition of intelligent beings” will need a good deal of fleshing out. Is one to be a Rawlsian maximin theorist for whom the standard is set by the condition of the worst (the least well-off)? Is one to be an elitist from whom the standard is the condition of the best, the most able and highly developed, or is one to be a liberal democrat whose standard is the preponderant condition of the middle run? Also, is the standard—however otherwise construed—to be applied at the level of individuals or at the level of species? Clearly larger and deeper issues lurk behind these questions, but we need not pursue them

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NOTES

here because the thrust of the considerations of the present deliberations will apply across the board—mutatis mutandis—no matter which specific standard is chosen. 2

See Nicholas Rescher, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 77– 83.

3

This condition of things is old news, already noted in his influential Treatise on Obligations by the medieval scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (ca. 1275–ca. 1345) laid down the rule: “When a false contingent proposition is posited, one can prove any other false proposition that is compatible with it.” Translated in part in N. Kretzman and E. Stump, The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Texts, vol. 1: Logic and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 389–412. His reasoning proceeded by way of an example, and went as follows.

4

Lorenz’s discussion gave rise to the 2004 feature film The Butterfly Effect.

5

Think here of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of cosmic evolution that plays so prominent a role in the setting of the Anthropic Hypothesis.

6

An intriguing example of the adverse consequences of improving matters in the world is afforded in Kenneth Boulding’s intriguing study of the unhappy consequences of significant life prolongation. See Kenneth Boulding, “The Menace of Methusalah” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965),pp.171–79.

7

F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), p. 201.

8

Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 106. I myself would amend the passage to read “the inevitable consequences.” The issue is one of the “collateral (damage)” that is (unavoidable) in pursuing the greatest achievable measure of the good.

9

On possible worlds in literary theory in their interrelationship with philosophical issues, see C. A. Mihailesau and W. Hamarneh eds., Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

10

On this feature of concrete worlds see the author’s “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129–62.

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NOTES 11

See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). An alternative perspective could be mereological: a possible world now being seen as simply the sum-total of the possible individuals that exist within it. (The two approaches come to the same thing if we adopt a theory of reductive particularism—or “methodological individualism” as it is sometimes called— according to which every state-of-affairs regarding things-in-general reduces to a collection of facts about some set of individuals.)

12

“A possible world, then, is a possible state of affairs—one that is possible in the broadly logical sense.” (Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, [Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974], p. 44).

13

Some logicians regard possible worlds as collections of statements rather than objects; while there is much to be said for such an approach, it faces two big obstacles: (1) not every collection of (compatible) statements can plausibly be said to constitute a world, but rather (2) only those can do so which satisfy an appropriate manifold of special conditions intending that any word characterizing set propositions must both be inferentially closed and descriptively complete by way of assuring that any possible contention about an object is either true or false. Such macrosets of statements lie beyond our grasp.

14

Authentic worlds thus differ from the schematic worlds often contemplated by model logicians. The latter are not possible worlds at all, but conceptual constructs, while, insofar as we can provide them, are inadequate to the needs of the situation.

15

Leibniz, to be sure, was entitled to conjure with alternative possible worlds because they were, for him, theoretical resources as instances of God’s entia rationis. Were one to ask him where possible worlds are to come from, he would answer, “Only God knows.” That is exactly correct—only God does so. We feeble humans have no way to get there from here.

16

Totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem Duns Scotus maintained. (Quoted from W. Tatarkiewicz, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992), p. 47. St. Thomas maintained that perfectum dicitur cui nilil deest secundum modum suae perfectionis (Summa Theologiae I, q. 4, a. 1, ad resp.). The substantial study of The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) by R. N. Flew addresses the issue of human imperfection only; the idea of imperfection in physical reality is not considered. On larger aspects of the concept of perfection, see Tatarkeiwicz, On Perfection, 1992, as well as M. Foss, The Idea of Perfection in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

17

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 4, a. 1.

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NOTES 18

Even—indeed especially—in the sunlight, will material objects cast a shadow. See Plotinus, Enneads, III 2.5.

References Aquinas St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae. Bergson, Henri, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1935). Boulding, Kenneth, “The Menace of Methusalah” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965), pp.171–79. Byrd, Robert and Peter J. Richardson Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Churchland, Paul M., Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). Churchland, Patricia Smith, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). Cole, J. R. and S. Cole, “The Ortega Hypothesis,” Science, vol. 178 (1972), pp. 368–375. Cole, J. R. and S. Cole, Social Stratifications in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1985). de Beer, Gavin, “The Darwin-Wallace Centenary,” Endeavor, vol. 17 [1958], pp. 61–76. Flew, R. Newton, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). Foss, Martin, The Idea of Perfection in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). Guillaume, Alfred (ed.), The ‘Summa Philosophiae’ of Al-Shahrastānī (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).

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Haldane, J. B. S., “On Being the Right Size” in his collection Possible Worlds and Other Papers (New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1928). Hayek, F. A., The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Hobart, R. E. (= Dickinson Miller), “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without it,” Mind, vol. 43, No. 169 (1934), pp. 1–27. Honderich, Theodore (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge, 1973). Hull, David L., “Altruism in Science: A Sociobiological Model of CoOperative Behavior Among Scientists,” Animal Behavior, vol. 26 (1978), pp. 685–697. James, William, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans Green, 1907). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason. Kretzman, N. and E. Stump, The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Texts, vol. 1: Logic and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lotze, Herrman, Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852). McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996). Mihailesau, C. A. and W. Hamarneh eds., Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic (London: John W. Parker, 1843). Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers, Vol. V (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1934). Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Plotinus, Enneads.

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Reichenbach, Bruce, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982). Rescher, Nicholas, Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973). Rescher, Nicholas, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). Rescher, Nicholas, A Useful Inheritance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990). Rescher, Nicholas, “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129–62. Rescher, Nicholas, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007). Rougier, Louis, Traité de la Connaissance (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1955). Ruse, Michael, Taking Darwin Seriously (Oxford: Blackwells, 1986). Schillpp, P. A. [ed.], The Philosophy of Karl Popper (2 vols.; La Salle, Il: Open Court, 1974). Schurz, Gerhard, Evolution in Natur und Kultur (Heidelberg: Spektrum, 2011). Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Simmel, Georg, “Ueber eine Beziehung der Selektionslehre zur Erkenntnistheorie,” Archiv für systematische Philosophie und Soziologie, vol. 1 (1895), pp. 34–45. Simon, Herbert A., The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Simon, Herbert A., “Does Scientific Discovery Have a Logic?” Philosophy of Science, vol. 40 (1973), pp. 471–80. Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992). Tennant, F. R., Philosophical Theology, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). Weatherford, Roy, The Implications of Determinism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991.)

Name Index Aquinas, St, Thomas, 114, 118n16, 119n17, 121 Aristotle, 86 Beer, Gavin de, 55n3, 121 Bergson, Henri, 95, 97n2, 121 Berkeley, 69 Boulding, Kenneth, 118n6, 121 Burley, Walter, 101, 112, 118n3 Byrd, Robert, 12n2, 121 Campbell, Donald T., 55n5 Chardin, Teilhard de, 86, 95 Churchland, Patricia Smith, 12n3, 47n1, 121 Churchland, Paul M., 12n3, 23n5, 47n1, 121 Cole, J. R., 47n6, 54n1, 121 Cole, S., 47n6, 54n1, 121 Darwin, Charles, 14, 60, 95 Dawkins, Richard, 23n2, 121 Descartes, 71 Flew, R. N., 119n16, 121 Foss, Martin, 119n16, 121 Gödel, Kurt, 88n1 Goethe, 48n9 Haldane, J. B, S., 23n3, 23n6, 122 Hayek. F. A., 47n2, 122 Hitler, Adolf, 102, 105 Hobart, R. E. (= Dickinson Miller), 70, 73n8, 122 Hobbes, 69 Hull, David L., 47n7, 122 Hume 71

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Jacobs. W. W., 105 James, William, 29, 122 Kant, Immanuel, 69, 73n6, 122 Kepler, 46 King Alfonso X, 100 Kretzman, N., 122 La Mettrie, 69 Laplace, 69 Leibniz, 88n1, 94, 100, 117, 119n15 Lorenz, E. N., 103, 118n4 Lotze, Hermann, 69, 73n5, 122 McDowell, John, 33, 122 Mill, John Stuart, 73n9, 122 Pangloss, Dr., 100 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 38, 47n4, 122 Plantinga, Alvin, 119n11, 119n12, 122 Plato, 86, 115 Plotinus, 86, 88n1, 120n18, 122 Popper, 55n5 Proclus, 86, 88n1 Reichenbach, Bruce, 106, 118n8, 123 Rescher, Nicholas, 118n2, 123 Richardson, Peter J., 12n2, 121 Rougier, Louis, 47n3, 123 Ruse, Michael, 12n1, 47n5, 52, 56n6, 123 Schlick. Moritz, 66 Schurz, Gerhard, 48n8, 123 Scotus, Duns, 119n16 Sextus Empiricus, 33n2, 123 Shakespeare, 83

NAME INDEX

Simmel, Georg, 28-29, 33n1, 123 Simon, Herbert A., 55n4, 123 Socrates, 69 Stalin, 102, 105 Stump, E., 122 Suess, Dr., 94 Tarski, 119n16 Tatarkiewicz, Władysław, 123 Tennant, F, R., 118n7, 123 Twain, Mark, 64, 67, 70 Vaihinger, 55n4 Voltaire, 99 Weatherford, Roy, 57, 72n1, 123 Wittgenstein, 32

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