Conjuring teleology

At The Philosophers’ Magazine online, Massimo Pigliucci discusses teleology and teleonomy.  His position has the virtues of being simple and clear.  Unfortunately, it also has the vices of being simplistic and wrong.  His remarks can be summarized fairly briefly.  Explaining what is wrong with them takes a little more doing.

Teleology, as Pigliucci says, is actual purposefulness, whereas teleonomy is the mere appearance of purposefulness.  The former, he claims, always involves either divine or human agency.  The sciences can in Piglucci’s view be distinguished by their relationships to teleology and teleonomy.  “[P]hysics, chemistry, astronomy and geology,” he says, “are neither teleonomic nor teleologic.”  At the other extreme, with psychology, sociology and economics it is “mandatory” that we understand the phenomena they study in teleological terms.  In the middle stands biology, which he says is not teleological but is teleonomic.  Why is teleonomy “indispensible” to biology?  Because, Pigliucci says, “natural selection… truly does mimic goals and purposes” whereas the phenomena studied by physics, chemistry, etc. do not.  And what accounts for the difference between merely teleonomic phenomena and truly teleological ones?  In Pigliucci’s view it is consciousness, the science of which “is still waiting for its Darwin.”

Pigliucci is a smart and interesting guy, but as we’ve seen before (here and here), like too many other contemporary philosophers he often seems unable or unwilling to think outside the box of what everyone “knows.”  In this case, like most people who comment on the subject these days (whether naturalists, ID theorists, or whoever), he overlooks several crucial distinctions where teleology is concerned -- distinctions I spelled out in my article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” (with further, more recent relevant discussion at pp. 88-105 of Scholastic Metaphysics).  Though these are distinctions which come naturally to us Thomists, they are also (as I discuss in the writings just referred to and have discussed in many other places as well) distinctions some of which you will find recapitulated by some contemporary non-Thomist and even naturalistic philosophers.

I won’t repeat here everything I’ve said in those earlier writings.  Suffice it to note that there are at least five approaches one could take to the question of whether teleology is (or is not) real, and at least five levels in nature at which one might (or might not) identify a distinct sort of teleology. 

As I’ve noted before, the first set of distinctions roughly corresponds to the five sorts of position one could take on the problem of universals: nominalism, conceptualism, and the three brands of realism (Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic).  Teleological eliminativism (which roughly parallels nominalism) holds that there is no teleology at all in the natural world.  Teleological reductionism holds that there is teleology in the natural world, but that it is entirely reducible to non-teleological phenomena.  Platonic teleological realism holds that teleology is real and irreducible but that it does not exist in natural, non-mental phenomena in any intrinsic way.  Rather, it exists only relative to some mind (say, human or divine) which imparts teleology to otherwise purposeless phenomena.  Aristotelian teleological realism holds that teleology is real and irreducible and that it does exist in natural, non-mental phenomena in an intrinsic way, without having to be derived from any mind.  Scholastic teleological realism is something of a middle ground position between Platonic and Aristotelian teleological realism.  It holds that teleology is real and irreducible, and that it has a proximate ground in the intrinsic natures of things (as the Aristotelian view holds) but that it also has its ultimate source in the divine intellect (as the Platonic view holds).  Platonic teleological realism is the view reflected in arguments like Paley’s design argument and ID theory.  Scholastic teleological realism is the view one finds in Aquinas’s Fifth Way.  (See my article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”  Both that article and “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” are reprinted in Neo-Scholastic Essays.  The distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian teleological realism has been emphasized in recent analytic philosophy by writers like Christopher Shields and Andre Ariew.)

The second set of distinctions, between levels in nature at which teleology may or may not exist, goes as follows.  First, teleology might exist (indeed, as everyone but eliminative materialists agrees, does exist) at the level of human thought and action, where the ends toward which thought and action are directed are grasped conceptually.  Second, teleology exists in non-human animals in a way that does not involve conceptualization, but is still conscious.  Third, teleology exists in merely vegetative forms of life (in the technical, Aristotelian sense of “vegetative”) in a way that is completely unconscious, but still involves processes which are directed toward the flourishing of the whole organism.  (Scholastics call this “immanent causation,” as opposed to the “transeunt causation” to which non-living things are confined.)  Fourth, teleology might be claimed to exist in inorganic phenomena in a way that does not involve the flourishing of a whole substance (as in living things) but still involves complex causal processes.  David Oderberg proposes the rock cycle and the water cycle as examples.  Fifth, teleology might exist at the simplest level in the form of an efficient cause’s mere “directedness” toward its characteristic effect or range of effects.  Contemporary philosopher Paul Hoffman has called this last kind the “stripped-down core notion” of teleology, and it is essentially what contemporary metaphysicians like John Heil, George Molnar, and U.T. Place have in mind when they attribute “physical intentionality” or “natural intentionality” to causal powers. 

Now, the first mistake Pigliucci makes is matter-of-factly to suppose that teleology, if it is real, must “either [be] the result of a supernatural cause (‘god’) or, more obviously, of human activity.”  This essentially assumes that the only options are either teleological eliminativism or Platonic teleological realism.  Yet surely Pigliucci is familiar with versions of teleological reductionism (for example, attempts in the philosophy of biology to analyze the notion of biological function in “naturalistic” terms), which makes it odd that he doesn’t even mention these in passing.  Perhaps he supposes (rightly, in my view) that such reductionism inevitably collapses into some other view about teleology.  But Pigliucci seems completely unaware that there is such a thing as the Aristotelian teleological realist position -- which is also a bit odd, since Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos brought some attention to it recently (nor is Nagel the only naturalist to take such a view).  Naturally, someone unaware of the Aristotelian teleological realist position would also be unfamiliar with the Scholastic teleological realist position (which can really only be understood by contrast to the Aristotelian and Platonist positions).  Perhaps Pigliucci would say that all of these views end up collapsing into the Platonic position.  But justifying such a claim would require argument.  Pigliucci not only gives no argument, he shows no awareness that there is even a dispute here.

Pigliucci’s second mistake is in assimilating all teleology to the sort exhibited (or apparently exhibited) either in human action or in biological phenomena.  This is a very common assimilation, but it is wrong, and manifests Pigliucci’s tendency (which we have seen before) to take the metaphysical conventional wisdom for granted.  Again, teleology of a sort that is much more rudimentary than the sort one finds in biological and specifically human phenomena might arguably be found in inorganic cyclical phenomena (as in Oderberg’s examples) or in basic causal relations (as in the phenomena that writers like Hoffman, Heil, Molnar, Place, et al. have in mind).  And in that case, even if one denies that “physics, chemistry, astronomy and geology” are concerned with truly teleological phenomena, they would still be teleonomic phenomena -- which would undermine Pigliucci’s proposed way of classifying the sciences, and also undermine his claim that it is natural selection that accounts for teleonomy (since natural selection does not exist at the level of the inorganic phenomena in question). 

Pigliucci says: “It makes no sense to ask what is the purpose or goal of an electron, a molecule, a planet or a mountain.”  But the remark is either aimed at a straw man or begs the question.  If by “the purpose of an electron etc.” Pigliucci has in mind something like the kind of purposes that a heart or an eyeball has (which can only be understood by reference to the flourishing of the organism of which these organs are parts), or the kind that an artifact has (which can only be understood by reference to the human purposes for which the artifact was made), then he is of course correct that electrons, molecules, planets and mountains lack such purposes.  But not all teleology need in the first place involve the kinds of purposes we see in bodily organs and artifacts, and those who attribute teleology to inorganic phenomena are not attributing to them those specific kinds of teleology.  What they have in mind instead is mere directedness toward an end. 

Now, anything with irreducible causal powers arguably has that sort of mere directedness -- what Hoffman calls the “stripped-down core notion” of teleology -- insofar as it has a typical sort of effect or range of effects.  Contemporary “new essentialist” powers theorists willing to countenance something like “physical intentionality” would attribute this sort of teleology to physical particles.  Planets and mountains (to cite Pigliucci’s other examples) are trickier, since it might be argued that their causal powers are reducible to those of their parts.  If so, then they would have what the Scholastic would call mere “accidental forms” rather than “substantial forms,” and thus not be true substances, and thus not be candidates for the sorts of thing having irreducible teleology in the first place.  I don’t intend to get into all that here.  Suffice it to say that Pigliucci is not only ignoring distinctions between kinds of teleology, but also running together examples of very different sorts which would require careful case-by-case treatment in the application of the relevant metaphysical notions.  (See Scholastic Metaphysics for exposition and defense of all the relevant notions.)

It is also surprising that a philosopher of science like Pigliucci should overlook a famous example of purported teleology within physics, viz. least action principles.  (See Hawthorne and Nolan’s paper “What Would Teleological Causation Be?” for a recent brief discussion by philosophers.)  Of course, whether such principles ought really to be regarded as teleological is a matter of controversy, but that is irrelevant to the present point.  What is relevant is, first, that if they are teleological, they would not have the kind of teleology that bodily organs and artifacts have.  Hence they would be good examples of the more rudimentary, sub-organic kind of purported teleology that Pigliucci entirely overlooks.  Second, the very fact that least action principles at least seem to many people to be teleological is another good illustration of how even physics is arguably teleonomic even if one were to concede to Pigliucci that it is not teleological.  Once again, that would undermine Pigliucci’s attempt to explain teleonomy in terms of natural selection.

A further problem with Pigliucci’s remarks is that he supposes that a reference to natural selection suffices to show that teleology has been banished from biology.  But that is not the case.  As various thinkers with no ID theoretic or otherwise theological ax to grind (e.g. Marjorie Grene, Andre Ariew, J. Scott Turner) have pointed out, natural selection by itself only casts doubt on teleology where questions of adaptation are concerned.  Whether some sort of teleology is necessary to make sense of developmental processes within an organism is another question.  (Keep in mind that whether such teleology would require reference to some sort of designer is, contrary to what Pigliucci seems to suppose, a yet further question -- and one which would require settling the dispute between Platonic teleological realism, Aristotelian teleological realism, Scholastic teleological realism, and teleological reductionism.)

Finally, Pigliucci overlooks some obvious problems with his remarks about consciousness.  By his own admission, apparently, phenomena that involve consciousness are irreducibly teleological and not merely teleonomic.  So far so good; I think that is certainly true.  But in that case it is quite silly to pretend (as Pigliucci rather glibly does) that explaining consciousness merely requires that cognitive science find its own Darwin.  The way Darwin accounts for adaptation is precisely by arguing that it is not really teleological at all but merely teleonomic.  Naturally, then, if consciousness is irreducibly teleological, it is not even in principle going to be susceptible of that kind of reductionist or eliminativist explanation. 

Of course, Pigliucci might respond that he didn’t mean to imply that consciousness would ever be explained in exactly the kind of manner Darwin employed, but only that it would require a scientist of Darwin’s stature to account for it.  Fair enough, but even on this interpretation his remark is still much too glib.  Darwin, and the other great names in modern science, are considered great largely because they are thought to have found ways to eliminate teleology from the phenomena they dealt with.  In particular, they’ve treated teleology as a mere projection of the mind rather than a real feature of nature.  Obviously you can’t apply that approach to conscious teleological processes without implicitly denying the existence of the thing you’re supposed to be explaining rather than actually explaining it.  (And into the bargain, taking an incoherent position, since scientific theorizing, weighing evidence, etc. are themselves all teleological conscious processes.)

So, a “Darwin” of the science of consciousness would have to be as unlike Darwin, Newton, and Co. as they were unlike Aristotle.  In particular, he’d have to reverse the anti-teleological trend of modern scientific theorizing.  Or at any rate, he’d have to do so for all Pigliucci has said, or all he plausibly could say given what he’s willing to concede vis-à-vis the centrality of genuine teleology (not just teleonomy) to the understanding of human phenomena.

Hence to write many paragraphs about the scientific banishment of teleology from everywhere else in nature while insisting that teleology is real in the case of human beings, and then casually to insinuate that the history of that banishment gives hope that someday a scientific explanation of the teleology of human consciousness will also be possible… to do that is something of a conjuring trick, a bit of sleight of hand.  To appeal to an analogy I’ve used many times before, it’s like someone who has gotten rid of all the dirt in every room in the house by sweeping it under a particular rug, when asked how he’s now going to get rid of the dirt under the rug, responding: “Why, I’ll get rid of it the same way I got rid of the dirt in all the rooms, of course!  That method worked in all those other cases -- why wouldn’t it work in the one case of the dirt under the rug?”  This only sounds plausible if you don’t think very carefully about what has just been said.  The minute you do think about it, you see that in fact it’s absurd.  Naturally, the past success of the sweep-it-under-the-rug method gives no reason whatsoever to think that that method offers hope of getting rid of the dirt under the rug itself.  And by the same token, the past success of the treat-teleology-as-a-mere-projection-of-consciousness method gives no reason whatsoever to think that people using essentially the same method will succeed in explaining the teleology of consciousness itself.

(For more detailed discussion of these and related issues, see my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and on Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.)