On philosophy, humidity and equanimity

In which our hero rediscovers history and sociology and damned hot weather...

My travels continued with the usual boring flight to Heathrow, thence to Chicago, and a train trip to visit David Hull, as I said. As I flew into American airspace, I was struck looking out the window by the haze of pollution that covers the entire continent. I saw this also last year and in previous trips. Looking down from 11km, one wonders if the sun can even be seen on the ground, for the ground cannot be easily seen from the air. On the ground, though, the heat indicates that enough energy reaches the ground to fry an egg on a sidewalk. Damn, it was hot. And humid. In Australia we only see fog during cold weather. One morning in Bloomington I got up to 35 degree weather and fog so thick that I couldn't see the tree tops.

David and I discussed my manuscript claim that essentialism was not widely, if at all, held before Darwin. Well, it's not just my story, but mainly Polly Winsor's and Gordon McOuat's, although Ron Amundson also has a similar story regarding morphology. Polly calls it the Received View, as do I, while McOuat and others call it the "E-story" or "essentialism Story". Ron calls it in a broader context the Synthesis Historiography.

David thinks that if true it is a black mark against Aristotle and the others who had one view for logic, and another quite different story for ordinary usage or natural history. I think that it is on a par with, say, David Lewis, a recently deceased metaphysician, using the term "big" for classes that are very big in a metaphysical sense. I'm sure that if he remarked to his wife that the grocery bill this month was big, he didn't mean it in this sense. Likewise essence and species. But I've talked about this before.

Then I flew to Bloomington. Illinois. Which was problematic, as we philosophers say, because the workshop was in Indiana. So, a quick ticket to Chicago and back to Indianapolis, where I should have gone. Who knew there were two Bloomington's in adjacent states with similar abbreviations? The tickets certainly didn't mention Illinois. The attendant at the airport noted, as he lit my cigarette (yeah, I know, I was going to quit. Conferences, eh?), that I wasn't the first and won't be the last.

The workshop was amazing. I got to meet folk I had only read. In particular I was very pleased to meet Roberta Millstein and Lindley Darden, whose workshop on selection as a mechanism was the best one I attended. Lindley and her colleagues Peter Machamer and Carl Craver had published a paper on (PhilSci 67:1-25, 2000) a paper arguing for a particular model of mechanism for molecular systems in which the following criteria for a mechanism were posited: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic processes. These are the "bottom-out" processes of molecular systems. The MDC-mechanism, as we called it, was intended only for molecular biological processes, but Rob Skipper and Roberta published a paper in which they argued that selection doesn't match these criteria for mechanism (StudHistPhil Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36:327-347, 2005). The discussion focussed on whether this meant there was either a broader construal of the MDC account that selection fitted, or whether selection was not a mechanism. I thought the latter. Selection is what Brandon called an "explanatory scheme", and each case of selection is, I believe, a filling in of the details in something very like an MDC account. Each case of selection will have, whether we can retrieve it or not, a physical account very like an MDC mechanism. So in my view, selection is not itself an MDC-style mechanism, but a dynamic of systems or a model that can be applied to some physical cases (but not all! Drift and migration also form part of the system under explanation).

I also met Joe Cain, presently from University College London, who I very much enjoyed talking to and listening to, and Steve Downes, who I met before but it turns out shares many of the same interests I have (and his talk on evolutionary psychology was one of the best I have heard for situating the theoretical and epistemic issues). Among the students and low lifes like me I met many folk. Mark Tschaepe from Southern Illinois University (anywhere near Bloomington, Mark?) turns out not only to share my interest in cultural evolution, but coming at it from a completely different direction shares also my conclusions on it (one of which I published as a review of Robert Aunger's book on memes - that what we track in cultural evolution depends on what, as Mark puts it, we bracket out and in as being worth watching). Mark is trying to set up a cultural evolution listserv. Watch this space for an announcement.

There were many other wonderful sessions. One thing that struck me was the reintroduction of sociology and history into philosophy of biology. I have long been influenced by the social sciences, particularly by David Hull's view of the interrelation of "internal" influences in science, such as the ideas and theoretical views of research programs, to the "external" influences, that include the social structure of science as a "demic" population, but also including the external factors such as social institutions of the wider community, metaphors in culture, political movements (like capitalism, but not restricted to that) and so forth. The consensus was that this is not only inevitable, but necessary, if we are to understand the nature of science. David has also been a proponent of using real history rather than thought experiments or intuitions to understand biology, and this too is becoming standard.

This raises a problem I noted in my last post: that of interdisciplinarity. The various disciplines tend to guard their intellectual borders and projects jealously. So getting papers published is difficult. But it can be done. Paul Griffiths gave a talk about his and his colleagues Karola Stotz and Polly Ambermoon's project of censusing the views of geneticists about the concept of gene, and correlating it with training and speciality. Paul argued for an combination of social science, history and philosophy as a way to address these issues. The work is not yet done, but the most interesting thing was that the sociologists there didn't attack him as not understanding t heir literature and project, which is how philosophers usually get responded to in these cases. A rapprochement is underway, I think.

My flight back was difficult. An accident delayed the shuttle from Bloomington, so that I could have missed my flight, except that storms due to the hot weather delayed most flights in the US. So it was delayed by an hour. This left me 20 minutes to get on the Chicago to LA flight, which I made, and 20 minutes to get from the domestic to the international terminal at LAX to catch my flight home to Australia. I made it. My luggage didn't. And I didn't sleep for about 46 hours all up. But I'm home. The photos will be up when I get them developed (I didn't take the digital). In the meantime, here's a photo of me visiting Sue Blackmore...

[From Meme Lab]