One of the enduring mistakes made in science and philosophy is to confuse how things seem with how they are. In biology, the conjunction "pattern and process" has been around for decades, at least since 1947 in ecology, when Alex Watt used it as a title for an essay on plant communities. In 1967, Terrell Hamilton published his Process and pattern in evolution, and the phrase sort of took off from there. But patterns are relationships that are salient to the observer, while processes account for the patterns, and many other kinds as well. In the ontology of biology, it is common for theorists and critics alike to argue that an observed pattern of some kind just is the ontology - that communities are real, that species are an organisational rank in biology, that groups are formed by an "adaptive radiation", and so on.
The mistake of this kind of conflation of epistemology with ontology (and not always a well-founded epistemology - often it is merely a phenomenological and subjective impression held by some authorities or other) is an old one, but as a fallacy it was not named until Alfred North Whitehead (what is it with late nineteenth century philosophers that we have to always use their middle names?) called it "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness". Later, Marcuse called it the "reification fallacy". It is the error of taking a noun to require a concrete referent, and in this case it is the error of thinking that because one sees a pattern, there must be a process that the pattern answers to. But as pareidola indicates, as pattern recognition systems our brains are capable of identifying patterns that aren't there (or more exactly, identifying patterns that do not have any other underlying natural process than the act of pattern recognition itself).
It should not need to be said that this is a mistake, but it is a subtle one that occurs frequently in the literature, and I am sure I am equally guilty of it as anyone else. However, it is not a foundation for an ontology, and in fact such observer bias is ideally eliminated from scientific research (an ideal honoured often more in the breach than the observance).
Take, for an exemplar, species. Many biologists identify species as a salient grouping of organisms, and the salience is based on the sharing of a group of traits, or typical features. The majority of reflective biologists know that these marks of identification or diagnosis are not the causal processes that make the groupings in nature; that is more to do with an interaction between shared developmental systems including genomes, cell types, and behaviours, and the environments and ecologies in which they exist. [This is often referred to as the "interactionist consensus", Sterelny and Griffiths, p97ff.] Now it is clear that if one thinks that species have different organisational structures in different parts of the evolutionary tree (plant species and mammal species are quite different, and bacterial species even more so), there can be no such thing as "the" organisational rank of being a species. But I have encountered, both personally and in the literature, biologists who sincerely believe that because there is a typical organisational structure for species in, say, snakes or birds or ants, that this is the rank and structure for all species. A classic example of putting pattern before process.
Systematics is the hunting ground for this mistake par excellence. Often people think that classification is just the process of assigning names, and that once you have a name you have a thing that is named. The use of clustering algorithms to identify species in molecular data is as much the reification fallacy as phenetics had been when it was used used for morphological data - what such algorithms tell you is that the criteria for grouping work in such and such a way on that data set. What clustering does not tell you is that there is a significant and natural process underlying it that makes the pattern informative. The underlying justification for phylogenetic classification is that the patterns it uncovers are supposed to be the outcome of historical processes of descent with modification, or as we call it, common descent. The problem with other methods of grouping organisms is that at best they merely mark one process (the one on which the clustering is based), and at worst they reflect only the choice of principal components, which are epistemically relative.
Ontologies are supposed to mark the classes or kinds of things that exist in a domain or under a theory. But like any discipline that deals with the empirical world, all we have access to are the patterns, so over time science has developed many methodologies to attempt to ensure that only the patterns that are actually informative about the world are the ones that get used. And there is no magic "noetic ray" that will do this, as Putnam once noted, so we are stuck with the patterns in our data sets from which we seek to reconstruct the processes. This is as true in physics as in biology, and it lends itself to the reification fallacy in science. If we have patterns in our data, and we use them to figure our the processes, it is a short leap to thinking that the patterns are the processes, even if on reflection or under challenge, a scientist will say "Well of course the data isn't the things themselves!" As Joel Cracraft once said of species "... somehow a species definition must be inclusive of an ontology and an epistemology". Well, there's the trick.
The issue is that patterns do not automatically give us the processes and so they do not help us with our ontology, however they may play out in our epistemology. Even the choice of what to measure and how to measure it is already presumptive of an ontology, and rally we ought to have some foundation for that before we get going, which implies that we already have our ontology before we apply our epistemology, and this can't be right. Where does the ontology come from? If not from a prior theory (as a variable in the Quinean sense), it cannot come Aristotelianly by refining definitions or intuitions - that project of science by definition died in the 16th century. And the answer is, I think, that we evolve our ontologies, so what we apply at t is the best outcome of what we obtained at t-n. But we have to always be on our guard against the reification fallacy.
A final bit of amusement: one of the exemplars of this fallacy was, I believe, Louis Agassiz, who held quite explicitly that patterns were more real than processes (he was a Platonist). After his death, a statue of him fell from the Zoology building at Stanford after an earthquake in 1906. David Starr Jordan, a renowned zoologist in his own right, and president of Stanford, wrote "Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'" How true
References mentioned
Cracraft, Joel. 2000. Species concepts in theoretical and applied biology: A systematic debate with consequences. In Species concepts and phylogenetic theory: A debate, edited by Q. D. Wheeler and R. Meier. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hamilton, Terrell H. 1967. Process and pattern in evolution. New York, London: Macmillan; Collier-Macmillan.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, truth and history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sterelny, Kim, and Paul E. Griffiths. 1999. Sex and death: an introduction to philosophy of biology, Science and its conceptual foundations. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Watt, Alex S. 1947. Pattern and process in the plant community. Journal of Ecology 35 (1/2): 1-22.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1938. Science and the modern world. Pelican ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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The three names business reminds me a list of three name artists I used to carry in my pocket notebook: Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, George Caleb Bingham, Henry Varnum Poor, all American Midwest regional artists. Why three names, I wondered? And I still wonder.
REH
I think the Quinean answer is to recognize that every ontology derives from the theory or theories that define it. The mistake is thinking that it is something prior to or independent of theory. Reality isn't labeled, but that we label it.
If every ontology derives from a theory, then what is the ontological status of theories?
What are thoughts on Olivier Rieppel's "Fundamentals of Comparative Biology"? He spends a fair amount of time of historical philosophy.
"Even the choice of what to measure and how to measure it is already presumptive of an ontology"
That is why I might suggest that we may live in a world of not just objects, but objects and subjects, where subjects are not simply another object class, but somehow fundamental. Without a subject, there is no epistemology and no ontology. When you "understand" an abstract cladistics concept, or a complex neural net specification, or a QM interpretation, there is always something missing from that understanding: you, the observer.
"And the answer is, I think, that we evolve our ontologies, so what we apply at t is the best outcome of what we obtained at t-n"
Prior knowledge acts as a filter or a lens for later knowledge, at many different levels. You learn the alphabet first, then the words. But can any absolute ontology ever be arrived at, when you only live in this epistemic world of the mind, and not actually in a physical world? Not to advocate idealism, but... can you even know how "close" you are to a perfect ontology? You may believe you are close, but perhaps you are merely at a local maxima (or minima, depending on your orientation).
I'm not sure about ontology, but writing blogs and posting them in the near future might qualify as a form of teleology...
Bob, we theorize about theories, also. That's much of what Quine was doing. Along with a host of other philosophers of science.
Russell - Yes, even I have theorized about theories. And sure, "an ontology" is a sort of theory -- a theory about "what there is." But I'm not inclined to the view that what there is is "theories, all the way down."
What there is is ever and always described by theories. Until someone discovers how to do a Vulcan mind meld with the universe, it cannot be otherwise. The map will remain different from the territory.
What some people want to do is to somehow make some parts of those theories, the nouns or the essential categories, as more basic than the other aspects of the theory. I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense. The notion that fermions and bosons are somehow more basic than the Schrodinger equation, because they are categories of things, strikes me as odd. Sometimes the objects of one theory get carried over into another. Projectiles are much the same in Newtonian and relativistic physics, just behaving a bit different. But sometimes what there is changes. Newtonian and quantum particles simply aren't the same thing.
Now, yeah, I know: there are all sorts of experiments that cause us to infer electrons, for example, and whatever theories we develop have to explain those experiments. But not the "infer" in that first sentence. There are theories other than grand theories of physics, that get drawn into the latter.
Russell I've addressed some of these matters in 1 to 3 of this series. But I must disagree that everything is described by theories. Everything is explained by theories, yes but if I shout "Look out! A tree!" there is clearly no theory there.
That should read: "but note the 'infer' in the first sentence."
John S. Wilkins:
Sure, there is. At some point in our childhood, we learned and developed ideas about trees, about how to recognize them, how to distinguish them from other things, and why we might want to look out for them, e.g., they are big and stationary when run into. If you really had no theory of a tree, telling you to "look out, a tree" would give you no hint of how to respond. Instead of looking for something that hurts when collided with, you might look on your arms for something that might sting, or cover your eyes for fear of being blinded by bright light, or hold your breath for fear of breathing a noxious gas. The fact that you respond differently to that warning than you do to "look out, a tiger" shows that you do indeed have a theory of trees.
Now, no, our notions of trees aren't a sophisticated theory like quantum mechanics, or even Boyle's law of gases, and yes, our notions of trees are lumped in with a lot of other notions that constitute the common stuff we learn as children. But science is fully contiguous with those notions, and those notions are just as susceptible to the kinds of epistemological issues applied to science. One testimonial to that is how the "common stuff" of our age has been influenced by science. Most twelve year-olds today knows that a dolphin isn't a fish, that the earth is spherical, and that rubbing a balloon against your hair generates static electricity. A twelve year-old in ancient Sumeria would have a very different set of "common stuff."
In some of your previous posts, it seemed to me you tried to take common notions and the ontology they carry as somehow primitive, as something somehow prior to the issues you're raising. But they're not. The world doesn't come with labels. It is people who decide how to divvy the world up, saying these things we call "trees" are alike in important ways. Mind, I'm not criticizing that category. A biologist might point out it's not cladistic. Consider Gould's famous essay on zebras. It's a useful category nonetheless. What it isn't is somehow untethered from human theorizing about the world. My point is precisely that that theorizing extends all the way down, to the first words uttered by the first hominid, and earlier, and that there is no line to be drawn that keeps that early theorizing and its ontologies outside the epistemological issues you're raising about science. What you're trying to use as ground in which to anchor is in fact part of the boat.
The map will remain different from the territory.
A nitpick I might have with this analogy, is that the map can always be checked against the territory for accuracy in an absolute sense. With theories, can you ever really know how accurate they are? How close they are to the noumenon (assuming it exists)? You can only know that they work better than other theories. It's all pragmatism, it seems.
Hmmm, I may be able partially answer my own question. Bells Inequality - considered by some to be one of the most profound theories in science, says "there is no deep reality". Also, some might consider math to be the noumenon, but I don't know - can math comprehend math? And what "breathes fire into the equations", as Hawkings might say. If one actually does have a noumenon, one has reached something that cannot be reduced any further, and it's ontology is essentially unexplainable.
Presumably, there was a time before human beings had developed written or spoken language when, nonetheless, they could still recognize a tree and distinguish it from a rock or an elephant or a cloud. Does that recognition necessarily imply an underlying theory in the scientific sense or is that stretching the meaning of the word "theory" a tad too far?
Ian asks an interesting question. An important measure, I think, is how flexible animals are with regard to their conceptual apparatus. People are able not only to develop new concepts, but to do so in a conscious fashion, e.g., yes, knowing that those berries and that leaf aren't good to eat, let's have a notion of poisonous things. Which as a concept has the interesting aspect of classifying things functionally: there are things that are poisonous because you eat them, and things that are poisonous because they inject you with venom, having the commonality that ocne there is a poison inside you, it can works its ill effects.
How much of this flexibility is pre-linguistic? I don't know. Do the linguists know?
Jeff, I disagree "that the map can always be checked against the territory for accuracy in an absolute sense." That check always involves some theory of how cartography should work. Do you take the shoreline at high or low tide? And is that high high, low high, or median high? How do you account for sand bars that shift? How so you draw a mud flat or marsh? There is an art, both to making maps and to interpreting them. Given that the no one has mapped each and every point, how should one trust the line the map draws? At the bottom are some of the same epistemological questions as arise in testing theories.
I also disagree that Bell's inequality shows says "there is no deep reality." It shows that quantum reality is not simultaneously deterministic, local, and causal.
Russell, you're right - "no deep reality" was Bohr's view of the Copenhagen interpretation (it's all starting to run together in my head). From what I remember, Bell's inequality was a tradeoff between locality and realism, and recent experiments were showing realism to be a much bigger problem.
You raise good points about epistemic problems with maps and theories, but the territory is still there for you to inspect in its entirety, as you wish. It's not available with theories. There are energies, distances, and times you can't (yet) touch, and unknowns you can't yet explore (other universes, inside black holes, etc). You can't just inspect that territory at will.
All scientific theories are, at root, attempts to explain patterns (observations). But so are religious "theories." I believe that the tech equivalent of the Vulcan mind-meld will eventually be available (50-200 years maybe, if technological civilization isn't, er, interrupted) and that only then will we be able to determine how far "down" the family tree scientific thinking actually goes.
I have a hunch that the scientists of the future will indeed find that other animals can think scientifically, but that they don't do it very often. If that turns out to be the case - if even one instance of such thinking turns up in, say, an ape, or a cat, or a parrot - would that be at odds with modern philosophy?
I would say, none. A pre-linguistic person would have no concept of "poisons", as such; they would just know that there are things you shouldn't eat and things you shouldn't allow to stick you. Without a scientific understanding of the common process of poisoning, they would only see the two distinct patterns.
The discovery of patterns always points to something important. Just think of the development of the chemical elements and the periodic table.
Jung as other forward-thinkers and inventors believed that the spheres of matter and psyche (mind) have a tangible connection through numbers. The Universe is ordered in a systematic fashion based on numbers with their inherent metaphysical attributes, chemical elements, and patterns.
For a demonstration of a numerological pattern in number Pi, clusters of numbers, especially number 7, up-to-date explanation of the metaphysical attributes of numbers in context with current scientific facts, and the demonstration of living successful authentic lives see my book âInvisible Cloak - Know Thyselfâ (www.sumuniversal.com).