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Practical reasoning for serial hyperspecializers

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13869790903067675

1741-5918

Elijah Millgram,

Philosophy and History of Science

Abstract Some species are weedy: they move from one ecological niche to another. Other species are specialized: they are exquisitely adapted to exploit a particular niche. Human beings are the design solution in which a species is simultaneously weedy and specialized – the trick being to manage the exquisite niche-specific adaptations in software rather than in the hardware. We are built to reprogram ourselves on the fly, to select new goals, new priorities and new guidelines appropriate to novel niches. Understanding ourselves as an implementation of this design solution has consequences for the theory of practical reasoning. Instrumentalism (the theory of practical reasoning according to which it consists solely in selecting means to pre-given ends) cannot be a suitable theory of rationality for such a species (that is, our own). Keywords: informed desireinformed preferenceincommensurabilityinstrumentalismpractical rationalityserial hyperspecializationweedy species Acknowledgements I'd like to thank Chrisoula Andreou, Sarah Buss, Pepe Chang, Steve Downes, Sean Kelsey, Mark LeBar, Anya Plutynski and Connie Rosati for comments on earlier drafts. For helpful conversation, I'm also grateful to Jay Bernstein, Karin Boxer, Ben Crowe, Havi Carel, Christoph Fehige, Gabi Juvan, Kathrin Koslicki, Chandran Kukathas, Tamar Laddy, Brenda Lyshaug, Peter Momtchiloff, Huw Price, David Schmidtz, Wayne Waxman, and David Wiggins, as well as audiences at a Rosenblatt Free Lunch and a Law School Brown Bag, both at the University of Utah, at Birkbeck College, and at the Bowling Green Conference on Practical Reasoning. Notes 'Especially', because the approach has been adapted to other areas as well; see, e.g., Boyd and Richerson (1985) Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. 1985. Culture and the evolutionary process, Chicago: Chicago University Press. [Google Scholar], Boyd and Richerson (2004) Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. 2004. Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution, Chicago: Chicago University Press. [Google Scholar]. Examples of the sort of features I have in mind are sexual reproduction and mechanisms that contribute to the reproductive isolation of a species. (That is to say, that many organisms comprise species, in the sense of the term given by Mayr 1984 Mayr, E. 1984. "Species concepts and their application". In Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology, Edited by: Sober, E. 531–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar], esp. p. 539, is such a feature.) Modularity may well be another, and perhaps plasticity itself (West-Eberhard 2003 West-Eberhard, M. J. 2003. Developmental plasticity and evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 164, 178f; for references to work on the evolution of evolvability, see 182f). The contrast between weedy and specialized species should be not confused with another familar and embattled contrast, that between r- and K-selected species (Stearns 2004 Stearns, S. 2004. The evolution of life histories, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 105f; for complaints, see p. 206f). A word of caution: not all variants of the niche concept allow for niches to be independent of the organisms that occupy them; to describe organisms as traveling from niche to niche presupposes that sort of independence. For a recent overview of niche concepts, see Odling-Smee et al. (2003 Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. and Feldman, M. 2003. Niche construction, Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 37ff); for a note of caution, see Arthur (1987 Arthur, W. 1987. The niche in competition and evolution, New York: John Wiley. [Google Scholar], vii). For gorgeously shot illustrations, see Debats et al. (2001) Debats, M., Cluzard, J. and Perrin, J. 2001. Winged migration Produced by Christoph Barratier and Jacques Perrin. Columbia Tristar Hom [Google Scholar]; to be sure, sometimes the fit of a specialized species is quite awkward, and it survives anyway. Continuing the list of features started in note 2, sexual reproduction is a solution that requires death in order to work efficiently; if older copies of gene mixes stick around, the genetic profile of a population won't adapt as efficiently as if they all die off. (Once again, this is an answer to the question, what problem does death solve? not, how did it happen? For recent approaches to the latter question, see, e.g. Stearns [2004, 199–202]). The bald way I have just put it might suggest that the niche appears first, which is of course not necessarily the case: often specialized species and their niches coevolve, as in the case of parasites and their hosts. There are halfway stages to Piltdown Man: think of dogs, which are shaped largely by artificial rather than natural selection. Here, the adaptations are still in hardware and hardwired programs (dachshunds, designed to go down burrows; boxers, designed for bear baiting; hunting dogs; tracking dogs; herding dogs), but the species as a whole is less disposable, because there are those relatively disposable breeds. For a related set of classifications – generalists, specialists, and polyspecialists – see West-Eberhard (2003 West-Eberhard, M. J. 2003. Developmental plasticity and evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 382). Tenn (2001) Tenn, W. 2001. Of men and monsters, London: Orion. [Google Scholar]; for an animated film with a very similar view of humanity, see Laloux (1973) Laloux, R. 1973. Le planète sauvage, Anchor Bay Entertainment. Produced by Roger Corman. Based on novels by Stefan Wul [Google Scholar]. Sterelny (2003 Sterelny, K. 2003. Thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition, Oxford: Blackwell. [Google Scholar], ch. 5) argues that calling items like these desires or preferences probably attributes too much modularization to the cognitive architecture, and while that's a qualification I'm happy to allow, it doesn't affect the present point. For a recent and sophisticated defense of a view in this family, see Vogler (2002) Vogler, C. 2002. Reasonably vicious, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. For supporting argument, see Millgram (2009) Millgram, E. 2009. "D'o[ugrave] venons-nous … Que sommes nous … O[ugrave] allons nous?". In D. Callcut, ed. Reading Bernard Williams, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]. So-called to distinguish it from pain, the signal that one's body has been damaged; see Pitcher (1970) Pitcher, G. 1970. Pain perception. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 368–93. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. This account of the cognitive role of pleasure and displeasure is developed in Millgram (2005 Millgram, E. 2005. Ethics done right: Practical reasoning as a foundation for moral theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ch. 2). This account of boredom and interest is suggested in Millgram (2004) Millgram, E. 2004. On being bored out of your mind. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104(2): 163–84. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. That is, when Vogler (2002 Vogler, C. 2002. Reasonably vicious, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 80–89) reconstructs Aquinas's definition of pleasure, 'the unimpeded operatio of a habit that is itself in harmony with one's nature,' as the sense of a nexus of 'agent, action, and circumstance' – the sense that it's all coming together – she is actually describing the content of the signal I have been characterizing. It follows (and here I am taking issue with Vogler) that, when the signaling system has been corrupted, such pleasures can be mistaken (or, as the traditional vocabulary has it, 'false'). The terminology is from Millgram (1997) Millgram, E. 1997. Practical induction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]. For an overview of this debate, see Chang (1997) Chang, R. 1997. Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]. And when they do say, the answers will often look oddly off-base, because what counts as success by one standard will be given no credit by another. If you're a businessperson, and your measure of success is return on investment, technological elegance is just a distraction; but if you're the researcher, financial success is the distraction. For a different but compatible bounded-rationality account of the incommensurability of values, see Morton (1990) Morton, A. 1990. Disasters and dilemmas, Oxford: Blackwell. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Just what it takes to be better (or 'fully') informed is a difficult and contentious question. By way of giving a foretaste of the problems involved in spelling it out, the relevant information, in the movie example, seems to be the information you'd collect by actually seeing the movie; but if you had seen the movie, you might well not relish the thought of seeing it (the surprise twist at the ending would no longer be a surprise), and you might not be able to resuscitate the responses that made it such a good idea to see it for the first time. For a discussion of this sort of problem, see Millgram (2005 Millgram, E. 2005. Ethics done right: Practical reasoning as a foundation for moral theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 53n.21). For discussion of other difficulties with informed desires, and for pointers to representative views of this sort, see Enoch (2005) Enoch, D. 2005. Why idealize?. Ethics, 115: 759–87. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. For an overview of simulation theory (although one which advocates replacing the label), see Nichols and Stich (2003 Nichols, S. and Stich, S. 2003. Mindreading: An integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds, Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], ch. 2). I'm grateful to Pepe Chang for being an informant on this topic. Lectern name suggested by Jamie Dreier. For a related difficulty with instrumentalist appeals to informed desires, see Millgram (1996 Millgram, E. 1996. Williams' argument against external reasons. Nous, 30(2): 197–220. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 208–209). That said, there's surprising flexibility even about these. The variations in what people will eat, and how they will go about eating it, and the different ways humans go about reproducing, highlight just how much latitude the self-programming software really has. You might wonder whether this question is after all trivial: don't serial hyperspecializers do everything that Piltdown Men do, and more? So why isn't serial hyperspecialization the inevitable choice, if you're in a position to make it? That would be to forget the overhead involved in serial hyperspecialization; in describing the cognitive machinery it involves, we are also indirectly enumerating some of its costs, and these are often quite high. (For a brief but suggestive list of costs of developmental plasticity in the natural world more broadly, see West-Eberhard [2003, 431].) There is a further reason for not insisting that being a serial hyperspecializer is an adaptation: it would be hard, in principle, to give a legitimate argument for the claim. The decently concrete just-so story that such an argument would be built around requires a definite phenotype to work with, and to be a serial hyperspecializer is precisely to have an indefinite phenotype. This claim is spelled out in Millgram (2005 Millgram, E. 2005. Ethics done right: Practical reasoning as a foundation for moral theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Introduction and ch. 11). Notice that even though some of these tools effectively measure relative success within a niche, and seem to work within many different niches, it does not follow that there is a substantive notion of success that is common to all those niches, and which might amount to a utilitarian's generic goal or end. Here is a relatively local illustration of that point. Athletes may have a sense of how well they're doing at a given sport, and they may appeal to it in deciding which sports to pursue professionally. But sports are very different from one another, and there is nothing substantive that success in the various sports may have in common. For a description of the so-called CI-procedure, see Millgram (2005 Millgram, E. 2005. Ethics done right: Practical reasoning as a foundation for moral theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 90f, 141f). Thompson (2008 Thompson, M. 2008. Life and action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Part I) is a recent and very sophisticated attempt in this tradition to delineate species form via 'Aristotelian categoricals' or 'natural-historical judgements,' that is, sentences with the logical form of 'Bobcats have two to three cubs in the spring.' The problem with using this conceptual apparatus to make sense of ourselves is that, for serial hyperspecializers, the Aristotelian categoricals come and go. 'Humans illuminate their dwellings by burning whale blubber' was an observation briefly on a par with 'Beavers assure their food supply by building dams.' But it is true no longer, having joined the class that includes 'Humans prepare documents using typewriters' and that will shortly include 'Humans select items from drop-down menus by pointing and clicking.' I leave it to the reader to extend the list; what matters for the present point is that this sort of transience extends very far into what is normally the subject of natural history. For instance, 'Human females nurse their young' was a natural-historical judgment that might have seemed to belong to the species form, if any did; but there has been substantial movement away from that Aristotelian categorical over the past hundred or so years. The Aristotelian categoricals that are stably true of humans are mostly of a piece with the ones we have been surveying over the course of this paper, and amount to a description of the ways in which the species form is plastic. (Another way of putting it: the most important Aristotelian categorical about our species is that the Aristotelian categoricals true of it change from decade to decade.) I am tempted to conclude that, by the lights of such neo-Aristotelians, we must not after all be a species. In any case, the intellectual apparatus they provide us for reasoning about species has very little usable grip on us. (Thompson himself attempts to peel off the problematic natural-historical judgments by assigning them to a different logical category, having to do with artifacts. The parrying move is unsuccessful, because what matters is not how you categorize those judgments, but what (and how much, or rather, how little) is left over when you delete the ephemeral ones. And, although this is an incidental matter, the reassignment, which turns on the requirement that for such a statement to be true of artifacts, people must know that it is, is inconsistent with the first-person authority that Thompson insists on with respect to our own species form.) For the latecomers, Piltdown Man was a hoax involving a human skull, the jaw of a modern ape, and sandpaper; Millar (1972) Millar, R. 1972. The Piltdown Men, London: Victor Gollancz. [Google Scholar] is a popular account.