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Background painting: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henri-rousseau/the-snake-charmer-1907 (public domain)
Transcript:
Hello everyone and welcome to Paradigms Lost: A Genealogical Synthesis of Darwinism, Pragmatism and Praxeology.
In this first episode, I want to give a brief description of what this channel and its goals are along with a very rough introduction to the worldview which I bring to my own interpretations and criticisms of other thinkers.
Most of the episodes on this channel are meant to revolve around and closely follow the audio lectures published by the Teaching Company’s Great Courses series. These audio lectures can be bought either at their website that I’ve linked in the description or at audible.com. To be clear, I am not sponsored by the Teaching Company in any way, but I do think that the lectures they put out are top notch and well-worth listening to.
As a first approximation, then, if the Teaching Company’s professors provide the lectures for a university level class, then I hope to be the TA that provides the discussion section for that same class. As such, the level of understanding that I presuppose in my audience is basically that of an upper division bachelor student. Like any good TA, I definitely recommend that my audience come to the discussion section prepared, already having listened to the audio lecture that the video will address. The more advanced philosophy students should, however, be able to understand the strong majority of the content without having to actually listen to the corresponding audio-lecture.
Now that I’ve introduced the channel, let me say a few things about myself. I graduated with a bachelors degree in philosophy 10 years ago. While I did take a few graduate-level courses before deciding to pursue a masters degree in economics instead, most of my understanding and criticisms of these thinkers come from my own private studies. For this reason, I am very open to better informed or better-trained commenters offering corrections and emendations to my interpretation of any given thinker.
The only rule that I have to insist upon is ”Don’t be a jerk about it.” Also, keep in mind that while I don’t want to misrepresent the original authors, my primary objective is articulating their views only to the extent that doing so also clarifies my own positions and ideas.
Having introduced myself, I would now like to introduce the core ideas that I will bring to each video. To this end, I want to briefly describe the three key terms in my opening: Darwinism, Praxeology and Pragmatism. I will then try to illustrate my genealogical synthesis of these terms by outlining my own compositional understanding of conscious, deliberative action.
The first element of my approach is Darwinism. By this, I do not mean evolutionary history, genetics or paleontology. Rather, I specifically want to focus on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which I take to be the logic of adaptation rather than the history of adaptation. Whereas many naturalistic accounts of human behavior see it as a special subset of physical matter in motion, I want to largely sideline physics and instead see human action as a special subset of organisms adapting to their environment. That said, I actively reject gene-centrism, any equivalence of biological fitness with value and memetics as being too reductionistic.
The second element is that of Praxeology or the logic of economized action as pioneered by the Austrian economist Carl Menger. My goal is to qualitatively analyze the logic of end-oriented, economizing behavior and action, independent of the various ways in which different organisms have instantiated that logic. That said, I do depart from the mainstream, Austrian tradition on a number of significant points: Whereas the praxeological mainstream limits its focus to consciously chosen actions, my approach begins with unconscious economization and then works its way up to the conscious economization that they presuppose. While I greatly value the Austrians’ methodological individualism and their suspicion of hasty aggregations, I simply cannot accept what I take to be their exaggerated subjectivism – when it comes to values - and apriorism – when it comes to methodology.
An understanding of economizing action must, I suggest, be grounded in and structured by the final element of my approach: Pragmatism. Pragmatism, as conceived by Charles Sander Peirce, is the logic of signs, communication and thought in general and must be clearly distinguished from psychology, cognitive science or linguistics. The universal logic of Pragmatism relates to such particularistic disciplines in the same way that natural selection relates to paleontology, or as praxeology relates to behavioral psychology. Within each of these three contrasts, the first discipline provides the logical skeleton from which the historical or particularistic meat of the second discipline necessarily hangs.
As was the case in Darwinism and Praxeology, there are definitely elements in Peirce’s thought that I simply cannot accept. In particular, I reject his tendency towards objective idealism, his suspicions towards natural selection and his tendency towards hasty aggregations and holism. With those caveats in mind, I do call myself a Mengerian Pragmatist in that I believe the meaning of any sign, symbol or thought to be the concrete ways in which it furthers some teleological ends and hinders others within any economizing agent.
Let me now back up a bit and re-approach these ideas from the perspective of a genealogical synthesis. I just explained how Darwinism is my starting point, Mengerian Pragmatism is my end goal and a qualitative analysis the interactions among economizing agents is the explanatory path by which I wish to travel from the former to the latter. To anticipate a bit, my compositional genealogy of conscious, deliberative action, is actually very similar in spirit to Menger’s causal analysis of prices:
At stated, the starting point for conscious action is natural selection and its ability to produce end-oriented, functional adaptations. By this, I mean any system in the universe whose long run replication is the teleological end in terms of which its own adaptive fitness can be measured. This bottom level is not limited to life, but also includes viruses, RNA and any other functional product of natural selection.
The second level is actually a smaller subset or organization of the level below it. Among all the functional adaptations in the universe, some biological systems are actually a well-organized combination of adaptations from the lower level. Behavioral agents at this second level must, therefore, economize the use and design of their functional adaptations as an intelligent response to and anticipation of environmental stimuli. This second level thus includes pretty much all living, biological organisms: starfish, beetles, plants, even bacteria have some small degree of this very low-level agency.
A further subset of all the economizing agents in the universe are not only able to intelligently anticipate and respond to their environment, but are also able to intelligently anticipate and respond to other intelligent agents within a shared environment. As such, they are capable of strategic interactions and power struggles with other intelligent, economizing agents in ways that include competing for mates, avoiding predators, hunting prey, collaborating with allies or fighting against enemies, especially within shared, social groups. Of particular interest is the ability that third level organisms have to produce signals that are aimed at strategically influencing some intended audience – mating calls being one such signal. Examples of this level include cats, dogs, dolphins, birds and especially Apes among many others.
We can, I suggest, understand each of these levels in terms of the feedback mechanisms that design and shape the organisms at each level: The first level includes all biological systems in the universe that are shaped by the disembodied feedback mechanism of natural selection. The second level demarcates all those organisms that are also shaped by their own, first-person feedback mechanism of reinforced stimulus responses to some environment. The third level includes all social organisms in the universe that are also shaped by a second person feedback in which agents intelligently influence and are also influenced by each other. The 4th level, then, consists of all organisms in the universe that are also shaped by the third person feedback mechanism of normative validations and justifications of actions and signs.
If we can understand the 3rd level of strategies and signals as a population of 2-party duals or negotiations, then this 4th level is a population of 3-party trials where some 3rd party intelligently mediates 2-party interactions in a way that is itself – at least potentially – mediated by yet another 3rd party. The most salient form of this mediated mediation comes in the form of validating or invalidating the inferences that 4th level organisms make between the signs and symbols that make up a language. Briefly put, 1st person assertion, 2nd person contradiction and 3rd person validation/justification is the social process by which all such creatures stabilize, socialize and only then individually internalize their shared, symbolic language.The final level, then, is that of isolated individuals – similar to Robinson Crusoe - who, having been fully enculturated and socialized within a pre-existing, social language at the previous 4th level, is then able to put those mental tools to his own private deliberation and use. While I insist that there is no such thing as a private language, I absolutely allow for the private use of public languages. The process of conscious, internal deliberation is, therefore, the process by which all fully rational agents are able to conceptualize the world within the privacy of their own minds as well as rationally plan their courses of action within it.
At the risk of name-dropping, this genealogy can also be understood in terms of the ways in which various thinkers have sought to explain higher level phenomena and the disciplines that study them in terms of a lower ones:
- Daniel Dennett makes much of the ways in which the Adaptationism of natural selection is able to produce the behaviorism of intentional systems.
- Ken Binmore’s game theoretic model of social contracts has greatly influenced how I understand the transition from behavioral agency to strategic interactions and social norms.
- Friedrich Nietzsche’s refusal to see norms, communication and rationality as practices isolated from strategy and power obviously informs any genealogical account of human nature such as mine.
- Charles Sanders Peirce, like I said earlier, sees logical thought as the internalization of social practices, norms and communications.
- Finally, Carl Menger takes the rational actor that my own account seeks to compose – with a few important differences - as the conceptual starting point for the social sciences.
To repeat, these levels and the transitions between them not only characterize the compositional nature of conscious human action, but all conscious, deliberative action throughout the entire universe. Any metabolic organism that has also acquired a socially-normed, symbolic language necessarily falls, I want to suggest, within all 5 levels of analysis.
The central requirement of this compositional approach is a rejection of all metaphysical dualisms. Each and every level presupposes and practically depends upon all the levels beneath it for the simple reason that the higher levels are a concrete, causal organization of the lower levels. My genealogical synthesis, then, is based in the practical necessity of the causal world rather than the conceptual necessity of other, more rationalistic approaches.
My Darwinian approach thus insists that we build all these levels from the ground level up – which means that the bottom levels are not “chains” or “constraints” upon the higher levels, but are instead the life-lines or building blocks upon which the higher levels must be built if they are to avoid extinction. That said, I do not believe that there is one and only one “true” way of implementing any level. While every language-using community must have some normative, moral system or another, this does not entail that there must be one, true moral system towards which all systems tend or in terms of which all other systems can be measured. The entire point of the Darwinian foundation is that life itself is a developmental process of constrained diversification & divergence rather than one of universal convergence upon any ideal.
It is in this very Darwinian outlook that I most strongly depart from Peirce’s thought since I do not think that the universe of life “strives” to climb my genealogical pyramid. I instead hold that any species that finds itself at a higher level – however it happened to have gotten there - necessarily falls within and practically depends upon the lower levels as well. Thus, while a strict Darwinist would insist that all rational species must have – at some time or another - climbed my pyramid, my own approach wishes to sideline all such historical questions. Even if God did, in fact, create humans 6,000 years ago, the natural laws of the universe still necessitate that their concrete, rational actions in the here and now practically depend upon and are themselves a subset of the lower levels of my pyramid.
In conclusion, I know that this video has covered a lot of conceptual ground far too quickly – and don’t worry if some or most of it went by too fast. The entire point of future videos will be to slow down and elaborate upon these points. My goal in this video has only been to give you a rough, first-draft outline that will help you understand the conceptual baggage that I bring to the table.
So, I want to thank everybody for watching and be sure click the subscribe button below. If you want to leave a comment or read the transcript for this video, please follow the link in the description to my Steemit page. See you next discussion section!![