Re: Whitehead on Deduction

[Ted Winslow <winslow@xxxxxxxx>]

 John wrote:

> Such reconciliation as there can ever be between scientific determinism and
> philosophical constructs such as free will was performed by Monod in Chance
> and Necessity.  Dawkin's Selfish Gene reflects and illustrates this: given
> that some biological endowments are more favourable to phenotypic survival
> than others the gene combinations associated with such biological endowments
> will also survive.  Monod drew up the limits within which environment could
> alter the outcome for individual phenotypes and beyond which genetic change
> was needed.

How does this demonstrate that the passages from Wilson to which I pointed
are not self-contradictory?

The following passage from Monod is self-contradictory in the same way.  It
offers a determinist explanation of ideas, i.e. an explanation which
excludes any role for self-determination in the determination of ideas.
Monod implicitly assumes, however, that his own ideas about ideas are
self-determined and that the ideas of others (those he is attempting to
persuade) are also open to self-determination.  Scientists attempting to use
reason to persuade others to believe that ideas are not determined by reason
"make an interesting subject for study" (as do "scientists motivated by the
purpose of demonstrating there is no purpose in the universe").

"For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of
ideas and that of the biosphere. For while the abstract kingdom stands at a
yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the
nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms.
Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too
can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve,
and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. I shall
not hazard a theory of the selection of ideas. But one may at least try to
define some of the principal factors involved in it. This selection must
necessarily operate at two levels: that of the mind itself and that of
performance.
    "The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to
the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon
which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and
greater selfconfidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand
which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to 'take,'
the extent to which it can be 'put over' has little to do with the amount of
objective truth the idea may contain. The important thing about the stout
armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes
into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it
gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from
its power to perform.
    "The 'spreading power'--the infectivity, as it were--of ideas is much
more difficult to analyze. Let us say that it depends upon preexisting
structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but
also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to
identify. What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest
invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in
an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves."

Best,

Ted
--
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