Abstract
In this paper I propose a type-hierarchy approach to provide an intersubjective framework for the evaluation of evolutionary analogies. This approach develops David Hull’s and others’ attempts to provide full generalisation for selection processes, in order to show that sociocultural development and, particularly, scientific change can be considered as an instance of Darwinian selection. I argue that the recent work by Eileen Cornell Way on type hierarchies can offer the kind of generalisation needed to solve the main problems that still affect Hull’s theory and to show that the evolutionary analogy is, after all, only a particular way of grouping phenomena together. If Hull’s main objective is a unified theory of selection, which supports the idea that science selection and natural selection obey the same laws, I also argue that the type hierarchy approach to models shows that this objective is unsustainable as it stands, and is in need of further development. I will firstly introduce the general outline of the type hierarchy approach to models. Then, after a brief recapitulation of Hull’s main points and difficulties, I will try and construct a hierarchy for a general abstraction of selection processes. Finally I will introduce the main criticisms that Hull’s work has faced from philosophers and scientists, and show how they compare with my proposal.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Mention should also be made of the Austro-German School of Evolutionary Epistemology, which has its origins in a paper published in 1941 by Lorenz, “Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology”. This is an attempt to interpret Kantian transcendalism along biological lines (similar points had also been made by philosophers and scientists such as Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare). Lorenz’s paper remained mostly unknown and his later book ‘Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens’ (reprinted as ‘Behind the mirror’, 1977) raised little interest among philosophers, especially in English-speaking countries.
I will always use the expression ‘evolutionary analogy’ to refer, in the remaining, to the EET stance.
Lorenz is important for his biological interpretation of Kantian a priori. He maintais that these forms of perception are a priori for the single individual, but they are philogenetically a posteriori (Lorenz 1982).
Popper is also famous for his arguments in defence of an EET programme.
In a simile the similarities involved in the comparison are clearly defined and terms such as ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘not unlike’ are present in the statement of the comparison.
For instance by Kuhn (1970).
See Callanan (2008) for a clear analysis of the inductive power of analogical arguments in Kant.
My addition, in this quotation, reveals an instance of the sporadic lack of tightness in the language of Aronson et al. This, however, does not affect the merit of their arguments.
See also of Sowa (1984, Sect. 3.2) for some more formal definitions.
The term ‘set’, here, has been used in the general sense of ‘group’ and not in the specific sense of set theory.
Insights into the subtype-supertype relation in a TH could be captured, according to Way (1994: 191–194), by the five conditions of Searle’s relation determinate-determinable with the addition of a sixth condition of inheritance.
The distinction is explained by Sowa with the following example: “To say that the intersection of the set δCAT with the set δDOG is empty simply means that at the moment no individual happens to be both a dog and a cat (Sowa 1984: 82). A biologist might examine litters of puppies and kittens looking for an exception. But to say that [the types DOG and CAT are disjoint] means that it is logically impossible for an entity to be both a dog and a cat. Any mutant that might arise could not falsify the statement; it would just force the biologist to invent a new type” (Idem).
There is a problem in the way the nodes are originally labelled in these diagrams by Way. For example, it can be argued that ‘satellite’ is not an instance of ‘harmonic motion’. Analogously ‘central force’ is not a kind of ‘complex physical object’, hence my slightly modified labelling.
‘Nucleus’, in this simplification, is considered to be as simple as ‘electron’.
This font will be used to refer to labels of nodes in the diagrams.
And on the particular perspective adopted by the type hierarchy. For instance, this example shows that a system of racing cars and a system of planets are very different if we use a type hierarchy describing dynamic systems. If we adopted a purely cinematic point of view, however, the corresponding type hierarchy would bring the systems close together.
This may seem quite subjective. ‘We’, however, is in most cases referring to the scientific community or communities which have been exploring that chunk of the world. They carry, then, the same amount of subjectivity as can be attributed to scientific theories.
Hull acknowledges that these distinctions are not entirely new. Dawkins introduced the distinction ‘replicator’/‘vehicle’ in 1976 but Hull improves the second concept into his own ‘interactor’.
It could be argued that Hull’s defence is different from the statement of his theory. I believe, however, that his defence is just revealing the procedure he followed to elaborate his theory, which is the one of the comparison view and which results in a very slim hierarchy.
This level, of course, is very general and these are extreme examples only given for illustration purposes. What I mean, here, is that in our search for generalisations of processes the details need to be really forgotten, in order to lose any bias deriving from the particular examples we have in mind. Clear evidence of this risk is, for instance, the fact that most people believe that evolution only happens by natural selection, forgetting genetic drift. This mistake occurs because they do not think of the general concept of evolution, but what they have in mind is the more specific ‘Darwinian evolution by natural selection’. Only later will more detail be needed to populate those regions of the hierarchy where our task will require more precision.
Although they do not use the more detailed treatment that Hull offers in his book, which was not published until shortly after their paper.
I believe that, in a complete characterisation of selection processes, reproduction or its abstraction (replication) is needed to make a selective process evolutionary. This will be explained more fully later.
For example continuous or discrete.
The term ‘selection’ in the lower nodes has been left for clarity reasons and historical continuity. It does not imply that selection, in those nodes, has a prominent role.
Another problem could be identified in my labelling of the remaining upper nodes because, for example, ‘differential selection’ is not a type of ‘replication’. However, differential selection is a type of ‘replication process’, in the sense that it involves replication. The entities represented are processes anyway and better labels would be very repetitive. I prefer to leave out this terminological issue from my diagrams.
Although these instances could be linked directly to the node ‘selection’, because the node ‘mechanical’ inherits its properties but does not add any new ones, I found it more clear to group these processes together in a subnode.
It could be objected, for example, that sorting coins from a pocket is not mechanical in the way gravitational or natural sieve actions are, because it involves intention. At this level of granularity, however, in which only the physical properties of the selected objects are counted, intention is not explicitly represented and it does not differentiate ‘coin sorting’ from the other two nodes. It will appear in a more refined version of this diagram, offered in one of the next pages.
I cannot see any relevant ‘replication in cyclic character of the orbits within the rings’, as Catania claims.
Because of perturbations, the particles keep changing orbit and the space of variation is not discrete.
Particles tend to stabilise into orbits which reinforce each other or get expelled to outer space.
As defined in this instantiation.
Analogously to what has been already pointed out in the case of the term ‘selection’, although ‘evolution’ brings to mind the biological process usually driven by NS, it is worth stating again that here it is used in the more general sense of ‘gradual change’ of something which conserves its identity. After all, physicists talk about the ‘evolution’ of states of a system, meteorologists discuss the ‘evolution’ of atmospheric phenomena and so on.
Again, ‘intention’ should be read as ‘intentional process’ and analogously for the remaining labels.
Most of these features have already been implemented separately in different systems. I am not aware of any system currently integrating all of them.
Darden and Cain (1989: 111) think that ‘as long as preexisting diversity exists, the details of the mechanism of its production can be omitted from a selection type theory’. I see this judgment as a consequence of the reduced role of replication in their analysis.
(Futuyma 1998: 304) Genetic drift is strictly related to the subdivision of species into local breeding units which exchange genes to a greater or lesser degree.
Although there might be, as in the case of processes which inherit from both sociocultural selection and Darwinian selection.
It possible, of course, to conceive unintentional or quasi-unintentional selection or variation in sociocultural processes, for example in the form of transcription errors or unexpected consequences of intentional actions. I regard these as exceptions that need further analysis, impossible to carry out in the limited space of this paper, which would not alter the main points of my argument.
In the UK.
However, there is disagreement about what these ways are. See Shapere (2000) for a short survey.
Although this is a controversial topic, the predominant view is that science progresses by getting closer to truth, by becoming simpler, more explanatory or less erroneous. I cannot treat this topic more fully in this paper but I will assume the progressive nature of science in a general sense, which is based on the postulated regularity of nature.
It could be argued that scientific theories compete with one another in some sense, as animals do. However, while in the distinction, for example, between one organism and selecting environment it is possible to merge the rest of the organisms with the rest of the environment under the same type ‘selecting environment’, an analogous operation is not possible in the trichotomy theory/rest of theories/natural laws.
Campbell stresses the need to shift away from biological parallelisms but also that ‘a selection theory for conceptual evolution in successful science will have to be a sociology of science’ (Campbell 1987: 177).
It is worth stressing that arbitrariness is not removed, only one of its layers is; this is the layer where similarities and dissimilarities are decided and weighted.
This justifies the criterion as necessary. If we add that the chosen ontology is detailed enough for our aim, this justifies the criterion as sufficient.
For instance, the collapse of the node Directed variation in the diagram in Fig. 5 entails its removal and linking both Sociocultural selection and Cyber selection directly to Intention and Evolution .
This is correct, of course, if we agree that sociological analysis alone, without reference to reality cannot provide full accounts of scientific phenomena and its products. The debate on this and related issues is long-standing and still ongoing but here I can only state my position without any additional justification than those exposed elsewhere in this paper. On this topic see also Note 45 above.
Here ‘Darwinism’ means ‘evolution by Darwinian selection’.
References
Aronson, J. L., Harré, R., & Way, E. C. (1994). Realism rescued. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Black, M. (1962). Models and metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bradie, M. (1986). Assessing evolutionary epistemology. Biology and Philosophy, 1, 401–459.
Bradie, M. (1997). Without miracles: Universal selection theory and the second Darwinian revolution. Philosophical Psychology, 19(3), 399–402.
Cain, J. A., & Darden, L. (1988). Hull and selection. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 165–171.
Callanan, J. J. (2008). Kant on analogy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 16(4), 747–772.
Campbell, D. T. (1987). Blind Variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. In G. Radnitzky & W. W. Bartley III (Eds.), Evolutionary epistemology, rationality, and the sociology of knowledge. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Catania, A. C. (2001). Selection as a cause versus the causes of selection. In Hull et al. (Eds.), Open peer commentary (p. 533).
Cziko, G. (1995). Without miracles. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Darden, L., & Cain, J. A. (1989). Selection type theories. Philosophy of Science, 56, 106–129.
Dennett, D. C. (1979). Brainstorms: Philosophical essays on mind and psychology. Hassocks: Harvester Press.
Futuyma, D. J. (1998). Evolutionary biology. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
Hahlweg, K. (1986). Popper versus Lorenz: An exploration into the nature of evolutionary epistemology. PSA, 1, 172–182.
Henson, P. M. (1988). A short note on Hull’s “a mechanism and its metaphysics: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science”. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 192–193.
Hesse, M. B. (1966). Models and analogies in science. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Hull, D. L. (1988a). A mechanism and its metaphysics: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 123–155.
Hull, D. L. (1988b). A period of development: A response. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 241–263.
Hull, D. L. (1988c). Science as a process. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hull, D. L. (2006). The essence of scientific theories. Biological Theory, 1(1), 17–19.
Hull, D. L., Langman, E. R., & Glenn, S. S. (2001). A general account of selection: Biology, immunology and behavior. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 511–573.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lorenz, K. (1977). Behind the mirror: A search for a natural history of human knowledge. London: Methuen.
Lorenz, K. (1982). Kant’s Doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology. In Plotkin.
Losee, J. (1998). Philosophy of science and the theory of natural selection. In Proceedings of the 20th WCP, ΠΑΙΔΕΙΑ Project Online available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieLose.htm.
Montuschi, E. (2000). Metaphor in science. In W. H. Newton-Smith (Ed.), A companion to philosophy of science (pp. 277–282). Oxford: Blackwell.
Plotkin, H. C. (1982). Learning, development and culture. London: Wiley.
Popper, K. R. (1984). Evolutionary epistemology. In J. W. Pollard (Ed.), Evolutionary theory: Paths into the future. Wiley: Chichester.
Ruse, M. (1989). Great expectations. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 64, 463–468.
Shapere, D. (2000). Scientific change. In W. H. Newton-Smith (Ed.), A companion to philosophy of science (pp. 413–422). Oxford: Blackwell.
Skipper, R. A., Jr. (1999). Selection and the extent of explanatory unification. Philosophy of Science, 61(Proceedings), S196–S209.
Soanes, C., & Stevenson, A. (2005). Oxford dictionary of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sowa, J. F. (1984). Conceptual structures. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Thagard, P. (1993). Computational philosophy of science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Toulmin, S. (1961). Foresight and understanding. London: Hutchinson.
Way, E. C. (1994). Knowledge representation and metaphor. Oxford: Intellect Books.
Wuketits, F. M. (1990). Evolutionary epistemology and its implications for humankind. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Renzi, B.G. A Type Hierarchy of Selection Processes for the Evaluation of Evolutionary Analogies. J Gen Philos Sci 40, 311–336 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-009-9099-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-009-9099-8