William Morse  wrote:

> john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
> news:cbnls7$2os1$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 
> 
> > Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
> 
> >> I strongly disagree.  This is an issue of appropriate levels of
> >> explanation.  Thermodynamics has been successfully reduced to
> >> statistical mechanics, but engineers still talk and think in
> >> terms of heat flow.  They certainly don't talk about the propagation
> >> of random molecular motion, even though they know that that is
> >> what is really going on.
>  
> > That is not a supererogatory concept. There is a direct reduction of
> > talk at one level to talk at another. But if they talked about what
> > heat "wanted" to do, and it led them to ascribe
misleading properties
> > to heat ("it's a Saturday, so it's less likely to do useful work, as
> > it's tired") would you then think it so harmless? And lest ye think
> > this frivolous, I have heard people say similar things about
> > computers. Not experts, of course, unless they were joking or
> > "explaining" to the laity, but even so...
> 
> 
> 
> Now if they made the same "Saturday" statement with regard to a human,
> would you agree? I assume from the way you phrased your example that you
> would  How about if they made the same statement with regard to a 
> chimpanzee, would you then agree with it? If they made the same statement
> with regard to a dog, would you agree? If they made the same statement
> with regard to a mouse, would you agree? If they made the same statement
> with regard to an ant, would you agree? Just exactly when would you 
> disagree? How stupid does a person have to be, before they become a 
> machine? How stupid does a machine have to be, before it becomes
"heat".
> No I don't think this is frivolous, but I don't see where you have 
> provided any basis to differentiate heat and humans with regard to their
> "intentions". 

This is a slippery slope argument, also known as a Sorites. It is a
classical defence of the idea that concepts must be precise and without
vagueness if it has some restricted meaning, but I am reminded of
(Johnson's?) comment that light and dark are not delimitable exactly but
that they are, on the whole, tolerably well defined.

There is a paradigmatic case in which it makes sense to apply
"intention", and there are a host of paradigmatic cases in which it does
not. The murderer who acted calmly and in full knowledge of his actions
and their repercussions is a paradigm of intentionality. The rock that
fell off a cliff due to merely physical forces and processes, thereby
killing an innocent, is not. Somewhere in the middle there, you need to
draw an arbitrary line, but that does not mean that there is no
objective distinction to be made.

The pointto be made is that words get their meaning from the ways they
are used exemplarily. We point to our cold-blooded killer, or our
aircraft engineer, and say they did what they did intentionally. We
recognise that the falling rock had no intentions. Where shall we draw
that fuzzy border?

The old approach deriving from Aristotle was to have an essential set of
conditions - necessary and sufficient. This caused enormous problems in
biology for reasons we now understand (biological processes are
populational). It turns out the same is also true of social concepts.
What we must do instead is try to use a kind of "nearest neighbour"
analysis and find out where the clumps are and where the intervening
connections are sparse.

So "intentional" has a paradigm (this is the correct sense of that word,
by the way; Kuhn's use was... rarified to say the least). We can look at
chimps and find sufficient similarities to say they, too, have this
ability to form intentions, although there are aspects of human
intentionality they do not have. As phylogenetic distance increases, the
similarity drops, although there may be homoplasious instances in other
lineages (cetaceans, crows, parrots). When you get to the point of
considering processes in which no exemplary conditions are even faintly
met, like natural selection on fungi, you are not entitled to apply the
term "intention" or any of its cognates in more than a purely
metaphorical sense.

Since this is true of NS when there are no intentions, it is by
extension true *of natural selection* when it applies to intentional
systems. Natural selection considered as a dynamic or process, is not
intentional. To think otherwise is anthropomorphism.
> 
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Bill Morse
>  


-- 
Dr John Wilkins
john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au   http://wilkins.id.au
"Men mark it when they hit, but do not mark it when they miss" 
                                               - Francis Bacon
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