“RELACIÓN LABORAL CARGA DE LA PRUEBA PARA LA PATRONAL CUANDO

The shifting interpretations of autopoiesis and sense-making reflect tensions within modern biology as a whole. André Ariew and Mark Perlman (2002) offer a general perspective on the topic, boiling the issue down to the following question: is there “a naturalistic, non-pragmatic way to sustain the distinction between how an item functions and the function of the item?” (2). Teleological explanations play a legitimate role in biology if there is a (potentially) meaningful difference between an item’s present and its actual functions. For those who answer in the affirmative, many use Darwinian natural selection as a grounding mechanism for functions. This is an attractive strategy in the philosophy of mind because it is thus possible to account for the nature of misrepresentations by branding it as possessing negative survival value (3). As touched upon in §2.2, Ruth Millikan’s concept of proper function has been the most influential attempt in this regard. Ariew and Perlman note the potential for Developmental Systems Theory to offer an alternative grounding, a potential that I articulate by using the enactivist framework discussed in the previous section in conjunction with Mark Bickhard’s interactive model of representation. To set the explanatory target for this alternative grounding of functions, I first examine Ariew’s (2002) discussion of Aristotelian teleology.

Ariew (2002) recognizes two basic types of teleology, both of which are present within Aristotelian philosophy. There is (i) agency-centered teleology and (ii) teleology pertaining to natural organisms (9). While both of these types are present within Aristotle, the former unlike

the latter is also found in Plato and so Ariew labels (i) Platonic and (ii) Aristotelian. Agency- centered teleology roots functions in an agent’s conscious intentions; when scaled to the level of the universe, nature appears as an artifact created by a very powerful agent (11). The second type of teleology, by contrast, corresponds to an inner principle of change within organisms. One form of this teleology corresponds to developmental processes that occur for the sake of an organism’s self-preservation. Ariew considers the example of a plant’s roots growing

downwards: a plant is not consciously aware that it is good for its roots to grow downwards but instead plants whose roots don’t grow downwards simply do not flourish (9). Rather than the product of conscious intention, the second type of teleology is immanent to organisms, activating potentialities specific to a species rather than a universal form. As a result, immanent teleology doesn’t imply striving for what is best; this telos only implies relative usefulness. So, for

example, just because a plant’s roots grow downwards does not mean the development is ideal; it is possible that a different root system would enable the plant to flourish even more (12). Hence, immanent teleology implies a gradation of norms (i.e., worse-to-better) rather than an all-or- nothing norm of best versus the rest. As discussed in the last section, with regard to sense- making, having graded norms is essential to accounting for learning. Ariew sticks to the more abstract notion of development in order to argue that Aristotle’s basic notion of immanent teleology is integral to contemporary biology.

Ariew claims that Darwin’s principle of natural selection presupposes immanent teleology. More specifically, natural selection presupposes organisms’ striving for self-

preservation, which corresponds to the graded norms of development (23). The basic issue is that “blind necessity” alone is insufficient to account for organismal development, adaptation, and the like (29). To bolster this reading, Ariew cites correspondence in which Darwin thanks Asa Gray

for his remark that evolution restores a role for teleology (23). Ariew’s larger argumentative strategy is to show that grounding biological functions by appealing to natural selection presupposes Aristotle’s immanent teleology. To evaluate this strategy, it is worth returning to Millikan’s account of proper functions.

Millikan (1984) introduced her concept of proper functions to account for what underpins judgments of defectiveness. Hence, the concept of proper function applies to anything about which it makes sense to talk of its dysfunction, whether mental representations, toasters, or hearts (Millikan 2002, 116). With regard to cognitive realism, it is important to be able to claim that instances in which a mind misrepresents external reality are dysfunctional cases. Millikan (1984) believes that this requires appealing to the principle of natural selection for two reasons. First, cognitive capacities are the products of evolution and they have survival value (93). Second, and more decisively, Millikan thinks that defectiveness presupposes a historical dimension as a basis for evaluating a given instance. The way something “should” function in this context refers to what has been selected for in an evolutionary lineage (94). There are various issues with this account, of which I will draw upon two objections from Robert Cummins’s since his objections will set up an alternative view of teleonomy.

Expressing a common sentiment, Cummins (2002) views neo-teleology derisively. He levels two major objections to Millikan’s general project. First and most fundamental, natural selection does not create functions but instead only shapes what is already present (163). But, given this criticism, it is possible to claim that identifying the function of a trait identifies the dimension of performance relevant to assessing its adaptiveness (167). Cummins discounts this line of reasoning on the grounds that it oversimplifies actual selection histories. An adaptation need not correspond to improving a function—perhaps the adaptation nets an increase in

efficiency or robustness or contributes to another function (168). The key point is that there is no direct correspondence between functions and adaptations. It is possible to read Cummins as indicating the need for supplementing Millikan’s position with immanent teleology (Ariew’s position) or as undermining any substantive notion of teleology. One influential articulation of this latter position is Colin Pittendrigh’s concept of teleonomy.

Pittendrigh (1958) coins the term teleonomy to discuss goal-directedness without implying that the goal is causally operant in its own realization.65

There have been many

explications of teleonomy. Ernst Mayr (1974) defines a teleonomic process as one controlled by a program, wherein a program is any coded information (101). Ernest Nagel (1977), by contrast, offers a systems-property account in order to isolate specific functional aspects of complex systems. Common to both approaches and various others is reducing teleology to a heuristic. For Mayr, functional ascriptions aid in identifying behavioral programs, while for Nagel they simply reduce to generic causal properties. For Mayr and Nagel, the aim is to identify the deterministic mechanisms that underpin an organism.66

Enactivism, however, shows that teleology is in fact a special form of causation, the recognition of which undermines the teleonomy view, offers an alternative account of defectiveness, and improves on Ariew’s formulation of immanent teleology.

Weber and Varela’s (2002) central insight was in recognizing the teleological

implications of operational closure. Pace Pittendrigh, operational closure identifies how “ends” play a role in circular causation without implying “backwards” causation. Di Paolo’s (2005) concept of adaptivity addresses Millikan’s question of defectiveness: dysfunction is whatever

65 _{Similarly, Ariew (2002, 7) notes that most theorists have dropped “teleology” in favor of “functions” simply} in order to avoid the metaphysical associations of the former term.

66 _{Teleonomy thus corresponds to the interpretation of Kantian purposiveness as an artifact of the limits of} human cognition, in which heuristics partially reveal the actual causal mechanisms.

moves an organism further away from its viability conditions. By thus relieving natural selection of the burden of grounding all functional norms, Ariew’s argumentative strategy appears

somewhat myopic. While Ariew is right that natural selection presupposes an immanent

teleology, the central issue concerns adequately accounting for the organism as a unitary locus of activity as opposed to a coincidence of forces. Providing such an account, as is enactivism’s goal, shows that intrinsic teleology is not merely derivative upon nor even solely geared towards

natural selection. This is the point at which enactivism parts ways with Ariew’s account. Ariew’s understanding of immanent teleology is at variance with enactivism regarding purposiveness and intentionality. In contrast to enactivism, Ariew claims that immanent

teleology is non-purposive and non-intentional, but this is because he considers purposiveness to imply conscious design and intentionality as implying representational aboutness. Last section’s discussion of sense-making showed the rudiments of how enactivism departs from these claims. This departure is important for it enables enactivism to avoid appealing to Aristotle’s notion of “species form,” which may be more tractable than universal forms yet is still deeply

problematic.67 _{To buttress enactivism’s conception of intentionality and purposiveness, I now}

turn to Bickhard’s interactive model of representation.

Bickhard’s (1996, 2000, 2002) interactive model of representation buttresses Di Paolo’s (2005) sketch of adaptivity and brings into focus the issues of perceptual salience and learning. Bickhard’s interactivist model complements enactivism, approaching many of the same issues from the context of psychology. Offering an alternative account of representation is central to reconceptualizing intentionality, as evidenced by Bickhard’s (1996) shifting the question of representation from the usual one of content to the act of representing itself. Representational

content is a product of a system’s functional usage of a perceptual signal and thereby derivative upon the act of representing.

Representations, first and foremost, serve to differentiate between different interactive contacts. Bickhard (1996) writes, “differing environments may leave that (sub)system [whatever initiates the interaction] in differing final internal states or conditions when the interaction is ‘completed.’ Such possible internal final states, then, will serve to differentiate possible environments” (60; original emphasis). The term differentiation expresses the semantic

opaqueness between environment and interacting system. The final state reached does not bear informational content from environment to organism. Instead, the only information that

perceptual differentiators contain about the environment is that it caused the given final state to be reached; the internal state thereby only implicitly defines the environment (61).

Differentiation and implicit definition are the two foundations of interactive representation. The concept of implicit definition dovetails with enactivist adaptivity. An organism does not need to represent its environment as such but rather only what has a differential effect on its viability state. Thus, built directly into implicit definition is perceptual salience—the organism only perceives what is of differential significance. Because this account of salience treats the act of representing as a primitive, it presupposes goal-directedness. Bickhard’s interactive model clarifies the nature of primitive goal-directedness, showing that it is itself non-representational. Rather than representations, at the most primitive level, goals are functional switches with a success result (e.g., further processing/anticipation of another interaction) and a failure result (e.g., a trial and error interactive process) (62). To illustrate the difference Bickhard reinterprets one of Fodor’s (1990) examples concerning frogs. For it to eat, a frog does not represent, say, a fly or a worm. Instead, the fly and worm appear as two potential types of interaction: “tongue-

flick-at-a-point” and “tongue-flick-between-two-points,” respectively (64; original emphasis). The frog thus anticipates specific kinds of eating opportunities, the salient issue being how to flick the tongue rather than what the tongue flicks at.

Representation (as implicit definition) is inherently opaque or coarse-grained, though capable of becoming more fine-grained with increasing interactive sophistication. Frogs flick their tongues rather indiscriminately; fortunately, they live in a world where many of those flicking opportunities bear edible fruit. If massive numbers of teenagers or philosophers took it upon themselves to shoot BBs across their fronts, this would change the frogs’ world

dramatically. Perhaps frogs would become able to discriminate between metal projectiles and buzzing things, maybe their diet would shift more towards crawling things, or maybe they would die off. Regardless of this (thankfully) hypothetical situation, the key point is that what the frog represents is inextricable from its interactive world because its representations are the product of its actual interactions. Ingestion of metal spheres would constitute error and could trigger

learning new behavioral patterns, but for the vast majority of frogs who have been spared the machinations of philosophers of mind, BBs don’t count as errors. Bickhard’s rendition of the frog example thus illustrates how implicit definition entails error-guided learning.

For the interactivist model, misrepresentation is no longer an aberrant phenomenon in need of explanation. Misrepresentation is inherent to implicit definition and is the basis for detecting and then learning from error. There’s a profound sense in which you can’t be right without having first been wrong. Error prompts refining one’s interactions and implicit definitions; but refining implicit definitions does not make them bearers of external content. They are still subordinate to the self-maintenant network of which they are a part and whose self- identity is the motivating constraint from which the anticipatory interaction issues. Fitch (2008)

highlights the serial nature of such learning and an attendant need for tagging, a proposal that I buttress in Ch. 4 by further articulating Bickhard’s (2002) levels of knowing model. But for now, in preparation for discussing enactivism’s specifically social implications, it is enough to clarify why the individual as a self-maintenant locus of activity does not entail egoism. Towards this end, Searle’s account of intrinsic normativity serves as a useful contrast.

Searle’s (1990, 1995) account of intrinsic normativity ties together the issues of adaptationism, egoism, and intentionality discussed in this section. His identification of

intentionality with representational aboutness implies that individuals have a more determinate relationship to the world than is actually the case. This, in turn, dovetails with viewing

individuals as motivated by egoistic self-interest: an individual’s desire appears in terms of what thing(s) she wants to acquire from the world. The world is comparable to a shopping list.68

The essential difference between egoism and enactivist self-maintenance is that, in the former case, the default position is a static individual as opposed to the continuous interactive coping of the latter. From the position of stasis, according to egoism, the individual chooses to interact with her environment. This creates the false problematic that Searle’s we-intentions aim to solve: we- intentions are meant to flip the switch from the isolated self to self “as member of a community.”

Searle’s normativity thus lacks the gradation essential to any learning process: someone has committed to a we-intention or they haven’t. In place of a first-personal learning process, the broad stroke of natural selection is meant to ensure that those for whom we-intentions do not flip on are selected against. Furthermore, making the we-intention commitment tacit and then trying to cash it out in terms of stronger and weaker only has the regrettable consequence of turning

68 _{As in much else, Jerry Fodor is instructive: “What philosophers call ‘linguistic deference’ is actually the use} of experts as instruments….Epistemology…is mostly about money; e.g., about what I’m prepared to pay to

insure that one or other of my beliefs is true” (1995, 36-37). I take Fodor’s position as a reductio of much of epistemology.

normativity into an ethereal mystery rather than an integral part of a learning process. It is this latter depiction of the social that De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s concept of participatory sense- making offers.

In the present section, I have addressed two apparent tensions between my commitment to enactivism and my previous critiques of adaptationism and Searle’s intrinsic normativity. In doing so, I situated enactivism’s intrinsic teleology within the larger context of the philosophy of science and buttressed Di Paolo’s (2005) sketch of adaptivity with Bickhard’s interactive model of representation. The opaqueness of goal-directedness, as conceived by implicit definition, together with sense-making’s emphasis on regulated movement opens up new ways for examining social interaction.