CHAPTER 5

QUINE AND THE DRAWING OF INFERENCES

Let us begin this chapter with help from Alfred North Whitehead who stated that: “… it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising [our] modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its healthy niche as essential to the healthy progress of society … [through] the critique of abstractions. A civilization [that] cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited burst of progress … “ (1967) Here we shall suspend consideration of what Whitehead might have meant by the term “modes”, but still move forward with the remainder of his claim. It is not difficult to find what he has to say somewhat worrying, especially in light of the purpose of this book. That is, how do we critically revise our “modes of abstraction” so as to avoid sterility (and its presumed consequences of non-existence)? And let us immediately focus on Willard Van Orman Quine (1969), who pithily observed that “(c)reatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind”. Whitehead and Quine can here be juxtaposed to suggest that how we draw inductions — wrong or otherwise — may be connected to our ability to revise our abstractions. What are Whitehead and Quine saying? We now seriously consider and explore what they might mean. Here I will explore how a tendency to be inductively wrong, or at least inductively inadequate, might be connected a lack of critical thought and thus to denial of philosophy. In conducting this exploration, I will take defensible liberties with Quine’s observation by generalizing, for example, from inductions that are wrong to inductions that never happen because they are denied, and what this might mean with regard to the tasks of epistemic clarification. To explore how Quine’s claim is interesting, useful and illuminating in consideration of the above, let us begin by reflecting on the following: just what would his doomed creatures be like, what characteristics of their contexts would have brought them to the point that Quine contemplates, and what would spell their doom? What characteristics would they have — or, perhaps more importantly, not have? Pollack (1991) or Kauffman (2005) might suggest that their ability to move to new coordinates in their state space is limited — that is, within whatever parameters of behaviour, genetics, physical structure, and even cognition provide compass for what they do and what they are, they do not possess any meaningful, helpful or useful “pre-adaptive capacity”. At this point we have ventured into the first 350 words or so of this fifth chapter, and already we must be cautious. “Pre-adaptive capacity” — what might that be?

53 CHAPTER 5

This term is dense and somewhat woolly, laden with multiple shadowy concepts, potential significance, and, I think, containing dangerously conflated meanings. However, the general concept is interesting as it suggests system conditions that given their dynamics and characteristics provide a narrowed range of possible outcomes, and this might be interpreted as a species of determinism; and, the term has both functional significance and conceptual relevance to (and its origins in) evolutionary biology and in chemistry (Law et al, 2009; Corey, 1990). But, taken generally, the term suggests some of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to learn and adapt within, and to navigate through and achieve adaptive advantage, especially through multiple generations, in a larger context or environment that itself may be presenting challenges and change. Let us reduce the degree of conflation and explicate the term at least in part by suggesting that Quine’s “pitiful” creatures — agents in that changing environment — are lacking any strong capacity to learn from their experiences and thereby adapt to their evolving context. They may have excellent memories of accumulated experience and superbly refined senses for perceiving what goes on around them that provide input for their infallible memories (or, alternatively, we can hold the possibility that they may have neither); but, regardless, learning and adaptation are not central to their repertoire, if they can be considered to be in their repertoire at all, or if they can be considered to even posses a repertoire. To tease apart what this means, we must explicate some important aspects of what are thought to be pre-adaptation’s constituent parts, of which there are at least two that are arguably critical. First, in order to have potential capacity for learning, it would be difficult to think of our Quineian creatures as being “of a piece”, to be uniform throughout, something like a block of homogenous cheese or pure silver. Instead, they would have constituent differentiated parts, “building blocks” if you like, that when taken together comprise their “creature-ness” (let us be generous with Quine’s terminology and here envision eyes, arms, and legs, for example; a nervous system to coordinate it all and perhaps specialized sectors of a brain specifically related to those parts; organs and their systems; and, for sake of argument, all the genetic bits that make put all those pieces together and ensure that they all work together). But most importantly, even with such a configuration, they would not have much if any ability to utilize those blocks to assemble some novel capacity capable of bestowing advantage from modification of the connections among those constituent blocks. Although they might accumulate a lifetime’s worth of clear and very accurate memories — envisioned perhaps as watching a highly detailed video screen of life from beginning to end, but with no way of interacting with the “outside” where events actually do take place — they would have little or no capacity to build from or upon what is remembered (conversely, and quite obviously, if their memories were not quite so good, they would have little to remember, no matter what). They could utilize their “blocks” to do the things that would be determined by their “initial condition” configuration (that is, they could run an equivalent of an activity program — an algorithm — based

54