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The conversation, well facilitated by Lisa on Dennett and Elise on Johnson, took off from some passages from the end of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (pp 170-173). Speaking of his portrayal of science, Kuhn notes

nothing that has been said or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything .... We are all deeply accustomed to seeing scince as the one enterprise that draws constantly nearer to some goal set by nature in advance. But need there be such a goal? ... If we can learn to substitute evolution-from-what-we-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process ... The analogy that relates the evolution of organisms to the evolution of scientific ideas can easily be pushed too far. But with respect to this closing section it is very nearly perfect. The process described (earlier) as the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science. The net result ... is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge. And the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth ...

Can there be "progress" in the absence of a goal or target? an animator/motivator without a goal. Might we think of science as "'getting it less wrong' and forget all the other talk"?

Dennett's portrayal of biological evolution as the ongoing result of "mindless, motiveless mechanisms" based in random change suggests the possibility that we might consider yes answers to both questions. At the same time, it sharpens some questions needing better answers. Among them is "who created natural selection"? (parallel to "who created God?"). Along these lines, it was suggested that the "selection" part of "natural selection" was misleading. One might better speak of biological evolution in terms of "differential persistance." There is no "selector" but only variations in persistance of different life forms.

A second important question is whether accounting for things in terms of randomness and differential persistance is "refutable" in the Popperian sense. It was agreed that it isn't, just as a "non-interventionist" God is not "refutable". Does this mean that evolution (and God) should be regarded as "non-scientific"? An alternative is to acknowledge a fundamental role in science for things which are non-refutable things and may be "incommensurable" (for now? for ever?).

A third important question was the absence of "intention" in Dennett's description of biological evolution. Is he missing something? Could perhaps "intention" be integrated into the picture, not as something always present, or present at the beginning, but something that itself evolves, relatively late in the process, and in turn becomes significant?

The notion of "emergence" broadens the discussion of "mindless differential persistance" beyond the realm of biological evolution to include other phenomena, both physical and social. The idea of accounting for things in a "bottom up" fashion makes it possible to make sense of the world without presuming, as we often do, either a "designer" or a "conductor". And allows for the possibility, indeed the likelihood that two (or more) "incommensurable") responses to the same challenge will "bubble up". At the same time, successful simulations of emergence don't show that a designer/conductor doesn't exist but only that it needn't. And we still have the issues raised in the discussion of biological evolution. For some additional relevant discussion of emergence in a different venue see Irreducibility without dualism: chaos or indeterminacy.

Our issues for next week

1. Can science be understood without "logical refutability"?
2. Is science simply fashion?
3. Can we reinstate "intentionality" in some useful way?