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@uh @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @dcm@social.sunet.se

Indeed this is a much longer chapter! I stopped at p. 73 for now.

I share your concern about the ontology here: Juarrero talks constantly about constraints 'doing' things, and even being a form of causality (though she doesn't say how). But her examples suggest that what she calls constraints are just ways of describing patterns that appear when certain entities interact with each other in specific organised ways. This impression is reinforced by the apparently circular treatment of context-dependent constraints on p.70: they are characterised by appeal to constrained interactions...

But then, rather than being something ontologically additional that does things, constraints are just ways of talking about features of such patterns, which are in their turn constituted by the familiar kinds of causal interactions between entities. So, nothing ontologically new, just, at most, new-ish alternative explanatory tools.

(This connects, I think, to the Deacon vs Heil discussion we had last week. Hat tip: @NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social, @awaisaftab@mastodon.social) (Also connected, perhaps, to the traditional criticisms of Dynamical Systems Theory, when applied to CogSci, in terms of it offering just redescriptions, rather than explanations)

Though I promised not to complain any more about the general obscurity and lack of rigour, I can't help myself. Juarrero talks about enabling constraints 'locking in' (??) information and energy flow to 'real-world traits/characteristics' (what others are there? what do such constraints do that has to do with real-world traits rather than... what exactly?). Then on p.71 she seems to give 3 non-equivalent characterisations of enabling constraints in the space of two paragraphs...

#JuarreroBook

@uh @dcm@social.sunet.se @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @MolemanPeter@bookwyrm.social

#JuarreroBook

Nice summary! What were your thoughts about the merits of the proposal?

As I mentioned earlier, I'm rather bothered by the rhetoric, unexplained jargon and lack of argumentation, which still persists in this chapter, which should not be introductory any more. Cases are briefly mentioned, e.g. major transitions in evolution, are then claimed to be examples of constraints operating, but no argument is provided to back those claims and little detail on what those constraints are is provided.

From what I could understand, the proposal seems to be the normal sort of complex system analysis of things, right? What does the chapter add to the tools of that sort of analysis?

I was also puzzled by the fact that she lists several scientific examples from several fields in which there is attention to constraints and dynamics. But I had thought that part of the motivation for the book is that science has neglected that kind of approach. Or is that criticism moved just against modern science (thus understood as the period roughly between XVIII-XIX)? Her points about space being seen as a passive container in modern science at the beginning of the chapter, followed in the end by some points about spacetime becoming a gravitational influence would suggest that reading (i.e. in XXth century science we stopped seeing space as a passive container).

If so, then I'm unclear on the dialectics: instead of being a radical revision of scientific ontology, it would rather be providing philosophical treatment of ontological views already operant in much of science.

What do you think?

@uh Thanks for this summary, @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org! I think this captures well the main message of this chapter, and apparently of the book in general.

The chapter also made clearer to me where her approach comes from, as she cites a few times in key points some of the mid-90's work that tried to apply dynamical systems theory tools to explaining cognition (like Kelso, other attempts included work in developmental psychology by Thelen and Smith - in philosophy this was taken up for example by van Gelder and some radical embodied cognition researchers). As far as I see, those attempts were mostly unsuccessful, failing to scale up from explaining simple things to more truly cognitive stuff (my view of this is though rather partial).

In general, I'm quite bothered by the style so far. This chapter, for example, is jargon-filled, and being at the beginning of the book, the jargon is not explained. I struggled to understand most of it. There was lots of rhetoric, which clashes with my view of what makes for good philosophical writing. Too much telling, too little showing. Hopefully this will change in future chapters (though I found ch.3 to be similarly disappointing).

@MolemanPeter@bookwyrm.social @dcm@social.sunet.se

#JuarreroBook

@uh @MolemanPeter @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @dcm@social.sunet.se

#JuarreroBook

Thanks for your thoughts Ulrike and Peter! I agree that those seem to be the aims of the book as stated in this chapter. However, I rather disliked this chapter. It provides a rather partial, oversimplified, and partly false historical reconstruction of many of the topics mentioned, making the dialectical setup rather unconvincing to me. In more detail: - the points about relations, interactions and context being seen as irrelevant or causally impotent fails to take into consideration the past 20 years or so of work on neo-mechanistic explanation, e.g. Bechtel, who tackle these things explicitly - similarly, the supposed mainstream consensus that cause and effect are purely a matter of energy-transferring processes does not exist. Currently (one of) the most influential theories of cause-effect is manipulationism (e.g. work by Woodward), in which energy-transfer plays no central role - it is not true that the consensus is that tokens of a kind differ only in secondary properties. Her own example of scorpions belonging to the same species denies this, as each scorpion differs from each other in many of their primary properties. There seems to be a conflation between primary properties and essential properties in her treatment. - saying in p.8 that the reason Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was controversial due just to its rejection of essence and immutability is a wild oversimplification - the whole depiction of reductionism is rather uncharitable, focusing exclusively on its crudest version, which pretty much no philosopher subscribes to today. Moreover, reductionism has been attacked and rejected by many philosophers of science already starting in the 70's, so it's very far from being anything like being the mainstream view - same for causation being only to be found at the level of quarks and electrons (actually, it's the opposite, it's difficult to make sense of causation at that level). Very few philosophers subscribe to this strong view. - there is a crude misinterpretation of the nature and motivations of Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness, oversimplifying the whole debate. - on p.17, she seems to imply that naturalistic accounts of mind are just a no-go in current philosophy. The opposite is the case. Since at least the 1950s very few are dualists, and from the 70s on there has been a flurry of work on how to naturalise the mind, with a rather broad consensus around some version of functionalism + teleosemantics today. - the ontological picture she claims to be mainstream in philosophy today, the desert landscape sort of approach, is anything but. Since the 70's philosophers have been claiming that ontology, natural kinds, etc., are legion and go much beyond the kinds posited in physics.

In brief, I found this first chapter very frustrating. Hopefully the positive view she wants to put forward will not suffer from the weakness of this first, mostly negative chapter.

What do you think?