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From: Hans-Cees Speel <hanss@zondisk.sepa.tudelft.nl>
Organization: TU Delft
To: Bruce Edmonds pcp <b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 11:14:30 +0000
Subject: "rosen and evolution
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some further questions...
> Don also writes:
> >"He[Rosen] points out that biologists have always wanted to both
> >have their cake and to eat it too. They play at "hard" science and
> >mechanistic/reductionism as if it were perfectly adequate for
> >dealing with the "livingness" of living systems and then when it
> >fails they have "evolution" to fall back on. Much of what is
> >unentailed by their> mechanistic
> >models gets entailed by "evolution". He also makes a clear
> >distinction between the physiology of an organism and the
> >"fabrication" of and organism. Here's a real stepping off point for
> >future work!"
>
> Help me understand this difference from Rosen's point of view. How
> something 'works' vs. how it 'came to be' seems a simple
> distinction. But are mechanisms not organisms because they do not
> have a closed self-entailment like organisms? Or is self-entailment
> (organismic reproduction) what Rosen means by closed efficient
> causation?
I also had problems with Rosens views on this point. I think
self-entailment [being your own efficient cause] entails
reproduction, and thus a little piece of what we call evolution. I
did not quit understand what he meant by unentailed evolution.
Hans-Cees
Theories come and go, the frog stays [F. Jacob]
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