When A causes B, and B causes C, where the kind of causation at issue is nomological, then there need not be a teleological explanation of the occurrence of B at all. It's only in the case of functionally organized systems (such as a functional artifact, like a computer, or a living organism) that we can say that a state B will occur with the purpose of realizing C (or realizing a final state C that instantiates the relevant aim of the system.) And in that case, on my view, it's not relevant whether the material realization basis of the system is governed by deterministic or indeterministic laws. The initial occurrence of A might explain the occurrence of B, specifically, owing to laws of nature that such sequences of events can be subsumed under. But what it is that explains that whatever physical state B the system happens to be caused to instantiate would be such as to subsequently lead to a state C that instantiates the relevant goal is the specific functional organization of the system, and such a teleological explanation is valid and informative regardless of the deterministic nature of the laws that govern the particular A -> B -> C sequence of events.

So, although the teleological explanation doesn't guarantee that C rather than C' or C'' (etc.) will occur, it explains why it is that whichever final state is realized will (likely) be such as to non accidentally realize the general aim of the functionally organized system.

what it is that explains that whatever physical state B the system happens to be caused to instantiate would be such as to subsequently lead to a state C that instantiates the relevant goal is the specific functional organization of the system — Pierre-Normand

Yes, very good. The indeterminacy doesn't carry over to the functional level, so to speak, where all As and Bs and Cs have the same function relative to that system.

What said. Also, consider that the paradigmatic cases of teleological explanations are those where human (or animal) agency is involved, and these are extremely common. For example,

Q: Why did Alice go out?
A: To buy bread.
Q: Why is the overpass being constructed?
A: To relieve traffic congestion.

We make up these explanations, regardless of how certain the outcomes are. Alice may or may not buy bread. The overpass may or may not be completed. That does not in any way change the fact that the actions were goal-oriented in the first place. Of course, in a world in which the future is so wide-open that any fixed outcome is extremely unlikely teleology would not be possible, so you have a point there. But fortunately, our world is not like that. A lot of things are fairly predictable, and so we set goals with a reasonable expectation of achieving them.

When we think about time progressing as a sequence of events — say, A → B → C — it’s tempting to seek explanations for why things happen the way they do. — tom111

No naturally occurring sequence of events happens this way and only the extremely simplest artificial ones do, e.g. billiard balls. Nothing real is ever caused by just one thing and nothing ever has only a single effect.

As for teleology, how does that fit into this at all? It seems like it is a complete non sequitur. Are you saying that something in the future reaches back and causes something in the past? As I see it, the only way to make teleology plausible is to assume there is a God.

Are you saying that something in the future reaches back and causes something in the past? — T Clark

That's not what teleology is.

As I see it, the only way to make teleology plausible is to assume there is a God. — T Clark

This is a non sequitur, even to your own caricature of teleology.

As for teleology, how does that fit into this at all? It seems like it is a complete non sequitur. Are you saying that something in the future reaches back and causes something in the past? As I see it, the only way to make teleology plausible is to assume there is a God. — T Clark

Proponents of naturalized teleology have something less contentious in mind. See for instance the two SEP entries about teleological notions in biology or in theories of mental content. @SophistiCat provided two neat examples. When one provides a teleological explanation of an event or phenomenon, it's not an event in the future that is claimed to be the cause. Not even Aristotle really was claiming this when he distinguished final causes from efficient, material and formal ones, since his notion of αἰτία that we now translate as "cause" was referring to the "why" or explanation of something. It's rather the identification of the aim to be realized in the future that is provided as the explanation of a natural phenomenon, behavior or rational action.

Of course, some thinkers like Ernst Mayr have resisted the introduction of teleological notions in science. But the fault line seems to be between reductionism and strong (nomologically irreducible) emergentism rather than between naturalism and supernaturalism (or natural theology).

That's not what teleology is. — SophistiCat

This is what Wikipedia says about teleology:

Teleology (from τέλος, telos, 'end', 'aim', or 'goal', and λόγος, logos, 'explanation' or 'reason') or finality is a branch of causality giving the reason or an explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose, or its goal, as opposed to as a function of its cause.

I think it’s perfectly accurate to describe that the way I did - as the future, reaching back to influence the past.

As I see it, the only way to make teleology plausible is to assume there is a God.
— T Clark

This is a non sequitur, even to your own caricature of teleology. — SophistiCat

Can you specify a mechanism other than God that could establish a goal or purpose for the universe?

Can you specify a mechanism other than God that could establish a goal or purpose for the universe? — T Clark

If I may jump in... Individual things in the world, like plants, animals, persons and thermostats, can have goals and functions without there there being an overarching goal for the whole universe.

If I may jump in... Individual things in the world, like plants, animals, persons and thermostats, can have goals and functions without there there being an overarching goal for the whole universe. — Pierre-Normand

Thermostats, sure. They are designed by people for a particular purpose. People have goals, e.g. I'm saving money so my children can go to college. Do animals and plants? Some higher animals clearly do. Do amoeba have goals? No, they have reactions to stimuli that evolved by mutation and natural selection. I guess the same would be true of plants. A function is not the same as a goal.

See for instance the two SEP entries about teleological notions in biology or in theories of mental content. — Pierre-Normand

I scanned the two articles in the SEP you, although I didn't read all of them. In both cases, there seemed to be confusion between cause and function. Yes, the function of the heart is to pump blood, but that's not why it developed. Again, it developed in accordance with the principles of evolution by natural selection. There are many examples of organs and tissues that evolved for one function but later evolved for other functions. A common example is the evolution of the bones in the inner ear from the jaw bones of fish.

SophistiCat provided two neat examples. — Pierre-Normand

Yes, I was wrong. There are things other than God that can apply goals - humans and some higher animals. The examples @SophistiCat were the results of human planning.

Yes, I was wrong. There are things other than God that can apply goals - humans and some higher animals. The examples @SophistiCat were the results of human planning. — T Clark

I don't think you were wrong but that you and @SophistiCat were thinking about different things―namely local purposes and global purpose.

I don't think you were wrong but that you and SophistiCat were thinking about different things―namely local purposes and global purpose. — Janus

I think you’re right, but my original response was to the OP, which appeared to describe a more general form of teleology. If I’m wrong about that, @Tim111 can let us know.

A function is not the same as a goal. — T Clark

Yes, you can make this distinction, but both (1) the functional explanations of the behaviors of artifacts and (2) the purposive explanations of intentional behaviors of humans (or of non-rational animals) are species of teleological explanation. They both appeal to the end state that the system or organism is non-accidentally structured to achieve rather than appealing to laws of nature. For sure, there also are explanations why those artifacts or animals came to be teleologically structured in the way that they are. Those explanations can indeed appeal to natural selection, cultural evolution or artificial design.

Nevertheless, the proximal explanations of the behaviors of such systems often appeal to norms rather than laws. Norms and laws have opposite directions of fit. If some objects are seen not to follow the laws of nature that we took them to be obeying, then either we were wrong about some auxiliary hypotheses or we were wrong about the law. If an artifact or person fails to act in accordance with a norm of behavior (norms of rationality, in the case of human behavior) then there is something wrong with them (e.g. they may be sick, broken, irrational or misinformed) rather than with the norms themselves.

I scanned the two articles in the SEP you, although I didn't read all of them. In both cases, there seemed to be confusion between cause and function. Yes, the function of the heart is to pump blood, but that's not why it developed. Again, it developed in accordance with the principles of evolution by natural selection. There are many examples of organs and tissues that evolved for one function but later evolved for other functions. A common example is the evolution of the bones in the inner ear from the jaw bones of fish.

I think it can naturally be argued that fulfilling its ability to pump blood is indeed why the heart developed. The genomic variations that favored its effectively carrying this function were selected for that reason, because fulfilling this function increased the fitness of the organism.

The process of exaptation that you mention also is teleological. An organ that was fulfilling one function came progressively to be restructured (as well as the other parts of the organisms that function synergistically with it), though the process of natural selection, to fulfill its new function precisely because the selected genomic variations favored the fulfilling of the new fitness enhancing function.

Natural selection isn't a mechanism that renders teleological explanations otiose. It is rather a general mechanism that explains how the development of teleologically structured organisms is enabled by random mutations and selective pressures. The suggestion that Darwin's theory explains natural teleology rather than replace it was made to Charles Darwin by one of his contemporaries and Darwin agreed. I can dig up the reference if you wish.

Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. But in a probabilistic system, the future is open at every step. To say that events are happening as a means to reaching some future state C, is nonsensical considering state C isn't even guaranteed. — tom111

In any probabilistic system of interest – ie: one that has the regularity to qualify as a system composed of its degrees of freedom – its destiny will be constrained by a global structural attractor. So shake any bag of degrees of freedom and they will arrive at some equilibrium value where continued change ceases to be meaningful change. You can describe the system simply in terms of its macrostate – its pressure and temperature, for example.

So roll the dice one time and its free individual action seems to have no teleology imposing on the randomness of its outcome. But in the long run, the statistics have to conform to a macroscopic attractor state. The casino always wins in the end as local randomness winds up as global order.

Frank's Common Patterns of Nature is a great paper on this – https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3507

Whether you consider the local degrees of freedom to be "random" or "mechanical" in some metaphysical sense, it doesn't make a difference. Change is only change until it thermalises. After that it becomes change that makes no further difference from the higher perspective which is the "system" that is the embodiment of some set of constraints imposing on the degrees of freedom.

That might then be not what you mean by "teleology" of course. But tough. Systems metaphysics trumps Newtonian metaphysics precisely by making teleology make natural sense.

If Nature is probabilistic at root, the usual way of thinking about causality is up for a more sophisticated rendering. :grin:

Yes, you can make this distinction, but both (1) the functional explanations of the behaviors of artifacts and (2) the purposive explanations of intentional behaviors of humans (or of non-rational animals) are species of teleological explanation. — Pierre-Normand

No. We are clearly not going to get any further with this discussion. Your understanding of teleology makes the whole thing trivial. Of course the heart has a function.

I guess we should just leave it at that.

No. We are clearly not going to get any further with this discussion. Your understanding of teleology makes the whole thing trivial. Of course the heart has a function.

I guess we should just leave it at that. — T Clark

Sure, you don't have to discuss it if you think it's trivial and not worth your while. But the very notion of function was precisely what some early critics of teleological explanations in science were targeting. Both Ernst Nagel and Carl Hempel sought to subsume functional explanations under the deductive-nomological model. The biologist Ernst Mayr, although critical of scientific reductionism, also was wary of teleological explanations and proposed the idea of teleonomy instead: a sort of as-if notion of goal directed behavior meant to replaces the abstract idea of function with the concrete notion of a physically instantiated program (such as, but not limited to, a DNA instantiated genetic program). This is meant to deal with causality by referring to the physically instantiated program as the efficient cause, as it were. I don't think either of those reduction programmes were successful, but they were attempts to cope with the non-trivial problem (according to those thinkers) of dealing with the scientific probity of the notion of function in biology.

(My first draft philosophy paper was titled Autonomy, Consequences and Teleology. It included a critique of such reductions as attempted by Nagel, Hempel and Mayr although I wasn't acquainted with either one of them specifically! I was rather drawing on ideas in the philosophy of biology from Michael Thompson and Anthony Chemero.)

The OP raises an overlooked point; if the evolution of a system is invertible, which is presumably the case for a deterministic system, then there is no physical justification for singling out a causal direction, and therefore no reason to choose the first event over the last event as the initial cause, as is the case if the microphysical laws are symmetric.

But the above remark shouldn't be confused with the examples associated with Aristotelian teleology, which seems to concern circular causality rather than linear causality, as in examples like "the purpose of teeth is to help digest food". Such examples can be unpacked by unwinding the causal circle backwards through time (in this case the cycle of reproduction) so as to reduce a supposedly forward looking "teleological" explanation to a standard Darwinian explanation.

The OP raises an overlooked point; if the evolution of a system is invertible, which is presumably the case for a deterministic system, then there is no physical justification for singling out a causal direction, and therefore no reason to choose the first event over the last event as the initial cause, as is the case if the microphysical laws are symmetric. — sime

That is a good point. But the idea applies when the events under consideration are taken to be "caused" or determined by "events" in the past or future that encompass the full intersection of the determined event's light cone with a space-like surface at that past or future time. This is because, of course, a physical event is determined jointly by everything that can influence it through forces propagating no faster than the speed of light. Another assumption is that we identify those spatially extended "events" from a God's-eye-view perspective, considering them in all their glorious microphysical details, and without perturbing them through our means of observation.

In physics, however, the idea of the arrow of time (from past to future) is generally taken to be linked to the direction of increasing entropy and is dependent on the contingent fact of the "past" having low entropy (by definition). Carlo Rovelli neatly explains how our conception of time asymmetrical concepts of time (our ideas of ordinary present, past and future events) and hence also of our (correct) belief that our actions can causally influence the future but not the past, is linked to the time-asymmetrical thermodynamical process by means of which our memories must be formed, and how those memories can only encode information about past events and not future ones. He does this in this paper, although there also are YouTube videos where he explains those ideas informally.

But the above remark shouldn't be confused with the examples associated with Aristotelian teleology, which seems to concern circular causality rather than linear causality, as in examples like "the purpose of teeth is to help digest food". Such examples can be unpacked by unwinding the causal circle backwards through time (in this case the cycle of reproduction) so as to reduce a supposedly forward looking "teleological" example to a standard Darwinian explanation. — sime

That's an interesting way to characterise an attempted reduction of holistic (or organismic) teleological explanations of organisms and of their function to a linear process of adaptation through random variation and selection. But I think, rather than constituting a reduction of the teleological explanation, the proposed evolutionary explanation answers a different question. We can ask why did the individual animal grew teeth. And the answer that the teeth help digesting food locates the explanation within a holistic (or circular) network of inter-dependent functional features of the specific organism (i.e. of the species that it belongs to). The attempted reduction, through peeling off the circular onion over the course of its past evolutionary history, however, answers a different question: why has the organism come to be functionally organized, over a phylogenetic times scale, in precisely the way that it now is? This is a perfectly good explanation to a different inquiry than the one the functional explanation was meant to address.

On edit: one clear way to highlight the distinctness of the two questions it to attend to the fact that the functional explanation can be known to a fairly high degree of accuracy and certainty, by means of observations of the organisms present behavior in a wide range of circumstances, while the evolutionary explanation can be greatly elusive.

Mechanism versus teleology in a probabilistic universe — tom111

Is there any evidence that the universe is probabilistic?

For example, the equation ${d = 0.5 * g * t^{2}}$ gives the distance an object falls under gravity from rest. No probability is involved.

I may not know how far the object will fall in a certain amount of time, and it is true for me that the future is uncertain. For me, the future is about probabilities

But where is the evidence that the universe is probabilistic?

Is there any evidence that the universe is probabilistic? — RussellA

The OP is inquiring what happens to teleology if the universe is probabilistic. As for evidence that the laws of physics are probabilistic, this appears to be the case with quantum mechanics.

The overall movement of a bacterium is the result of alternating tumble and swim phases, called run-and-tumble motion.[18] As a result, the trajectory of a bacterium swimming in a uniform environment will form a random walk with relatively straight swims interrupted by random tumbles that reorient the bacterium.[19] By repeatedly evaluating their course, and adjusting if they are moving in the wrong direction, bacteria can direct their random walk motion toward favorable locations. — wikipedia

(my bolding.)

Sure, you don't have to discuss it if you think it's trivial and not worth your while. — Pierre-Normand

That’s not it. I don’t want to discuss it any further here because this whole discussion grows out of the fact that we’re using the word teleology in different senses. I think my usage is correct, and I don’t think there’s any chance that we will come to further agreement.

I don't know about the universe, as a whole, being teleological. I don't see any reason to believe it is. But teleology is certainly found in the universe. To demonstrate this, I just did this.
I thought about a future state that was not going to come about without my envisioning it, my intent to bring it about, and my work to bring it about.

(It turns out it takes a minute to get the one on top to stay, because the cap of the one below is not a flat surface with sharp edges. In case anyone was wondering. :grin:)

I don't know about the universe, as a whole, being teleological. I don't see any reason to believe it is. But teleology is certainly found in the universe. — Patterner

Agreed, but I would say only where there is intention. I guess that means human or other outside intervention.

Frank's Common Patterns of Nature is a great paper on this – https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3507 — apokrisis

This looks like a great paper. Thanks.

Natural selection isn't a mechanism that renders teleological explanations otiose. It is rather a general mechanism that explains how the development of teleologically structured organisms is enabled by random mutations and selective pressures. — Pierre-Normand

I would underline this as the key point in the discussion: If it's true, which I think it is, then it allows us to say that "birds gather twigs in order to build a nest" is explanatory. The role of natural selection arises at a different level of description, having to do with how such bird-intentions wind up being chosen and facilitated. (And of course we mustn't read this as saying that a bird "knows what it's doing" under the same description we would use.)

Put simply: Teleological explanation requires a fixed end or final cause. — tom111

To simplify what others have said: final causes are not ordered ad unum (to just one thing). For example, a cow will eat vegetation, but it is not "deterministically" ordered to eat just one kind of vegetation, and therefore it is probabilistically ordered towards many different kinds of vegetation.

Natural selection isn't a mechanism that renders teleological explanations otiose. — Pierre-Normand

I would go further and say that natural selection is itself a teleological explanation. It is a teleological explanation that covers all species instead of just one (i.e. it is a generic final cause). I would even venture that if an ur-cause like natural selection were not teleological, then the subordinate causal accounts could not be teleological, and perhaps this is the principle that some are grabbing onto (i.e. "Natural selection is not teleological, therefore the subordinate causal accounts cannot be teleological.").

The common objection would be, "But natural selection is not consciously seeking anything." The response is, "It doesn't have to. Such a thing is not required for teleology."

-

But then the question arises:

So shake any bag of degrees of freedom and they will arrive at some equilibrium value where continued change ceases to be meaningful change. You can describe the system simply in terms of its macrostate – its pressure and temperature, for example. — apokrisis

If natural selection were reducible to non-teleological parts—such as "random mutations," for example—then how is it that "the bag shakes out" into a teleological phenomenon? If one wishes to opt for random mutations, then one simple answer would be that once the "life" or "survival" criterion is introduced, the "random" mutations actually end up "favoring" life, even if only by "accident."

More simply, a god could create species by means of random mutations + a distinction between death and life, where the death/life criterion is the sieve through which the random mutations are filtered. From the vantage point of the isolated mutations, they are random. From the vantage point of the sieve, they are not.

I think it’s perfectly accurate to describe that the way I did - as the future, reaching back to influence the past. — T Clark

Can you specify a mechanism other than God that could establish a goal or purpose for the universe? — T Clark

Again, a bizarre non sequitur. Even accepting your caricature, what does this have to do with establishing a goal or purpose for the universe?

I would go further and say that natural selection is itself a teleological explanation. It is a teleological explanation that covers all species instead of just one (i.e. a generic final cause).

The common objection would be, "But natural selection is not consciously seeking anything." The response is, "It doesn't have to. Such a thing is not required for teleology." — Leontiskos

Evolution by natural selection is a good example of a teleological explanation that is indeterministic at every scale. It is teleological because evolution is directed towards a future state of greater fitness. However, success is not guaranteed, and many do fail, at species, population, and individual level.

Again, a bizarre non sequitur. Even accepting your caricature, what does this have to do with establishing a goal or purpose for the universe? — SophistiCat

As I said to Pierre-Normand, there’s no way you and I are going to come to a common understanding on this.