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Fighting the good cause: meaning, purpose, difference, and choice

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Abstract

Concepts of cause, choice, and information are closely related. A cause is a choice that can be held responsible. It is a difference that makes a difference. Information about past causes and their effects is a valuable commodity because it can be used to guide future choices. Information about criteria of choice is generated by choosing a subset from an ensemble for ‘reasons’ and has meaning for an interpreter when it is used to achieve an end. Natural selection evolves interpreters with ends. Surviving genes embody a textual record of past choices that had favorable outcomes. Consultation of these archives guides current choices. Purposive choice is well-informed difference making.

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Notes

  1. Gouyon and Gliddon (1988) wrote “any material support which allows the replication of genetic information will be termed an avatar, which is used in the Hindu religion to refer to the material forms assumed by the god Vishnu.”

  2. Representation presents again in different form, but prior forms are present again when forms recur. By this means, a thing represents its self (Hofstadter 2007; Haig 2011a).

  3. This is my footnote to Plato.

  4. My account of meaning can be viewed as parallel to Peirce’s (1877) account of belief. His trinity of belief, desire, and action—“our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions”—can be loosely translated as my triad of meaning, end, and interpretation. For Peirce, beliefs were habits of mind that guided action: “Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises.” Represented in other words, beliefs were latent information whose meaning was expressed in conditional action to achieve a motivated end.

  5. The physician takes the role of the first assassin and cancer the role of the backup assassin in scenarios of causal preemption (e.g., Hitchcock 2007). If the patient does not die from an overdose, then the patient dies from cancer.

  6. “To the common sense of mankind it is the property of a cause, qua cause, that it might have been different and have had different effects” (Fisher 1934, p. 106).

  7. I remind readers that T at the 3’ end of the DNA segment corresponds to A at the 5’ end of the RNA segment because of antiparallel synthesis.

  8. Deleterious mutations are alternatives that are eliminated as soon as they occur. They have a phenotype but are unreasonable choices.

  9. The less-appealing traits of the suitors rejected by my mother in favor of my father comprise part of a complete causal account of how I happen to be writing this essay.

  10. This sentence deliberately confuses gene and protein. Proteins and genes often share the same name (metonymy). Sometimes a gene is named for its protein and sometimes a protein for its gene. By convention, the gene and its mRNA are italicized but not its protein. In speech, the denotation of a name often encompasses gene, mRNA, and protein.

  11. Lewontin (2000) reprises his earlier distinction between the analysis of variance and analysis of causes (Lewontin 1974).

  12. Kant (2000, p. 243) can be interpreted as making a related distinction when he describes the twofold sense in which a tree is both cause and effect of itself. A tree generates itself both as a species/genus (transmission) and as an individual (development).

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Acknowledgments

Daniel Dennett, Jeffrey Lipshaw, Eric Schliesser, James Simpson, Kim Sterelny, Wenfei Tong, and Adrian Young contributed to the manuscript. Samir Okasha is to blame but the credit is mine. Thanks to the Arnold Arboretum under snow for inspiration and the Colloquium on the Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things for special effects. Particular thanks to the many unacknowledged influences without whom it would not have been written in quite the way it was. In memory of David Haig (1932–2012).

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  1. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    David Haig

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Correspondence to David Haig.

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Haig, D. Fighting the good cause: meaning, purpose, difference, and choice. Biol Philos 29, 675–697 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-014-9432-4

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