Abstract
This article addresses some crucial assumptions that are rarely acknowledged when organisms and machines are compared. We begin by presenting a short historical reconstruction of the concept of “machine.” We show that there has never been a unique and widely accepted definition of “machine” and that the extant definitions are based on specific technologies. Then we argue that, despite the concept's ambiguity, we can still defend a more robust, specific, and useful notion of machine analogy that accounts for successful strategies in connecting specific devices (or mechanisms) with particular living phenomena. For that purpose, we distinguish between what we call “generic identity” and proper “machine analogy.” We suggest that “generic identity”—which, roughly stated, presumes that some sort of vague similarity might exist between organisms and machines—is a source of the confusion haunting many persistent disagreements and that, accordingly, it should be dismissed. Instead, we endorse a particular form of “machine analogy” where the relation between organic phenomena and mechanical devices is not generic but specific and grounded on the identification of shared “invariants.” We propose that the machine analogy is a kind of analogy as proportion and we elucidate how this is used or might be used in scientific practices. We finally argue that while organisms are not machines in a generic sense, they might share many robust “invariants,” which justify the scientists' use of machine analogies for grasping living phenomena.
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Notes
This is also why we use in this paper the notion of “machine analogy” and not “mechanistic” analogy.
On Descartes' uses of analogies and metaphors, see Galison (1984).
“The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false”. (Turing, (1950), p. 451). See also Schaffer (1999).
There is a vast and thriving literature addressing the notion (or notions) of organism, which is impossible to list here entirely. For a good representative example see Huneman and Wolfe (2010). In this paper, we are not interested in defining the concept of organism, but to explore the way machine analogies reveal (or eventually hide) interesting organic properties. Insofar as we focus on the relation between organisms and machines, and, therefore, on the attempts to understand the former in terms of the latter, our attention is largely devoted to mechanical devices and, more generally, machine analogies.
It would be interesting to have an empirical study listing the different ways most biologists define “machines”. Yet, what most biologists supposedly assume (or don’t) when they formulate machine analogies has no obvious or necessary import on how we should understand “machine analogies” in general. In other words, the fact that biologists might persist in using wrongheaded conceptions of machines does not necessarily undermine all possible uses of machine analogies. Moreover, the biologists' abuses of “machine analogies” would give us further reasons for having more theoretical and historical analyses that might inspire them to use those analogies more effectively.
We are aware that there are many ways to be against machine analogies. There are several persuasive and non-exclusive “antimachinist” arguments that we cannot properly list here. What we are willing to question is not “anti-mechanism” in general (whatever it means). What we are challenging is the argument that if we can find one or more discontinuous properties between machines and organisms, then any kind of machine analogy would be necessarily doomed.
Nicholson (2013), for instance, is pretty clear concerning the fact that machine metaphors can play a heuristic role in science.
Borelli, D’Arcy Thompson, and Istrail et al. could even believe that the artifacts they describe are somewhat “identical” to their epistemic targets. If so, for our perspective, their belief would be philosophically and epistemically flawed. But here we are not concerned with what those figures really believed. We are interested in how machine analogies might work in principle and be epistemically defensible. To the extent that Istrail et al. argue that organisms are just computers, for instance, we consider the claim as an abusive use of a machine analogy.
What we propose here is in the spirit of what Brunet (2021) has recently put forward, namely, that machine analogies can be properly assessed only when specific technologies or machines are compared with specific organic phenomena.
Philosophers can evade this last question in two ways, which are not particularly attractive. They can invent a new formal definition of “machine” and then demonstrate that this notion of “machine” is incompatible (or compatible) with the knowledge we have of living beings. Or they can engage in the desperate empirical and historical hunt for a general definition of machine encompassing all extant technologies in order to show that the organism is (or is not) that kind of abstract machine.
That is, due to the fact that R holds between A and B as well as between C and D.
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Funding was provided by FCT (Grant No. CEECIND/02290/2018 and Contract Nº DL57/2016/CP1479/CT0064).
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Esposito, M., Baravalle, L. The machine-organism relation revisited. HPLS 45, 34 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00587-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00587-2