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Five lessons from teleology-neutrality and metaphor in ecology: bottom-up and top-down all at once

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Abstract

This paper illuminates primary epistemic functions of teleological characterizations in ecology through discussion of the historical and conceptual origins of the theoretical branch of ecology (§§1–2). I subsequently defuse enduring confusions about the use of teleological characterizations in ecology; with a focus on recent critical arguments by Sagoff in this journal (Sagoff, Synthese 193:3003–3024, 2016) and some other places (e.g., his Sagoff, Ethics, Policy, and Environment 16:239–257, 2013 and Sagoff, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, 2017) (§3). The paper then culminates by collecting five generalizable novel insights attained through the forgoing discussion and outlining avenues for follow-up work that can build on the arguments laid out in this paper (§4).

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Notes

  1. I am sympathetic to the view that many concepts employed in ecology (e.g. ‘ecosystem’ and ‘community’) can, and arguably do, serve as useful and practically valuable theoretical constructs even if they haven’t any naturally delineated analogues; cf. Fitzsimmons, 1999 and O’Neill, 2001.

  2. Some argue that Karl Möbius introduced this ontologically-neutral understanding of ecological entities in the 1800s, and others argue that this view has even deeper historical roots (see, for example, Shrader-Frechette & McCoy, 1993, p. 19; Egerton, 2012, Ch. 1). I won’t attempt to trace the exact historical origin of this thinking, but will simply contend that this view was clearly popularized and widely-accepted by the 1940s at least.

  3. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for clarifying this point.

  4. George Verdanksy, whose theory Hutchinson uses, had developed the needed biochemical understanding in the 1930s. However, as far as I understand the history of ecology, it was not adopted by ecologists until Hutchinson made the relevant connections.

  5. Donhauser (2016b) unpacks this understanding of ecological networks and nodes; see also Allesina and Bondavalli (2004), Möbius (1877), Patten (2010), Scharler and Baird (2005), Ulanowicz (2011).

  6. The latter part of his paper then concentrates on explaining how certain kinds of theoretical population models can be used to predict relative rates of change in the abundances of some common types of interacting populations (1948, pp. 238-42; see Donhauser 2016a for further explanation). For more discussion of Hutchisnon’s historical roles in furthering theoretical ecology, see Cooper 2007, Ch. 5; Fretwell 1975, p. 4; Keller 2008; McIntosh 1985, pp. 275e9; Simberloff 1980; Slack 2011, pp. 236e7

  7. This is not to say that everyone must go through a phase of understanding such forces using the teleological metaphor. My claim is, rather, that teleological metaphors can and do serve epistemic functions of helping to understand the shape and realization of some kinds phenomena and dynamics in different sciences.

  8. Similar descriptions are found in the literature about more “macro” phenomena in geophysics; see, for example, Eaton, Church, & Davies, 2006 and Church, Hassan, &Wolcott, 1998.

  9. In his 1997, Sagoff also includes an entire section, V, in which he discusses how ecologists have presupposed a robust “telos” being operative within ecological networks in his view.

  10. Sagoff (2019) provides other critical arguments, about alleged Paley-type design-thinking within ecology. However, his arguments in that paper do not explicitly concern teleology or “ecological forces,” and so I will not engage with them in this paper.

  11. Notably, since it is a negative proposition, it is logically impossible to establish Sagoff’s claim that no such forces exist in nature; that may just be unknowable.

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Acknowledgements

I must thank Gillian Barker and two anonymous reviewers for taking care to provide helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. This paper has also benefitted greatly from discussions with the members of the Geofunctions unit of the Templeton Foundation Purposes and Agents in Global Environmental Sciences project. And I am grateful for the support received from the Templeton Foundation (Grant #: 62220) during the development of this work.

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    Justin Donhauser

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Donhauser, J. Five lessons from teleology-neutrality and metaphor in ecology: bottom-up and top-down all at once. Synthese 201, 82 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04079-5

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