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Author
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Topic: Extending the explanatory filter
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brauer
Member
Member # 398
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posted 14. October 2002 15:08
I'd like to propose an extension to Dembski's "Explanatory Filter", which may be considered in light of recent discussions on this board to have terminated prematurely.
Recall that the filter operates by rejecting first hypotheses of regularity, then hypotheses of chance, to conclude "design".
I think that it would be useful to ask: then what? Suppose that we are interested in distinguishing between single and multiple designers. Would it be fair to propose that if we could eliminate multiple designers that then and only then could we conclude a single designer?
How might we reject the hypothesis of a phenomenon being multiply designed? I suggest that we use Dembski's concept of specification, and look specifically for consistency among the specifications.
For example, the specification of a Plasmodium might be as a parasitic organism that has discreet life-stages in distinct hosts, and that is virulent in humans (that is, it reduces the fitness of its human hosts, in exchange for increasing its own fitness).
The human specification includes (in part) a complex organism that through its own intervention increases its fitness by taking anti-malarial drugs, at the expense of the fitness of the plasmodium parasite.
These specifications seem to be inconsistent, and therefore might be evidence for multiple designers.
What remains to be developed is a way to quantify the degree of inconsistency between specifications, a suitable test statistic for summarizing the inconsistency, and a null distribution for the statistic.
It might be that "CSI" should be thought of as not a scalar, but as a multidimensional vector. The inconsistency between any two specifications would then be a function of the angle between their respective vectors: orthogonal specifications would be strong evidence against a single designer, perhaps.
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William A. Dembski
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Member # 7
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posted 14. October 2002 18:49
I'm not sure Matt Brauer's focus on the number of designers is going to be that fruitful in design-theoretic research, at least not in the short term.
There are plenty of examples of multiple-designer projects from human design where trying to tease apart the relative contributions of the various designers has been attempted but remains problematic (for instance in biblical criticism, as with the JPED hypothesis for the Pentateuch, the biblical critics are trying to assess the relevant contributions of various hypothesized authors/designers).
There's also a question of hierarchy of design. An economic system, for instance, may have been planned by one designer (or set of designers) but then be implemented by various microeconomic agents ("firms") that act as designing intelligences within the economic system.
It seems to me that the item of main interest for design inferences, at least initially, is whether design is present at all, meaning whether an intelligent agent or agents were involved in the production of some item. Identifying different designers as well as hierarchies of design is then logically downstream.
I'm reminded of lit-crit, where one can take a reader response approach (meanings of texts are entirely due to the reader) vs. authorial intention approach (meanings of texts are what the author intended) vs. text-has-its-own-meaning approach (meanings are what texts convey intrinsically). Of these, as Umberto Eco has in my view successfully argued, only the latter is valid -- one takes texts as they are. It's not simply a matter of reading in our preferred meanings or trying to uncover the intentions of the authors from texts (what if the author really meant one thing but by an infelicitous choice of phrase ended up saying something else?).
What's at issue with reading texts is making sense of what they say. So too, with the design in nature, the point is to come to terms with the design that's actually there (if indeed it's actually there). The intention behind the design, the number of designers whose intentions where relevant, and their respective contributions are interesting questions, but shouldn't divert us from the fundamental design question -- whether design is actually present.
Matt raises an orthogonality criterion for specifications. It seems that this notion can be developed, but I'm not sure that it's going to be useful in teasing apart the effects of different designers, since a common designer might be responsible for orthogonal specifications. With literary texts the usual way to sift the contributions of different designers is through some sort of "stylography," where the different styles of different designers reveal respective contributions. That may be a more fruitful approach to identifying the contributions of different designers within ID.
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Frances
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Member # 169
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posted 15. October 2002 01:29
Bill writes quote:
Matt raises an orthogonality criterion for specifications. It seems that this notion can be developed, but I'm not sure that it's going to be useful in teasing apart the effects of different designers, since a common designer might be responsible for orthogonal specifications.
In order to determine if a design hypothesis is likely or not I would argue that knowing if the orthogonality is due to a single designer or multiple designers. How can we determine if orthogonality is a probable occurrence in design without understanding the causal history of design?
By adopting 'just so' scenarios such as 'a single designer may be responsible for orthogonal specifications' we have increased our expected probability of ID explaining orthogonality found in nature without really addressing if the assumption of single designer and/or orthogonal specifications is an assumption that makes sense. Surely a designer who takes pleasure in orthogonal design is more likely to explain a certain orthogonal feature found in nature than a designer who is interested in harmony and a single model of design. Without knowing which design we are looking for we may assign too large or too small probabilities to the design hypothesis.
I have seen a good story describing some of the problems of not knowing the causal history in infering design.Here it is
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brauer
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Member # 398
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posted 15. October 2002 01:59
Hi Bill,
I appreciate your response. I'm interested in how you'd perceive the orthogonality of a case such as I gave in my malaria example. I have in mind a zero-sum game, in which a fitness increase in one organism necessitates a fitness decline in the other.
One might of course say that a single designer was responsible for both, that that designer does not identify with either, and that some other purpose is fulfilled by the transaction.
But whether one postulates a single designer or multiple designers, the "dimensionality" of the specification should be an important factor in any analysis. A "specification-space" that spans a large number of dimensions might be indicative of multiple designers or, as you suggest, a single designer with multiple complex purposes. Our goals and purposes would in that case span a small subspace of the putative designer's.
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