nucleation

CLAIM-529: An organization can be individuated without presupposing it as a declared candidate whose verdict can come out false: criteria stated on the candidate's interactions (whether benefit can be booked per member, which interactions the others depend on, what removing an interaction type does, whether its order survives release from an outside scaffold) apply to a grouping not yet assumed to be a unit, while criteria stated as members' attitudes toward the group (a goal about it, belonging, identity) make it partly constituted by being taken as one, a different individuation, unavailable where members have no such attitudes

4 min read

Properties10
StatusProposed
Rolethesis
Warrantinterpretive
Tagsindividuation, social-ontology, philosophy-of-biology
Linedistributed-agency
Bears onQUESTION-284 — In any domain, when do the constraints on an entity's relations only characterize an entity individuated without them, and when do they partly constitute its identity, its boundary or what it can do; and are a boundary a process detects, one it maintains and one it constitutes three different things?
Rests onCLAIM-405 — An individuation is well defined only once its criterion is fixed (the target it serves, the transformations its unity must survive, the scale), and that dependence does not make it arbitrary: once the criterion is fixed a verdict can be false, and differently fixed criteria can pick out units of one system whose boundaries cross rather than nest, none of them less real for it, CLAIM-522 — Recovery under interventions on state cannot show where maintenance is realized: an outside controller that measures the constraint capacities and supplies the internal production law as state feedback yields the same trajectory under every perturbation of state, damage and recovery included, even with every capacity observed exactly; only interventions on the production mechanisms, relative to a declared boundary, separate the two
GroundsTHEORY-1247 — Griesemer and Shavit propose, as a first and rough sketch, that a collective becomes a new level of individuality only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it, some core interactions have become generatively entrenched, and it has organizational closure, and that such a community can be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone
ComplementsCLAIM-526 — Describing persons and organizations as coexisting levels of one process removes the question of how already-constituted agents add up to a collective, but not the question of levels: whether a collective variable has dynamics of its own, closed against the activity that realizes it, can be decided on a process description that presupposes no agents, is sometimes decided no, and a closed collective variable can be an aggregate that coexists with its realization while keeping none of its members' distinctions, CLAIM-531 — Generative entrenchment does not by itself give organizational closure: an entrenched core, which later interactions depend on so that perturbing it is catastrophic and perturbing them tolerable, can sit at the root of an acyclic dependency order, and where interactions turn over such an order persists only while something outside supplies its core; an organization that is both entrenched and closed has a core containing a cycle of mutual maintenance, each interaction on which is itself core unless its share of the maintenance is redundant
UsesTERM-088 — individuation, and which sense: descriptive (an inquiry can distinguish and track it), dynamical (its organization persists under specified dynamics and perturbation, with robust identity and boundaries), constitutive (its relational organization helps fix its identity and boundary), and organizational autonomy, the further achievement of contributing to the maintenance of its own constitutive constraints

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The claim

Griesemer and Shavit (LIT-188, abstract) name the circularity: evolutionary transitions “seem difficult to track without circularity, since their features—units of selection, individuality, inheritance at multiple levels (MLS1, MLS2)—are products of one process”. Their answer is one abstract sentence, describing transitions by “kinds of interactions among community members … that are not instances of those same interactions within community members”, and the body never returns to it (NOTE-173). The body does contain the parts of an answer. They are of two kinds, and only one kind avoids the circle.

  1. The unit enters as a hypothesis. Declare a candidate grouping and a criterion. The verdict can then be false (CLAIM-405). The candidate is presupposed only as something to be tested, which is not the presupposition the charge is about. Some tests need the declared boundary to mean anything. Only interventions on mechanisms, relative to a declared boundary, tell maintenance realized inside from maintenance supplied from outside (CLAIM-522). Endogenization, as the paper takes it from Bourrat (LIT-1927), is such a test: “undoing or releasing the system from scaffolding” (§2) separates a collective that has brought its scaffolded features inside from one that has not, and “inside” is fixed by the candidate. So endogenization cannot draw the boundary first. It can test one that has been declared. When the paper moves endogenization “into the community rather than into a lower-level individual” (§2), the community is the declared candidate.

  2. Criteria on interactions. The body offers four that refer to the candidate’s interactions and not to the group as anyone’s object:

    • whether benefit can be booked per member. In cooperation “it always makes sense to calculate or measure effects … in terms of the marginal benefits to individuals” (the lions’ meat per lion); in collaboration such calculation is “effectively meaningless” (§1);
    • the dependency order among interactions, generative entrenchment (§2);
    • what removing node or interaction types does (§3);
    • whether the order survives release from a scaffold (§2, after Bourrat).

    Each can be applied to a grouping without first deciding whether it is a collection, a conexus or a community, and each can fail. The paper gives no operational form of any of them (NOTE-173, Limitations), and they need not agree: CLAIM-531 shows the second and third can hold where closure fails.

  3. Criteria on attitudes. Stage 3 is also marked by a shared goal, which “may contribute to a ‘sense of belonging’ or group identity” (§1). Integration is the point where sustaining the system’s heterogeneity “becomes a focal goal of every participating member”, and Caporael’s truly social cognition is “cognition about the group itself” (§3). These take the group as their object. That need not be vicious: it makes the group partly constituted by being taken as one, the constitutive sense of TERM-088 and QUESTION-284’s second case. But it does not answer the charge, since the group figures in its own definiens. It also cannot be what tells a conexus from a community among cells or insects, which the paper hopes its sketch covers (“all life histories”, §1).

What it does not say

  • That Griesemer and Shavit argue this. It is the record’s sorting of their body text, which states these criteria without asking which of them avoids the circle.
  • That the lower-level units are not presupposed. The 3Cs start from individuals who coordinate in order “to continue to pursue whatever process trajectories they were individually following” (§2). That is no circle for the transition in question, but the abstract’s worry covers those units too, and the paper does not take it up. Its sources offer a route the record has not read: Griesemer’s reproducer (LIT-1932, LIT-1937), on which a demic group can be a “candidate for higher-level reproducers” that only “post-transition” evolves “the developmental integration necessary to count them higher-level individuals” (§2). Reproduction would then be identified before individuality. The claim does not rest on it.
  • That attitude criteria are illegitimate for human groups. Individuation through members’ attitudes is a real case. It is not the non-circular route, and it is a different sense of individuation.
  • That a declared candidate can be chosen without bias. CLAIM-405 makes the verdict objective once the criterion is fixed, not the choice of criterion or candidate.

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