nucleation

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

4 min read

Properties11
StatusProposed
Rolethesis
Warrantinterpretive
Tagsindividuation, philosophy-of-biology, social-ontology
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?, QUESTION-093 — Which of predictive autonomy, interventional autonomy, organizational closure and self-individuation must a coalition of processes have before it is a higher-level agent and not a convenient aggregate, and, beyond an effective-information advantage without closure or self-individuation, which of them can it have without the others?
Rests onCLAIM-516 — Where every constraint capacity turns over at a positive rate and is produced only by others, with no basal production and production vanishing as its producers do, capacities whose production graph is acyclic all decay to zero: a capacity that persists needs a productive cycle among its ancestors, and removing a feedback edge set extinguishes every capacity; a cycle is necessary and not sufficient, and a one-member cycle is not closure
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, LIT-1927 — Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded Properties
ComplementsCLAIM-194 — A gap or coupling criterion cannot tell a boundary a system produces from one imposed on it: a membrane the cell makes and a beam joining two pendulums pass alike, so the block test cannot by itself supply the individuality minimal agency needs, 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
UsesTERM-070 — organizational closure, as closure of constraints: a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and has another depending on it (Montévil and Mossio 2015), distinct from informational closure and from a flame's maintenance of the conditions of its own combustion
Cited as “complements” byCLAIM-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

Graph View

The claim

Griesemer and Shavit (THEORY-1247; LIT-188, read in NOTE-173) mark the step from conexus to community in two ways and pass from one to the other without an argument. Entrenchment, after Wimsatt: “A generatively entrenched interaction is a core interaction that later-evolved interactions will depend on for their existence and character, so that perturbations of it will tend to be catastrophic to the whole system while changes in the later interactions tend to lead to tolerable system changes” (§2). Closure: “Integration means that removal of node or interaction types disrupts social organization … Put differently, community requires ‘organizational closure’ [Moreno and Mossio] … Hence, community constitutes a new level of individuality” (§3).

  1. Entrenchment is a dependency order, and it can be acyclic. Write i → j when j depends on i for its existence. The definition says the core has many dependents and the later interactions few. It says nothing about what the core depends on. A tree rooted in the core meets it exactly: removing the root removes everything, removing a leaf removes only the leaf. The same tree passes the knockout test the paper gives for integration.
  2. Closure needs the other direction. In TERM-070’s sense, each member of the set depends directly on another member and has another depending on it. The root of a tree depends on nothing in the set. So entrenchment plus a knockout effect does not give closure, and the paper’s “Put differently” is a further claim, not a restatement.
  3. An acyclic order persists only on outside supply. CLAIM-516 shows that where constraint capacities turn over at a positive rate and each is produced only by its parents, with no basal production, an acyclic production graph decays to zero, and whatever persists has a productive cycle among its ancestors. Read for interactions, which is an interpretation since that claim is stated for constraint capacities, an entrenched tree persists only while its core is supplied from outside the set: by an ecological scaffold, an institution, or the members’ separate motives. That is the paper’s own second outcome for a conexus, persisting “maintained by external ecological scaffolding” (§2), and Bourrat’s de-Darwinized collective as the paper reports it (LIT-1927).
  4. What entrenched and closed looks like. If the core is maintained from inside, some interactions that depend on the core also maintain it, so the core lies on a cycle. Each interaction on that cycle is then itself one whose perturbation is catastrophic, unless the maintenance it does is spread redundantly over many interactions so that losing any one is tolerable. Entrenchment’s asymmetry then divides the set into a closed core, which contains the cycle, and a periphery that depends on the core and does not maintain it.

On this reading the paper’s relocated endogenization, which “moves scaffolding effects into the community” (§2), is the closing of that cycle: an outside supply of the core is replaced by maintenance from interactions that depend on it. Entrenchment can come first, under the scaffold, and does not show that the cycle has closed. Telling the two apart needs an intervention on the supply relative to a declared boundary (CLAIM-522), not a knockout of interaction types. A coupling or gap test cannot do it either (CLAIM-194).

What it does not say

  • That Griesemer and Shavit’s communities lack closure. They may have it. The claim is that entrenchment and the knockout effect do not show it.
  • That Wimsatt’s own concept is acyclic. Only the definition the paper quotes is read here. Wimsatt’s book is registered unread (LIT-1926), and it may let a core be maintained by what depends on it.
  • That closure suffices for individuality. TERM-088 treats closure as organizational autonomy, a further achievement, and the paper adopts Moreno and Mossio’s link between closure and individuality without arguing it.
  • That CLAIM-516’s hypotheses hold for social interactions. An interaction that members would perform anyway for their own ends has basal production in that claim’s sense. The present claim counts it as outside supply, which is a choice of boundary, not a finding.
  • That a cycle suffices for closure. CLAIM-516 says a cycle is necessary and not sufficient, and that a one-member cycle is not closure.

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