Subject: 
        Re: [evol-psych] ought and is in relation to function
   Date: 
        Tue, 19 Feb 2002 10:07:23 +1300
   From: 
        Andy Lock 
     To: 
        "Hill, David" ,
        "'[email protected]'" 




At 12:56 18/02/2002 -0600, Hill, David wrote:



Big cut


  Caveats:  (i) these implications are not logical entailments; 



Excuse the big cut, and the fact that I am taking what David has said - which I find a very sensible line
of reasoning - in a somewhat different direction to the general conversation.  But I've always been
fascinated by the potential power of implication as an explanatory/descriptive concept, yet have found
very little discussion of the nature and workings of implication in the literature.

My fascination comes from the way that the notion of implication can reveal how some futures are
implied by particular situations, and that creative processes such as development and evolution can be
characterized as the explication of these already-existing implications into physical and mental
structures.

Here are two examples of what I'm thinking.  

If we take early human infant crying as an expression of distress at the situation they find themselves in
as stating something with an English value like I DO NOT WANT THIS STATE, then they are
implying, at one remove, I WANT SOME OTHER STATE.  They may not necessarily know what
that other state is, but come to discover it, and give evidence that they have when, for example, they
terminate crying at the sight of a nipple, which they have established from past experience has
SOMETHING THAT I WANT WHEN I AM IN THIS NOW RECOGNISABLE STATE.  And
they come to control this implication and use it to direct their activities by around 3 months.  But, given
the nature of infancy, getting what you want implies YOU DO SOMETHING (because I am incapable
of satisfying my needs on my own).  And that they have made this further implication an explicit
foundation for their actions becomes apparent at around 9-10 months, when communication can be
used intentionally to get other people to do things.  Hence development can be thought of as a process
attuned to gaining control and making explicit the implications that follow from one's situation in the
world as an infant.  And lo and behold, human infants have been endowed by evolution with the
cognitive equipment to be able to do this.  So development is here a process of turning implications
into explicit mental structure.

From an evolutionary perspective, any present form implies future possible niches for future forms to
make explicit in new meat or vegetable forms that are already partly specified.  Plants imply herbivore
niches; herbivores imply carnivore and parasite niches; and natural selection winnows out the biological
structures that best explicate the requirements of these implied niches.

This way of looking at the problem provides me with a useful way of seeing how the future is, in a
sense, contained in the present, and gets me around what my grasp of English otherwise finds
difficulties with talking about: ie, my English resources don't seem to be very good at getting me a
conceptual hold on processual change through time.

All of which now seems such an obvious and useful vocabulary to me that I worry as to why there is so
little out there dealing with the nature of implication, in that it seems to me there ought to be, or I'm
totally off the wall, or just deficient in my reading....

Have a good day

Andy Lock