The Pirot Who Wouldn't Karulise Elatically

---- By J. L. S.

----------- a tribute to Peter Pan!

---

So we are discussing Grice on 'adaptiveness' of pirots. As Kramer notes, and D. Hoft. notes, etc. it's best to be 'variable-adaptiveness'. Grice was very strict witht his. Take a cactus.

--- You take a cactus out of Mexico and you wonder. Is it _necessary_? Surely for the cactus, the cactus is necessary. But in less arid climates, you don't know. The Sahara beats them all: the landscape has self-adapted perfectly to the total otiosity of vegetables (and vegetals). Etc.

--- Naturally wild, that is.


--- We don't know what Carnap had in mind when he said,

All pirots karulise elatically,

but we want to suggest he was perhaps being slightly dogmatic! (:)). So the idea is that for a pirot to adapt, it's not necessarily that he does it 'elatically'. Surely if he does it some other way (non-elatically), we may be reluctant to say he has adapted. Perhaps he has _ex-apted_.

Consider some quotes for these words, for it's via use we get to the meaning:

1903 F. W. H. MYERS Human Pers. I. 216

"Typical of life is its self-adaptive power."

Or "Idiotic of life", for this is a 'proprium' (idion) for Aristotle. And I'll go with Dawkins that the important (indeed ONLY) (important) sense of 'evolve' and 'adapt' is BIOLOGICAL, or biotic, as I prefer. It involves the serious morphological change of the 'form' or organ to adapt to the 'function'. But perhaps other uses are important too, if not more so.

Consider an older quote. I don't see why Dennett (who I respect) thought this harmless enough quote 'dangerous' enough to merit a title of the book, and wouldn't I join Dawkins in the celebrations of that Salop genius that Chaz was?

1859 DARWIN in Jrnl. Linn. Soc. Zool. III. 50

"The most vigorous and healthy males, implying perfect adaptation,
must generally gain the victory in their contests [for the females]."

This above always irritated me: it seems so ANTI-MACHIST to think that those big machos are ONLY doing it for the ladies. Where's narcissism?

1875 Encycl. Brit. I. 145/2

"Adaptation..is usually restricted..to imply such
modifications as arise during the life of an individual,
when an external change directly generates some change of function and
structure."

So Lord Berners adapted to his new life in London when he found he was too
old to stay in the stately country home without opera at 'hand'.

Idiotic: he NEVER adapted -- even if his wife would use the
verb).

1897 H. F. OSBORN in Science 15 Oct.,

"Ontogenetic adaptation..enables animals and plants to survive very
critical changes in their environment."

The fish off Co. Mayo may do ditto?

1904 H. E. CRAMPTON in Biometrika III. 114

"A rigid..organization, incapable..of structural alterations as
the result of ‘functional adaptation’."

This is the usage, above, that can IRRITATE a conservative like Grice, but maybe not.

1923 J. S. HUXLEY Ess. of Biologist i. 13

"If the degree of adaptation has not increased during evolution, then it
is clear that progress does not consist in increase in adaptation."

Very good. Typical negativistic Huxley. And note this is NOT Aldous!

1824 COLERIDGE Aids to Refl. (1848) 193

"This higher species of adaptive power we call Instinct."

Good quote: it's "Drive" in German. I don't have non-Gricean instincts, though -- so cannot share the feeling. (ha)

1854 WOODWARD Mollusca 56

"Modifications relating only to peculiar habits are called adaptive."

When they adapt, and non-adaptive or dysfunctional otherwise. Do we have interesting dysfunctional mollusca out there?

1866 ARGYLL Reign of Law iv. (ed. 4) 185

"Adaptive colouring as a means of concealment is never applied to any
animal whose habits do not expose it to special danger."

In the old days, the country gentleman had NO DANGERS. He _had_ to adapt when dangers started to arise in the horizon. First the railways, that destroyed the peace of his acres. Then his son, who liked Jazz. Then the in-laws, which were commoner. And then the bobby box.

1875 EMERSON Lett. & Soc. Aims iv. 114

"Ah! what a plastic he is! so shifty, so adaptive!"

Oddly, if you call Joan Rivers a 'plastic' she may not feel offended.

1902 H. F. OSBORN in Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. XVI. 92

"They represent an adaptive radiation for different local habitat,
different modes of feeding, fighting, locomotion, etc."

1902 in Amer. Naturalist May 353

"One of the essential features of divergent evolution..has been termed by
the writer ‘adaptive radiation’. This term seems to express most clearly
the idea of differentiation of habit in several directions from a primitive
type."

I think I like the idea of radiation: I hope it's not harmful (as I get out of my swimming-pool library villa and travel overseas). I'd prefer to have 'radiative' as adj. 'radiatively adapt', though.

1927 HALDANE & HUXLEY Animal Biol. xi. 240

"This adaptation to different modes of life, while..we call it
specialization when we are thinking only of one species of animal, is called adaptive radiation when we are thinking of the group as a whole."

I see: then forget about it! First a pirot, then a gaggle of pirots.

1958 IRE Trans. Automatic Control Dec. 102 (title)

"A survey of *adaptive control systems. Ibid. 108/1 In answers to these
questions may lie the fundamental principles of adaptive control."

These quotes sort of start the MECHANIST conception that some philosophers
won't feel does justice to the vagaries of human experience (e.g. OAKESHOTT). And Grice does have Mechanism as one of his betes noires.

1968 Brit. Med. Bull. XXIV. 251/1

A self-optimizing (also called ‘adaptive control’) system is one that
operates by continuously maximizing an overall performance index by adjusting
the characteristics of the system.

Homeostasis: and the things we are NOT valued for, for they are AUTOMATIC, or as Kramer may prefer, cybernetic. But of course we SHOULD be valued for, for there is a designer behind them, and not always blind (blind ref. to Dawkins's happy phrase, 'the blind watchman'). (When did he boringly turn to a _professional_ atheist that will bore us, L. J.?)

1984 J. F. LAMB et al. Essent. Physiol. (ed. 2) i. 13

"Adaptive control systems are those which change to meet changing needs."

And even smarter systems are those which do NOT assume changing needs. But then they die in their smartness.

1879 LUBBOCK Scient. Lect. ii. 42

"The modifications which insect larvæ undergo may be divided into two
kinds -- developmental..and adaptational or adaptive; those which tend to suit
them to their own mode of life."

Again, larvae should not always leave us cold. A foetus should be able to adapt to what they are doing to it in the second trimester and strike back! THAT would be
adaptation to the murderers alright.

1985 A. ROSENBERG Struct. Biol. Sci. viii. 243

"Adaptationalism must be compatible with the possibility, indeed the
actuality, that many evolved structures have a present function, but were ‘not
built by natural selection for their current roles’".

Yes. As a philosopher I feel like that on occasion. I feel that 'philosopher' was 'a role' in Classical Athens -- but whatcha gonna do?!

1988 Amer. Zoologist XXVIII. 200/2

"They go on to allege that all sorts of problems with evolutionary theory,
including a blind adherence to adaptationalism..can be laid at the door of
reductionism."

Yes, there is that danger that "ADAPT" _is_ to reduce the freedom (to choose versus just 'reflex') of the human experience.

1983 Acta Biotheoretica XXXII. 217

"The conceptual analysis in the present paper has a preliminary character.
It is meant primarily as a basis for criticizing various arguments against
‘adaptationism’."

And I ALWAYS welcome 'conceptual analysis' for I think 'evolve' and 'adapt' may NEED them, even if Kramer would join Grice in "We don't care a hoot what the dictionary says!" -- or "Change the idiom if it bothers you". :). C'm on: these things bore me too, but they may not bore our occasional reader, ha!

1988 Times Lit. Suppl. 19 Aug. 911/4

"He enlists the somewhat dubious help of biological ‘adaptationism’ to
make the point that assigning a purpose to a biological trait doesn't require
knowledge of how the trait fulfils that purpose."

I buy that. We, as philosophers, don't NEED to know the 'link' -- or actual hard-ware processing of a soft-ware qualia. (cfr. Kramer on physical vs. logical devices).

1991 Nature 11 July 117/3

"In the English scientific context,..the complexities of conventional
adaptationism may be underestimated by Gould."

adaptive is "of, pertaining to, or holding a view of the evolution of
morphological features which stresses adaptation by NATURAL selection", where 'natural' should better read 'biotic'? I find 'Nature' too
metaphysical a notion to be used so freely? Perhaps not. (I don't want to regiment discourse! -- even if that's what Grice may be seen as doing on occasion!)

1978 Sci. Amer. Sept. 161/1

"Their work is informed by the adaptationist program, and their aim is to
explain particular anatomical features by showing that they are well suited
to the function they perform."

Employees ALWAYS find that they are well suited to the function they perform. Yet Murphy (of the infamous law) warns us: they are UNDER-qualified. For each employee you can see that it's well suited to perform a LOWER function that she won't!

1983 Man XVIII. 786/2

"La Fontaine may well choose not to identify with the adaptationist
paradigm..but this should not lead her to characterise the biological approach as
in any sense pitted against cultural explanations."

Good: I can't think what 'cultural' he's talking since he wrote about _animals_, mainly, right?

1987 Nature 9 July 121/2

"Foley's approach to evolution is strictly neo-darwinian and (despite his
protestations) equally strictly adaptationist."

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

1988 J. GLEICK Chaos 201

"So an adaptationist explanation for the shape of an organism or the
function of an organ always looks to its cause, not its physical cause but its
final cause."

THIS IS GOOD, for it relates to TELEOLOGY (Finitism? The twin bete noire to Mechanism). No adaptation talk without teleology. And 'cause', some say, IS 'final' simpliciter (e.g. "I have a cause to go to war. My brother was killed by The Germans")

The OED defines the type, "one who stresses the role of adaptation in evolution, esp. one who holds that every morphological feature of an organism is the result of adaptation for a specific purpose."

1982 R. DAWKINS Extended Phenotype iii. 31

"History seems to be on the side of the adaptationists, in the sense that in particular instances they have confounded the scoffers again and again."

I suppose that is good but the meaning escapes me. Exegesis welcome. But I do love his idea of the extended phenotype. It sounds oxymoronic enough! (cfr. "etended Griceanism" -- extended memotype). (I also love the root, 'phen-' as in phenotype).

1982 New Scientist 6 May 360/2

"The cladist uses his method to construct a taxonomy; the comparative adaptationist inverts the technique."

1983 THORNHILL & ALCOCK Evolution Insect Mating Syst. i. 11

"An extreme adaptationist would interpret this behavior in the following
way."

In "Ecology", the OED notes it's "one who believes that human beings will
adapt their behaviour to accommodate changing climatic conditions. Chiefly
N. Amer." and Ireland (see Lucy Weir Bingham-McAndrew).

1991 Washington Post 22 Sept. C1/2

"A temperature rise of two or three or four degrees spread out over 50 or
60 years? No big deal, say these adaptationists."

Just joking. Lucy is not one of THOSE adaptationists.

1991 Gazette (Montreal) 16 Oct. B2/5

"The point of view of the so-called ‘adaptationist’ is not only
shortsighted but also stupid."

I told'ya! But is Jeremy Bowman, of CHORA, one?

1992 Washington Times 19 June F2/5

"Stephen Schneider was one of the first ‘adaptationists’ (i.e.,
moderates) in the global warming debate."

One of the first? I think he WAS *the* first! (or perhaps he wasn't)

1881 Harper's Mag. Apr. 645

"He possessed plenty of that Yankee adaptativeness."

But he wouln't wear the Little Lord Fountleroy costume -- even in Halloween.

The poets use "adaptedness"

1842 MRS. BROWNING Grk. Chr. Poets 129

"A hedge-thorn catches sheep's wool by position and approximation rather
than adaptitude."

1852 BROWNING Ess. on Shelley (1881) 16

"A profound sensibility and adaptitude for act."

1863 J. C. JEAFFRESON Everard's Dau. xiii. 221

"The man had..a subtle adaptiveness as well as sincere desire to please."

This is more like what the philosopher R. Thomason calles 'accomodation'.

1878 C. STANFORD Symb. Christ vi. 172

"The Saviour's words have minutely particular adaptiveness to every moment
of the soul's history."

1879 CARPENTER Ment. Physiol. I. ii. §70. 74

"The adaptiveness of the movements is no proof of the existence of
consciousness."

Indeed. But then, nothing may be said to be proof of the existence of consciousness. Especially after he underwent the coma that led to his death.

1917 A. DUANE Fuchs's Textbk. Ophthalm. (ed. 5) ii. 127

"A better instrument than Förster's is the adaptometer of Nagel."

Only it's more otiose, i.e. more expensive.

1928 R. J. E. SCOTT Gould's Med. Dict. (ed. 2) 31/2

"Adaptometer, an instrument for measuring the time taken in retinal
adaptation."

Especially necessary when reading Deutero-Chinese poetry (in the original), if you don't practice the language often enough.

1934 H. C. WARREN Dict. Psychol. 6/1

"Adaptometer, any device for measuring the course or degree of sensory
adaptation, in terms of fall or rise of threshold or sensitivity."

Good for squintessential rainbow-watchers.

1942 Brit. Jrnl. Psychol. July 4

"Certain hysterical and pathological eye conditions undoubtedly affect
adaptometer results."

On the contrary, I'd say that, if anyone, Dalton needs one.

OK: I still haven't found the relevant Gricean quotes on adaptiveness but I will.