The quote in the subject line was (is?) a slogan that Massachusetts egg farmers offered in Massachusetts shoppers trying to get them to buy their eggs. It came with a ditty which, if you call me up, I will happily sing for you. The back story is that the factory egg producers in neighboring NY used chickens that produced white eggs. Like as not, if you were eating a white egg in MA you were eating an egg that had been shipped in from NY, hence longer in transit. So, if the campaign were successful, shoppers would seek out brown eggs because of their color. Brownness in eggs would be their cue for purchase. If the campaign worked, the freshness would become epiphenonmenal with respect to their selection criteria. From the point of view of Massachusetts egg-producers, the brownness of the eggs was epiphenomenal. All they cared about is whether the eggs sold in MA were from MA This would of course break down if NY farmers started using chickens that laid brown eggs or Massachusetts farmers started storing eggs before shipping them.
At Friday’s meeting, my mentors urged me to get off the “epiphenomenon” kick. I suppose I could instead use the language of semeiotics. [Pause for moaning in the distance.] In this case we could say that the producers were trying to make brownness a sign of value in eggs. This works for two quite distinct reasons: it works for the consumer because the brown is a sign of local and local is a sign of fresh; it works for the producers because brown is a sign of eggs that come from their farms.
Instead of semiotic language, we could use the language of intension and extension. [More anguished groans] The marketing campaign works because although the intensions of the choices of the two agents are different, these intensions are both part of the extension of brown eggs in Massachusetts.
Note also that the slogan is an example of powers and perils of abduction. The sloganeer first abduces that brown eggs are local and from that category (local eggs) deduces that the eggs are fresh. The two steps in the abduction/deduction process are
These eggs are brown; local eggs are brown; these eggs are local;
Local eggs are fresh; these [brown] eggs are local; these [brown] eggs are fresh.
The point (to me) is that there is a very simple thread underlying all of these ways of talking about natural selection phenomena. Could all this baroque verbiage be reduced to a simple formula?
Years ago I wrote a paper that reduced the terminology of bird song down to three operations and 5 levels of organization. In short, the paper showed that while scientists had been using several dozen terms, they had, along, only been talking about three different sorts of thing. That is the sort of reduction I would like to do on all this talk of epiphenomena, intension, extension, function, purpose, cue, side-effect, spandrel, exaptation, blah, blah-blah, and blah-blah-blah.
Thanks for allowing me to think in your space and on your time.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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