While developments of a shared intellectual tradition, the enactivist approach and the organizational account proffer importantly different accounts of organismic normativity. Where enactivists tend to follow Hans Jonas, Andres Weber, and Francisco Varela in grounding intrinsic affordance norms in existential concern, organizational theorists such as Alvaro Moreno, Matteo Mossio, and Leonardo Bich seek a more deflationary account of these normative phenomena. Critiques directed at both of these accounts of organismic normativity motivate the introduction of the precedential account of organismic normativity, (...) which I nevertheless locate within the enactivist approach, broadly construed. After detailing empirical evidence that would seem to vindicate the precedential account, I explore some of its implications. (shrink)

An abbreviated history of marriage helps motivate the question of whether ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage could qualify as stages of the same (token) institution despite carrying significantly different functions, deontological powers, and constitutive rules. Having raised the question of institutional identity over time, I proceed to answer the question by appealing to Kurt Lewin's notion of genidentity. Lewin intends the notion of genidentity to track the spatiotemporal unfolding of different physical and biological processes, such as ontogenesis. I (...) extend the notion of genidentity to the institutional sphere by identifying two ‘re-anchoring mechanisms’ that would describe the conditions under which institutions with different characteristics could nevertheless qualify as the same institution across time. First, formal institutions can be re-anchored by way of a self-amending secondary rule. Second, informal institutions can be re-anchored by leveraging the inherent indeterminacy of the exemplars that indexically define them. I then argue ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage are genidentical in virtue of the actions of a (mostly) informal re-anchoring mechanism. (shrink)

Against the neo-Darwinian assumption that genetic factors are the principal source of variation upon which natural selection operates, a phenotype-first hypothesis strikes us as revolutionary because development would seem to constitute an independent source of variability. Richard Watson and his co-authors have argued that developmental memory constitutes one such variety of phenotypic variability. While this version of the phenotype-first hypothesis is especially well-suited for the late metazoan context, where animals have a sufficient history of selection from which to draw, appeals (...) to developmental memory seem less plausible in the evolutionary context of the early metazoans. I provide an interpretation of Stuart Newman’s account of deep metazoan phylogenesis that suggests that spandrels are, in addition to developmental memory, an important reservoir of phenotypic variability. I conclude by arguing that Gerd Müller’s “side-effect hypothesis” is an illuminating generalization of the proposed non-Watsonian version of the phenotype-first hypothesis. (shrink)