In philosophy and in robotics, this is called the frame problem. This is where Peterson gets into functionality and may be the principle you're trying to dig out....
Frame problem:
http://groups.umd.umich.edu/cis/course.des/cis479/projects/frame/welcome.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/
this is part of what I want to get at. This pruning process in decision making where we determine what’s relevant and what’s not is definitely a question that I want to see answered by Peterson. The answers that I’ve typically seen from him are of the sort of just simple self preservation (of an individual, of a group, of society, whatever).
The ‘functionalism’ I’m talking about is the social ontology that Peterson subscribes to.* If we explain social phenomena like this: “conservative political movements play a role in the preservation of human life by incubating society in times of natural disaster/disease” - that means that we understand certain premises of society to hold, namely:
i) social phenomena are primarily understood by the particular role they play as part of a whole
ii) this ‘whole’ can be construed as a kind of organism that logically precedes its constituent parts and strives toward some goal, as opposed to a machine which would entail more of a bottom up approach and is more agnostic with respect to ends
iii) this end/goal/telos can be realized without any of the parts (so, including individual agents) actually knowing what it is, or how to realize it
and I think we can tentatively posit iv) this end is infinite self perpetuation
The points I’m raising are that iii, above, directly conflicts with his imperative on setting ones house in order before passing judgment on what needs to be changed. You totally don’t need to thoroughly understand a problem if The Good can be realized without it being consciously pursued. If you want a coherent worldview, you need to toss one of these out, and if it’s iii that gets tossed out, then that has consequences for Peterson’s functionalism. If intentionality is sacrosanct, then the genetic understanding of moral truth is undermined to the extent that it relies upon people unwittingly transmitting information across generations.
I also want to know where he’s getting iv from, to what extent he’s actually committed to it, and whether or not he provides alternatives to it. Because from what I’ve seen, for Peterson, self preservation is both the criterion to diagnose whether the good is being realized and is the actual good itself. I want to know if that’s actually the case.
Those are the two main points I’m wondering about.**
The water bot is more functional towards the accomplishment. However, maybe the protest is really more about feeling like you're doing something. The protest is functional towards that. (Even though it really may not be helping the ocean.)
right, this is exactly my point. Protesting could really be about something else. Or it could be about saving the ocean but it gets at it indirectly in a cunning of reason type of way. But given Peterson’s hostility to it here, it seems that he doesn’t think either of those to be the case. So, if we want to be consistent functionalists here, then we explain this by saying that not all social phenomena serve roles that realize society’s end/goal/telos. This is perfectly fine. But it raises the question how we can know which movements/events/whatever have functions in this organism we call society and which don’t.
*or, more accurately, sometimes subscribes to. I don’t think he’s consistent on this and flip flops on his view of what social reality really ‘is’. Sometimes he’s an organic functionalist, sometimes he’s and out and out positivist.
**i also think you might could get away with saying that ii has a sort of tension with his Cold War like taxonomy where collectivism = bad. But I’m not sure how serious this tension might be