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  1. Rescuing Proper Functions.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2022 - Australasian Philosophical Review 6 (4):360-366.
    This is a response to Christie, Brusse, et al., ‘Are biological traits explained by their “selected effect” functions?’ The interest of their paper is that it draws our attention to those cases in which changes in a population that are brought about by natural selection in turn bring about changes in the environment that alter the selectionist pressures that were responsible for the original changes. Much of the paper, however, is an argument that the notion of a ‘proper function’ introduced (...)
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  • Bad Feelings, Best Explanations: In Defence of the Propitiousness Theory of the Low Mood System.James Turner - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-26.
    There are three main accounts of the proper function of the low mood system (LMS): the social risk theory, the disease theory, and the propitiousness theory. Adjudicating between these accounts has proven difficult, as there is little agreement in the literature about what a theory of the LMS’s proper function is supposed to explain. In this article, drawing upon influential work on the evolution of other affective systems, such as the disgust system and the fear system, I argue that a (...)
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  • Are Biology Experts and Novices Function Pluralists?Andrew J. Roberts & Pierrick Bourrat - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-19.
    Philosophers have proposed many accounts of biological function. A coarse-grained distinction can be made between backward-looking views, which emphasise historical contributions to fitness, and forward-looking views, which emphasise the current contribution to fitness or role of a biological component within some larger system. These two views are often framed as being incompatible and conflicting with one another. The emerging field of synthetic biology, which involves applying engineering principles to the design and construction of biological systems, complicates things further by adding (...)
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