This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views.

Teleological terms such as "function" and "design" appear frequently in the biological sciences. Examples of teleological claims include: A (biological) function of stotting by antelopes is to communicate to predators that they have been detected. Eagles' wings are (naturally) designed for soaring. Teleological notions were commonly associated with the pre-Darwinian view that the biological realm provides evidence of conscious design by a supernatural creator. Even after creationist viewpoints were rejected by most biologists there remained various grounds for concern about the (...) role of teleology in biology, including whether such terms are: 1. vitalistic (positing some special "life-force"); 2. requiring backwards causation (because future outcomes explain present traits); 3. incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); 4. mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none); 5. empirically untestable (for all the above reasons). Opinions divide over whether Darwin's theory of evolution provides a means of eliminating teleology from biology, or whether it provides a naturalistic account of the role of teleological notions in the science. Many contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology believe that teleological notions are a distinctive and ineliminable feature of biological explanations but that it is possible to provide a naturalistic account of their role that avoids the concerns above. Terminological issues sometimes serve to obscure some widely-accepted distinctions. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this ‘ontological problem’, a splitting account has been proposed, according to which the two kinds of functions (...) require distinct organizational definitions. In this article, we propose a solution for the ontological problem, by arguing that intra- and cross-generation functions can be said to contribute in the same way to the maintenance of the biological organization, characterized in terms of organizational self-maintenance. As a consequence, we suggest maintaining a unified organizational account of biological functions. (shrink)

In contrast to the “normativist” view, “naturalist” theorists claim that the concept of health refers to natural or normal states and propose different characterizations of healthy and diseased conditions that are meant to be objectivist and biologically grounded. In this article, we examine the core concept of these naturalist accounts of disease, i.e., the concept of biological malfunction, and develop a new formulation of the notion of malfunction following the recent organizational approach to functions in the philosophy of biology. We (...) focus on the notions of adaptive regulation and functional presupposition to develop a new conceptual framework that justifies the ascription of malfunctional behaviors to biological systems according to the embodied normativity of biological organizations. (shrink)

The possibility of group minds or group mental states has been considered by a number of authors addressing issues in social epistemology and related areas (Goldman 2004, Pettit 2003, Gilbert 2004, Hutchins 1995). An appeal to group minds might, in the end, do indispensable explanatory work in the social or cognitive sciences. I am skeptical, though, and this essay lays out some of the reasons for my skepticism. The concerns raised herein constitute challenges to the advocates of group minds (or (...) group mental states), challenges that might be overcome as theoretical and empirical work proceeds. Nevertheless, these hurdles are, I think, genuine and substantive, so much so that my tentative conclusion will not be optimistic. If a group mind is supposed to be a single mental system having two or more minds as proper parts,¹ the prospects for group minds seem dim. (shrink)

Causal theories of mental content (CTs) ground certain aspects of a concept's meaning in the causal relations a concept bears to what it represents. Section 1 explains the problems CTs are meant to solve and introduces terminology commonly used to discuss these problems. Section 2 specifies criteria that any acceptable CT must satisfy. Sections 3, 4, and 5 critically survey various CTs, including those proposed by Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, Ruth Garrett Millikan, David Papineau, Dennis Stampe, Dan Ryder, and the (...) author himself. The final section considers general objections to the causal approach. (shrink)

Our aim in the present paper is to approach the nature of life from the perspective of autonomy, showing that this perspective can be helpful for overcoming the traditional Cartesian gap between the physical and cognitive domains. We first argue that, although the phenomenon of life manifests itself as highly complex and multidimensional, requiring various levels of description, individual organisms constitute the core of this multifarious phenomenology. Thereafter, our discussion focuses on the nature of the organization of individual living entities, (...) proposing autonomy as the main concept to grasp it. In the second part of the article we show how autonomy is also fundamental to explaining major evolutionary transitions, in an attempt to rethink evolution from the point of view of the organizational structure of the entities/organisms involved. This gives further support to the idea of autonomy not only as a key to understanding life in general but also the complex expressions of it that we observe on our planet. Finally, we suggest a possible general principle that underlies those evolutionary transitions, which allow for the open-ended redefinition of autonomous systems: namely, the relative dynamic decoupling that must be articulated among distinct parts, modules or modes of operation in these systems. (shrink)

Defending or attacking either functionalism or computationalism requires clarity on what they amount to and what evidence counts for or against them. My goal here is not to evaluate their plausibility. My goal is to formulate them and their relationship clearly enough that we can determine which type of evidence is relevant to them. I aim to dispel some sources of confusion that surround functionalism and computationalism, recruit recent philosophical work on mechanisms and computation to shed light on them, and (...) clarify how functionalism and computationalism may or may not legitimately come together. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of computing, namely, doing (...) justice to the practices of computer scientists and computability theorists. It is also an application of recent literature on mechanisms, because it assimilates computational explanation to mechanistic explanation. The account can be used to individuate computing mechanisms and the functions they compute and to taxonomize computing mechanisms based on their computing power. (shrink)

According to pancomputationalism, everything is a computing system. In this paper, I distinguish between different varieties of pancomputationalism. I find that although some varieties are more plausible than others, only the strongest variety is relevant to the philosophy of mind, but only the most trivial varieties are true. As a side effect of this exercise, I offer a clarified distinction between computational modelling and computational explanation.<br><br>.

Functional language is ubiquitous in ecology, mainly in the researches about biodiversity and ecosystem function. However, it has not been adequately investigated by ecologists or philosophers of ecology. In the contemporary philosophy of ecology we can recognize a kind of implicit consensus about this issue: while the etiological approaches cannot offer a good concept of function in ecology, Cummins’ systemic approach can. Here we propose to go beyond this implicit consensus, because we think these approaches are not adequate for ecology. (...) We argue that a sound epistemological framework to function in ecology is to be found in organizational approaches. In this line, we define function in ecology as a precise effect of a given constraint on the ecosystem flow of matter and energy performed by a given item of biodiversity, within a closure of constraints. We elaborate on this definition by developing a case study of a bromeliad ecosystem. (shrink)

Although it may seem like a truism to assert that biology is the science that studies organisms, during the second half of the twentieth century the organism category disappeared from biological theory. Over the past decade, however, biology has begun to witness the return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept. There are three major causes: (a) the realization that the Modern Synthesis does not provide a fully satisfactory understanding of evolution; (b) the growing awareness of the limits of (...) reductionism in molecular biology; and (c) the renewed interest in the nature of life as a genuine scientific problem. This essay examines these recent developments and considers the new epistemological roles being played by the organism in each of them. It also reflects on what the present resurgence of the organism means for the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In (...) developmental biology the MCO underlies a logically incoherent model of ontogeny, the genetic program, which serves to legitimate three problematic theses about development: genetic animism, neo-preformationism, and developmental computability. In evolutionary biology the MCO is responsible for grounding unwarranted theoretical appeals to the concept of design as well as to the interpretation of natural selection as an engineer, which promote a distorted understanding of the process and products of evolutionary change. Overall, it is argued that, despite its heuristic value, the MCO today is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems. (shrink)

The machine conception of the organism (MCO) is one of the most pervasive notions in modern biology. However, it has not yet received much attention by philosophers of biology. The MCO has its origins in Cartesian natural philosophy, and it is based on the metaphorical redescription of the organism as a machine. In this paper I argue that although organisms and machines resemble each other in some basic respects, they are actually very different kinds of systems. I submit that the (...) most significant difference between organisms and machines is that the former are intrinsically purposive whereas the latter are extrinsically purposive. Using this distinction as a starting point, I discuss a wide range of dissimilarities between organisms and machines that collectively lay bare the inadequacy of the MCO as a general theory of living systems. To account for the MCO’s prevalence in biology, I distinguish between its theoretical, heuristic, and rhetorical functions. I explain why the MCO is valuable when it is employed heuristically but not theoretically, and finally I illustrate the serious problems that arise from the rhetorical appeal to the MCO. (shrink)

Since Darwin it is widely accepted that natural selection (NS) is the most important mechanism to explain how biological organisms—in their amazing variety—evolve and, therefore, also how the complexity of certain natural systems can increase over time, creating ever new functions or functional structures/relationships. Nevertheless, the way in which NS is conceived within Darwinian Theory already requires an open, wide enough, functional domain where selective forces may act. And, as the present paper will try to show, this becomes even more (...) evident if one looks into the problem of origins. If there was a time when NS was not operating (as it is quite reasonable to assume), where did that initial functional diversity, necessary to trigger off the process, come from? Self-organization processes may be part of the answer, as many authors have claimed in recent years, but surely not the complete one. We will argue here that a special type of self-maintaining organization, arising from the interplay among a set of different endogenously produced constraints (pre-enzymatic catalysts and primitive compartments included), is required for the appearance of functional diversity in the first place. Starting from that point, NS can progressively lead to new (and, at times, also more complex) organizations that, in turn, provide wider functional variety to be selected for, enlarging in this way the range of action and consequences of the mechanism of NS, in a kind of mutually enhancing effect. (shrink)

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory (...) of compositional hierarchies. (shrink)

Looking for an adequate explication of the concept of a biological function, several authors have proposed to link function to design. Unfortunately, known explications of biological design in turn refer to functions. The concept of general design I will introduce here breaks up this circle. I specify design with respect to its ontogenetic role. This allows function to be based on design without making reference to the history of the design, or to the phylogeny of an organism, while retaining the (...) normative aspect of function ascriptions. The concept is applicable to the function and design of technical artifacts as well. Several problems well known with other definitions can be overcome by this approach. (shrink)

Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic (...) biological organisms, but it also reveals insights that are of broader relevance: (1) aetiological accounts of biological function need to omit or reinterpret reference to natural selection. This results in complete continuity between aetiological analyses of function in engineering and philosophy; (2) considering synthetic biology prompts interesting further questions about heritability, ancestry, and biological individuals; and (3) accounts of disease as biological dysfunction do not straightforwardly map onto our intuitive health and disease judgments regarding non‐human animals. In response to the latter point I examine three possible avenues, and tentatively defend one on behalf of the ‘disease as dysfunction’ theorist. (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

Recently, psychological phenomena have been expanded to new domains, crisscrossing boundaries of organizational levels, with the emergence of areas such as social personality and ecosystem learning. In this contribution, we analyze the ascription of an individual-based concept (personality) to the social level. Although justified boundary crossings can boost new approaches and applications, the indiscriminate misuse of concepts refrains the growth of scientific areas. The concept of social personality is based mainly on the detection of repeated group differences across a population, (...) in a direct transposition of personality concepts from the individual to the social level. We show that this direct transposition is problematic for avowing the nonsensical ascription of personality even to simple electronic devices. To go beyond a metaphoric use of social personality, we apply the organizational approach to a review of social insect communication networks. Our conceptual analysis shows that socially self-organized systems, such as isolated ant trails and bee’s recruitment groups, are too simple to have social personality. The situation is more nuanced when measuring the collective choice between nest sites or foraging patches: some species show positive and negative feedbacks between two or more self-organized social structures so that these co-dependent structures are inter-related by second-order, social information systems, complying with a formal requirement for having social personality: the social closure of constraints. Other requirements include the decoupling between individual and social dynamics, and the self-regulation of collective decision processes. Social personality results to be sometimes a metaphorical transposition of a psychological concept to a social phenomenon. The application of this organizational approach to cases of learning ecosystems, or evolutionary learning, could help to ground theoretically the ascription of psychological properties to levels of analysis beyond the individual, up to meta-populations or ecological communities. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the explanatory powers of theories of function in the context of products that may result from synthetic biology. The aim is not to develop a new theory of functions, but to assess existing theories of function in relation to a new kind of biological and artifactual entity that might be produced in the not-too-distant future by means of synthetic biology. The paper thus investigates how to conceive of the functional nature of living systems that are (...) not the result of evolution by natural selection, or instantly generated by cosmic coincidence, but which are products of intelligent design. The paper argues that the aetiological theory of proper functions in organisms and artifacts is inadequate as an account of proper functions in such ‘Paley organisms’ and defends an alternative organisational approach. The paper ends by considering the implications of the discussion of biological function for questions about the interests and moral status of non-sentient organisms. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the aetiological account of biological interests, developed by Varner, in the context of artefactual organisms envisioned by current research in synthetic biology. In “Sections 2–5”, I present Varner's theory and criticise it for being incapable of ascribing non-derivative interests to artefactual organisms due to their lack of a history of natural selection. In “Sections 6–7”, I develop a new alternative to Varner's account, building on the organisational theory of biological teleology and function. I argue that (...) the organisational account of biological interest is superior to Varner's aetiological account because it can accommodate both artefactual and naturally evolved organisms, provides a non-arbitrary and practical way of determining biological interests, supports the claim that organisms have interests in a sense in which artefacts do not, and avoids the possibility of there being a conflict between what an organismic part is supposed to do and what is in the interest of the organism. (shrink)

In this paper, we bring together the concepts of affordance from ecological psychology and function from the organizational approach to philosophy of biology into a single integrative framework. This integration allows us to account for the biological basis of the notion of affordance, offering theoretical tools to address the normative interrelations between organisms and their environments.

Dobzhansky argued that biology only makes sense if life on earth has a shared history. But his dictum is often reinterpreted to mean that biology only makes sense in the light of adaptation. Some philosophers of science have argued in this spirit that all work in ‘proximal’ biosciences such as anatomy, physiology and molecular biology must be framed, at least implicitly, by the selection histories of the organisms under study. Others have denied this and have proposed non-evolutionary ways in which (...) biologists can frame these investigations. This paper argues that an evolutionary perspective is indeed necessary, but that it must be a forward-looking perspective informed by a general understanding of the evolutionary process, not a backward-looking perspective informed by the specific evolutionary history of the species being studied. Interestingly, it turns out that there are aspects of proximal biology that even a creationist cannot study except in the light of a theory of their effect on future evolution. (shrink)

Having an etiological function to F is sufficient to have a competence to F. Having an etiological function to reliably F is sufficient to have a reliable competence, a competence to reliably F. Epistemic warrant consists in the normal functioning of the belief-forming process when the process has forming true beliefs reliably as an etiological function. Epistemic warrant requires reliable competence. Warrant divides into two grades. The first consists in normal functioning, when the process has forming true beliefs reliably as (...) an etiological function, so that it reliably produces true beliefs when in normal conditions, but need not be in normal conditions. The second grade requires the first, and presence in normal conditions, so that the chance of true belief is high. Why is warrant normative? Because when reliably forming true beliefs is a function, both grades meet evaluative norms that follow from that function. The paper ends by comparing Tyler Burge’s answer to this question from "Perceptual Entitlement" and "Entitlement: The Basis of Empirical Warrant". It is argued that Burge’s answer implausibly presupposes that all belief-forming processes—not just those with forming reliably true beliefs as an etiological function—should form reliably true beliefs. (shrink)

Cancer biology features the ascription of normal functions to parts of cancers. At least some ascriptions of function in cancer biology track local normality of parts within the global abnormality of the aberration to which those parts belong. That is, cancer biologists identify as functions activities that, in some sense, parts of cancers are supposed to perform, despite cancers themselves having no purpose. The present paper provides a theory to accommodate these normal function ascriptions—I call it the Modeling Account of (...) Normal Function (MA). MA comprises two claims. First, normal functions are activities whose performance by the function-bearing part contributes to the self-maintenance of the whole system and, thereby, results in the continued presence of that part. Second, MA holds that models of system-level activities that are (partly) constitutive of self-maintenance are improved by including a representation of the relevant function-bearing part and by making reference to the activity/activities that part performs which contribute(s) to those system-level activities. I contrast MA with two other accounts that seek to explicate the ascription of normal functions in biology, namely, the organizational account and the selected effects account. Both struggle to extend to cancer biology. However, I offer ecumenical readings which allow them to recover some ascriptions of normal function to parts of cancers. So, though I contend that MA excels in this respect, the purpose of this paper is served if it provides materials for bridging the gap between cancer biology, philosophy of cancer, and the literature on function. (shrink)

I distinguish two forms of pluralism about biological functions, between-discipline pluralism and within-discipline pluralism. Between-discipline pluralism holds that different theories of function are appropriate for different subdisciplines of biology and psychology. I provide reasons for rejecting this view. Instead, I recommend within-discipline pluralism, which emphasizes the plurality of function concepts at play within any given subdiscipline of biology and psychology.

Over the last 20 years, several philosophers have developed a new approach to biological functions, the organizational approach. This is not a single theory but a family of theories based on the idea that a trait token can acquire a function by virtue of the way it contributes to a complex, organized system and thereby to its own continued persistence as a token. I argue that the organizational approach faces a serious liberality objection. I examine three different ways organizational theorists (...) have tried to avoid that objection and show how they fail. (shrink)

I present and defend the generalized selected effects theory (GSE) of function. According to GSE, the function of a trait consists in the activity that contributed to its bearer’s differential reproduction, or differential retention, within a population. Unlike the traditional selected effects (SE) theory, it does not require that the functional trait helped its bearer reproduce; differential retention is enough. Although the core theory has been presented previously, I go significantly beyond those presentations by providing a new argument for GSE (...) and defending it from a recent objection. I also sketch its implications for teleosemantics and philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...) sender triggers a change in the behaviour of the receiver that is functional for the sender itself. We critically analyse the current formulations of this account, that interpret what is functional for the sender in terms of evolutionary adaptations. Specifically, the adoption of this etiological functional framework may lead to the exclusion of several phenomena usually studied as instances of communication, and possibly even of entire fields of investigation such as synthetic biology. As an alternative, we reframe the influence approach in organisational terms, characterising functions in terms of contributions to the current organisation of a biological system. We develop a theoretical account of biological communication in which communicative functions are distinguished from other types of biological functions described by the organisational account (e.g. metabolic, ecological, etc.). The resulting organisational-influence approach allows to carry out causal analyses of current instances of phenomena of communication, without the need to provide etiological explanations. In such a way it makes it possible to understand in terms of communication those phenomena which realise interactive patterns typical of signalling interactions – and are usually studied as such in scientific practice – despite not being the result of evolutionary adaptations. Moreover, this approach provides operational tools to design and study communicative interactions in experimental fields such as synthetic biology. (shrink)

A meaningful distinction can be made between functions and mere effects in biological systems without resorting to teleological arguments: (i) biological systems must cope with a multitude of problems or they will cease to exist; (ii) the solutions to these problems invariably depend on circular causal chains (“feedback loops”); and (iii) biological functions are attributes of elements in biological systems that have an effect which, by contributing to the correcting behavior of a feedback control system, assists in solving a biological (...) problem. The analysis is applied to several biological systems. The proposed solution is discussed primarily in its relation to two popular approaches to the concept of biological function, i.e., the “causal role accounts” and the “selected effect accounts”. (shrink)

This paper criticizes Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder by arguing that the conceptual linkage it establishes between the medical concepts of health and disorder and the prudential notions of well-being and harm makes the account inapplicable to nonsentient organisms, such as plants, fungi, and many invertebrate animals. Drawing on a previous formulation of this criticism by Christopher Boorse, and noting that Wakefield could avoid it if he adopted a partly biofunction-based account of interests like that often advocated in (...) the field of environmental ethics, I argue that integrating such an account of interests into the HDA would generate serious concerns. Specifically, it would make dysfunction sufficient for disorder and so reestablish between dysfunction and disorder precisely the kind of sufficiency relation that harm-requiring accounts of disorder strive to avoid; blur the line between the HDA’s dysfunction and harm components and, in so doing, deprive the HDA of its alleged main advantage over monistic dysfunction-based accounts of disorders like Boorse’s; and tie the HDA to an understanding of harm that is in itself problematic. I argue that these three concerns, and the dilemmas they generate, rob the HDA of much of its prima facie appeal, ultimately indicating that a satisfactory account of disorder should most likely eschew all references to prudential notions of well-being and harm. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of ecologist Charles Elton’s “functional” concept of the niche and of the notion of function implicitly associated with it. It does so in part by situating Elton’s niche concept within the broader context of the “functionalist-interactionist” approach to ecology he introduced, and in relation to his views on the relationship between ecology and evolution. This involves criticizing the common claim that Elton’s idea of species as fulfilling functional roles within ecological communities committed him to an (...) idea of communities as units of selection. While such a claim implicitly attributes to Elton an understanding of function along the lines of the selected-effects theory of function advocated by many biologists and philosophers of biology, Elton’s use of the niche concept, I maintain, involves an understanding of function more along the lines of alternative nonselectionist theories such as the causal-role, goal-contribution, and organizational theories. I also briefly discuss how ecologists after Elton also tend to have typically adopted a nonselectionist understanding of the function concept, similar to his. (shrink)

We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ ability to thrive and perpetuate themselves. While Bigelow and Pargetter’s account (...) focused on functional organization at the level of organisms, we argue that such an account can be extended to functional organization at the community and ecosystem levels in a way that broadens the scope of the reconciliation between ecosystem ecology and evolutionary biology envisioned by many BEF researchers. By linking an evolutionary forward-looking account of functions to the persistence-based understanding of evolution defended by Bouchard and others, and to the theoretical research on complex adaptive systems, we argue that ecosystems, by forming more or less resilient assemblages, can evolve even while they do not reproduce and form lineages. We thus propose a Persistence Enhancing Propensity account of role functions in ecology to account for this overlap of evolutionary and ecological processes. (shrink)

I defend and revise the systematic account of normative functions (teleofunctions), as recently developed by Gerhard Schlosser and by W. D. Christensen and M. H. Bickhard. This account proposes that teleofunctions are had by structures that play certain kinds of roles in complex systems. This theory is an alternative to the historical etiological account of teleofunctions, developed by Ruth Millikan and others. The historical etiological account is susceptible to a general ontological problem that has been under-appreciated, and that offers important (...) reasons to adopt the systematic account. However, the systematic account must be revised to allow for two distinct kinds of teleofunctions in order to avoid another ontological problem. (shrink)

Perhaps the most familiar understanding of “naturalism” derives from Quine, understanding it as a continuity of empirical theories of the world as described through the scientific method. So, it might be surprising that one of the most important naturalistic moral realists, Philippa Foot, rejects standard evolutionary biology in her justly lauded _Natural Goodness_. One of her main reasons for this is the true claim that humans can flourish (eudaimonia) without reproducing, which she claims cannot be squared with evolutionary theory and (...) biology more generally. The present argument concludes that Foot was wrong to reject evolutionary theory as the empirical foundation of naturalized eudaimonist moral realism. This is based on contemporary discussion of _biological function_ and _evolutionary fitness_, from which a definition of “eudaimonia” is constructed. This gives eudaimonist moral realism an empirically respectable foundation. (shrink)

To ascribe a telos is to ascribe a norm or standard of performance. That fact underwrites the plausibility of, say, teleological theories of mind. Teleosemantics, for example, relies on the normative character of teleology to solve the problem of “intentional inexistence”: a misrepresentation is just a malfunction. If the teleological ascriptions of such theories to natural systems, e.g., the neurological structures of the brain, are to be literally true, then it must be literally true that norms can exist independent of (...) intentional and psychological agency. Davies, for one, has argued that such norms are impossible within a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, teleological theories of mind, for example, cannot be literally true. I will show, however, that the truth conditions on normative statements do not presuppose intentional and psychological agency and, further, that a selectional regime is one naturalistic mechanism that satisfies those truth conditions. Norms, then, exist in the world independent of intentional and psychological agency. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a recent theory on functions called Organizational Account. This theory seeks to provide a new definition of function that overcomes the distinction between etiological and dispositional accounts and that could be used in biology as well as in technology. I present a definition of function that I think captures the intuitions of Organizational Accounts and consider several objections.

We argue that cognitive functions are not reducible to biological functionality. Since only neural animals can develop complex forms of agency, we assume that genuinely cognitive processes are deeply related with the activity of the nervous system. We first analyze the significance of the appearance of the nervous system in certain multicellular organisms, arguing that it has changed the logic of their biological organization. Then, we focus on the appearance of specifically cognitive capacities within the nervous system. Considering a case (...) of a minimal form of perceptual representation, we analyze the specific functional role of this minimal form of activity in relatively earlier nervous systems, arguing that though this role is only understandable within a biological organization, yet it is not reducible to the underlying biological functionality. Finally, we conclude that the appearance of cognition is in turn linked to the emergence of an autonomous neurodynamic domain and a qualitative change in body complexity. (shrink)