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Biofunctions: Two Paradigms
Abstract
Applications to biological systems of Robert Cummins’s notion of ‘function’ from his classic paper ‘Functional Analysis’ (Cummins 1975) and of my notion ‘proper function’ from Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (LTOBC) (Millikan 1984) are discussed and compared. Neither notion is fully determinate in its application to life forms, always cutting decisively between ‘functions’ of the designated kind and ‘mere effects’. Nor do we need a notion of function in biology that is fully deter-minate in this way. The dimensions of indeterminacy for both concepts are explored.
... Some philosophers, in particular Ruth Millikan, claim to have defined " function " in non-normative, descriptive or naturalistic terms. Millikan's aim is to account for the normativity – the goal or purpose and standard of success, i.e., what counts as a good, wellfunctioning item and what counts as a bad, malfunctioning one – of natural processes in nonnormative terms (Millikan 1989Millikan , 2002). She argues that the function of a mammalian heart is to pump blood only if or just in case all the following four conditions are fulfilled (Millikan 1989: 288): 11 ...
Feminist theory needs a constructivist account of biological sex for at least two reasons. The first is that as long as female and male are the only two sexes that are taken for granted, being cisgender, heterosexual, and preferably a parent will be the norm, and being intersexed, transgender, bi- or homosexual, infertile or voluntarily childless will be deemed failure. The second is the fact that, usually, sex and gender come together in the way that is expected, i.e. the fact that most females are women and most males are men needs to be explained. This paper provides a constructivist theory of sex, which is that the sex categories depend on norms of reproduction. I argue that, because the sex categories are defined according to the two functions or causal roles in reproduction, and biological function is a teleological concept involving purposes, goals, and values, female and male are normative categories. As there are no norms or values in nature, normative categories are social constructions; hence, female and male are not natural but social categories. Once we understand that biological normativity is social, biological norms of heterosexuality, fertility, and so on are no longer incontestable. In addition, as many gender norms also concern reproduction—socially mediated reproduction—this simple theory of sex explains the common confluence of sex and gender.
The etiological account of teleological function is beset by several difficulties, which I propose to solve by grafting onto the etiological theory a subordinated goal-contribution clause. This approach enables us to ascribe neither too many teleofunctions nor too few; to give a unitary, one-clause analysis that works just as well for teleological functions derived from Darwinian evolution, as for those derived from human intention; and finally, to save the etiological theory from falsification, by explaining how, in spite of appearances, the theory can allow for evolutionary function loss.
The main misunderstanding of the etiological conception of the concept of function is to confuse this notion with the concept of adaptation. The explanations by natural selection do not justify function attributions: They explain the configuration of an organic structure by considerations that, among other elements, also include references to the functional performance of this structure. That is why, the best manner of characterizing them is to say that they are design explanations. However, for a correct formulation of the idea of design, it will be necessary to adopt a conception of the function attributions that could avoid the difficulties of the etiological conception. For this, it will be necessary to think of functions as causal roles.
The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to make sense of them both as natural phenomena.
The distinction between causal role (CR) and selected effect (SE) functions is typically framed in terms of their respective explanatory roles. However, much of the controversy over functions in genomics takes place in an investigative, not an explanatory context. Specifically, the process of component-driven functional investigation begins with the designation of some genetic or epigenetic element as functional —i.e. not junk— because it possesses properties that, arguably, suggest some biologically interesting organismal effect. The investigative process then proceeds, in a bottom-up fashion, to search for those effects. I argue that this process encounters a problem reminiscent of one that Gould and Lewontin (1979) associated with the adaptationist program. Just as their stereotypical adaptationst became trapped in the myopic pursuit of one selectionist hypothesis after another, so can the investigation of CR functions in genomics lead to an unending series putative organism-level CR functions for junk DNA. This is an acute problem for genomics, because (1) eukaryotic genomes are littered with transposable elements (TEs) and their deactivated descendants which (2) often masquerade as interesting CR-functional components and (3) it is experimentally onerous to determine whether they lack such a function. I further argue that selectionist reasoning about TE-host coevolutionary dynamics can greatly streamline the investigative process. Importantly, selectionist hypotheses need not be well confirmed to be illuminating in this context. Informed selectionist reasoning about the strategic roles of TEs in the genome offers a corrective to the idea that most of our DNA is somehow CR (and possibly SE) functional for the organism.
The notion of self-organisation plays a major role in enactive cognitive science. In this paper, I review several formal models of self-organisation that various approaches in modern cognitive science rely upon. I then focus on Rosen’s account of self-organisation as closure to efficient cause and his argument that models of systems closed to efficient cause – ( M, R) systems – are uncomputable. Despite being sometimes relied on by enactivists this argument is problematic it rests on assumptions unacceptable for enactivists: that living systems can be modelled as time-invariant and material-independent. I then argue that there exists a simple and philosophically appealing reparametrisation of ( M, R)–systems that accounts for the temporal dimensions of life but renders Rosen’s argument invalid.
The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research programs are tracking the same real kind, and to maintain an ongoing commitment to interact causally with real kinds to focus reference on those kinds. A tempting view of these non-idealized epistemic conditions should be avoided: that they signal an ontological structure of the social world so plentiful that it would permit ameliorated (norm-driven, conceptually engineered) classificatory schemes to achieve their normative aims regardless of whether they defer (in ways to be described) to real-kind classificatory schemes. To ground these discussions, the essay appeals to an overlooked convergence in the systematic naturalistic frameworks of Richard Boyd and Ruth Millikan.
I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which is its psychological economy, and I point to the casual mechanisms that are the ground of the application of evolutionary game theory to linguistic phenomena. Lastly, I consider the objection that the account cannot explain predication, logic, and compositionality.
The goal of this essay is to assess the Selected-Effects Etiological Theory of biological function, according to which a trait has a function F if and only if it has been selected for F. First, I argue that this approach should be understood as describing the paradigm case of functions, rather than as establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for function possession. I contend that, interpreted in this way, the selected-effects approach can explain two central properties of functions and can satisfactorily address some recent counterexamples. This reading, however, shows that there is only a partial overlap between biological functions and selected effects, so the former cannot be reduced to the latter. Finally, I maintain that this result is still compatible with a naturalistic theory of function that appeals to some evolutionary process.
In this paper we argue that ‘informed’ consent in Big Data genomic biobanking is frequently less than optimally informative. This is due to the particular features of genomic biobanking research which render it ethically problematic. We discuss these features together with details of consent models aimed to address them. Using insights from consent theory, we provide a detailed analysis of the essential components of informed consent which includes recommendations to improve consent performance. In addition, and using insights from philosophy of mind and language and psycholinguistics we support our analyses by identifying the nature and function of concepts (ideas) operational in human cognition and language together with an implicit coding/decoding model of human communication. We identify this model as the source of patients/participants poor understanding. We suggest an alternative, explicit model of human communication, namely, that of relevance‐theoretic inference which obviates the limitations of the code model. We suggest practical strategies to assist health service professionals to ensure that the specific information they provide concerning the proposed treatment or research is used to inform participants’ decision to consent. We do not prescribe a standard, formal approach to decision‐making where boxes are ticked; rather, we aim to focus attention towards the sorts of considerations and questions that might usefully be borne in mind in any consent situation. We hope that our theorising will be of real practical benefit to nurses and midwives working on the clinical and research front‐line of genomic science.
We explore the contribution made by oscillatory, synchronous neural activity to representation in the brain. We closely examine six prominent examples of brain function in which neural oscillations play a central role, and identify two levels of involvement that these oscillations take in the emergence of representations: enabling (when oscillations help to establish a communication channel between sender and receiver, or are causally involved in triggering a representation) and properly representational (when oscillations are a constitutive part of the representation). We show that even an idealized informational sender-receiver account of representation makes the representational status of oscillations a non-trivial matter, which depends on rather minute empirical details.
We introduce a new type of pluralism about biological function that, in contrast to existing, demonstrates a practical integration among the term's different meanings. In particular, we show how to generalize Sandra Mitchell's notion of integrative pluralism to circumstances where multiple epistemic tools of the same type are jointly necessary to solve scientific problems. We argue that the multiple definitions of biological function operate jointly in this way based on how biologists explain the evolution of protein function. To clarify how our account relates to existing views, we introduce a general typology for monist and pluralist accounts along with standardized criteria for judging which is best supported by evidence.
This work challenges the underlying assumption, within traditional psychiatry, of certain cognitive deficits presumed to exist in people with autism: namely, subjects’ alleged incapacity to establish a logical categorical relationship between instance and type; part and whole; premises, inferences, and conclusions, etc. The authors draw on first-person accounts by autistic individuals to show that verbal and non-verbal behaviors that can be described as examples of deficit, are, in fact, unconventional ways of giving meaning to objects and experiences. Additionally, the authors draw attention to the fact that the term “cognition”, in the deficit hypothesis, is defined as an intellectual, exclusively logical activity. The accounts analyzed here show cognition to involve the ordering process through which subjects give coherence, regularity, and meaning to creative relationships with the environment. This ordering is pragmatic and its efficacy is related to the original and spontaneous employment of new metaphors and logical strategies.
In this paper, I show how semantic factors constrain the understanding of the computational phenomena to be explained so that they help build better mechanistic models. In particular, understanding what cognitive systems may refer to is important in building better models of cognitive processes. For that purpose, a recent study of some phenomena in rats that are capable of ‘entertaining’ future paths (Pfeiffer and Foster 2013) is analyzed. The case shows that the mechanistic account of physical computation may be complemented with semantic considerations, and in many cases, it actually should.
I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory.
This chapter is about the causal role theory of function. According to this view, roughly, a function of a part of a system consists in its contribution to some system-level effect, which effect has been picked out as especially interesting by a group of researchers. I will discuss Robert Cummins’ original formulation of the view, and then present a more sophisticated variation, the mechanistic causal role theory, due to Carl Craver and Paul Sheldon Davies. I then discuss the classic problem of overbreadth, namely, that it seems to attribute functions too liberally. I distinguish two different versions of this problem: the problem of non-functional traits and the problem of dysfunctional traits. I provide a critical assessment of the ways causal role theorists have tried to solve these problems. Many philosophers of biology today have accepted a pluralistic stance, according to which both the selected effects theory, and the causal role theory, capture important elements of biological usage. I distinguish two forms of pluralism. The first (and most popular), between-discipline pluralism, holds that the selected effects theory mainly captures the way evolutionary biologists use the term “function” and the causal role theory mainly captures the way “function” is used in other disciplines. I object to this division of labor and recommend a new form of pluralism, within-discipline pluralism, which emphasizes the co-existence of function concepts within any given discipline.
This chapter focuses on the selected effects theory of function. According to this view, a function of a trait is whatever it was selected for by natural selection or some natural process of selection. I show how the theory plausibly accounts for the explanatory and normative aspects of function. First, if a function of a trait is whatever it was selected for by natural selection, then when one attributes a function to a trait one provides a causal explanation for why the trait currently exists. Second, since the function of a trait is determined by its history rather than current performance, it is easy to see how a trait can have a function that it cannot perform (“dysfunction”). I sketch the somewhat complex historical background of this theory. The theory was actually developed by biologists throughout the twentieth century, and in the 1970s philosophers began to explore it systematically. I survey the major criticisms of the theory and show why they are not compelling. Critics say that it does not really account for the explanatory and normative features of function; that it is inconsistent with the way biologists actually use the term; that there are (real or imaginary) counterexamples; and that it is committed to adaptationism. I close by presenting a new version of the theory, the generalized selected effects theory, which shows how brain structures (such as synapses) can acquire new functions during an individual’s lifetime through a process that is analogous in some ways to natural selection itself.
One key element of Boorse’s view on health and disease is its definition of Normal Functions. In this paper, we question his reference to survival and reproduction both in this definition and within the general framework of BST. We suggest that, beyond the naturalistic stance of BST, this reference is motivated by what we may call Hempel’s problem, that is, the necessity to make explicit the background of functional ascriptions in scientific contexts. We offer reasons to doubt that Boorse’s solution of Hempel’s problem coincides with standard medical thought and we suggest an alternative.
According to the autonomous perspective, the constitutive organisation of biological systems realises an emergent regime of causation, which we labelled closure of constraints. One of the crucial implications of the realisation of closure is that, as we will argue in this chapter, it provides an adequate grounding for a distinctive feature of biological systems, namely their functionality.
Artifacts are inherently practical things, intended to be used to achieve certain kinds of ends. This is, after all, what we mean when we speak about artifactual functions that things of this sort are good for something or, to put the matter differently, that things of this sort are good for something—that is, that the function bearer is good at achieving certain related classes of ends. To possess a function is to be suited for certain specified things.
Historical accounts of biological are thought to have, as a point in their favour, their being able to accommodate malfunction. Recently, this has been brought into doubt by Paul Sheldon Davies’s argument for the claim that both selected malfunction (that of the selected functions account) and weak etiological malfunction (that of the weak etiological account), are impossible. In this paper I suggest that in light of Davies’s objection, historical accounts of biological function need to be adjusted to accommodate malfunction. I propose a historical account which places two conditions on membership of a functional kind. My claim is that it is in virtue of a trait’s meeting these conditions that it is a member of a functional kind, and can thus malfunction. I suggest that a version of my proposal can be adopted by both the selected effects and weak etiological theorists, and so conclude that such a proposal meets Davies’s objection.
In this paper, I present a new “taxonomy of functions” that reviews the different theories on functional explanations which can be found in the current debate in philosophy of biology. I begin by presenting a critical survey of the classical ways of interpreting the notion of function (the “causal-role” and the “evolutionary” approaches) under the light of the current theoretical proposals. I then analyze the major novelty in the philosophical discussion on functions: the Organizational Approach. According to organizational theories, a function is a disposition of a particular current biological trait that has explanatory relevance with regard to the presence of the function-bearing trait. The organizational account claims that a functional effect can be understood as a “condition of existence” of that very trait (without appealing to evolutionary history) to the extent that it is a necessary condition for the process of biological self-maintenance of the organism.
IntroductionEtiological Theories of FunctionConsequentialist Theories of FunctionAcknowledgmentReferencesFurther Reading
Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.
Information has been a central concept for contemporary work in the biological sciences (and other sciences) especially after the publication of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, in 1949. In fact, the pervasiveness of Shannon’s information theory—as well as of the very terms themselves—becomes evident when one takes a moment to reflect upon just a few of the concepts that are standard in the biomedical sciences, such as genetic code, messenger RNA, ion channel, cell signaling, intracellular communication, signal transduction, pathogen transmission, positive feedback loop, expressive noise minimization, and many others. In this chapter we first give a historical introduction concerning the concept and nature of information, with a special emphasis upon the biological sciences. Then, we provide a few important examples of information at work in the biological sciences. Next, we consider the debate regarding the reality and nature of bioinformation, arguing that bioinformation is best understood as a relationship between and/or among entities; for instance, DNA is informational only in relation to a given cellular context, and it is misguiding to locate information in a particular molecule. We then go on to show how bioinformation relates to other concepts such as entropy, order, organization, complexity, and knowledge. Finally, we approach education itself as an informational process in order to draw some consequences for the teaching of biology.
The debate on the notion of function has been historically dominated by dispositional and etiological accounts, but recently a third contender has gained prominence: the organizational account. This original theory of function is intended to offer an alternative account based on the notion of self-maintaining system. However, there is a set of cases where organizational accounts seem to generate counterintuitive results. These cases involve cross-generational traits, that is, traits that do not contribute in any relevant way to the self-maintenance of the organism carrying them, but instead have very important effects on organisms that belong to the next generation. We argue that any plausible solution to the problem of cross-generational traits shows that the organizational account just is a version of the etiological theory and, furthermore, that it does not provide any substantive advantage over standard etiological theories of function.
Talk of the functions of objects (i.e., what the function of X is, or what X is for) is common throughout biology, indeed in many areas of science, as well as in our everyday understanding of objects in the world. This talk of what things are for, or the purpose for which they function, is the subject-matter of the field of teleology. There is widespread disagreement among philosophers and scientists about how we should understand functions. The main debate is between those who would base teleological functions on history and evolutionary selection of the thing in question (the selectionist view) and those who would base function on the actual causal role the thing plays (the systematic view). This chapter will describe the various approaches to functions, and defend a selectionist answer, that biological traits have evolved to function the way they do because of a past advantage. The paper will also discuss the counterarguments from the systematic view, and show how they fail to account for some major constraints on explaining functions, such as normativity.
Teleosemantics is a naturalistic research programme in the philosophy of mind and language. Its ambition is to achieve a reduction, first, of mental content to teleological function; second, of teleological function to non‐teleological notions. This article explores the second step, particularly as envisaged by Millikan’s etiological theory of function.
This paper applies the conceptual toolkit of Evolutionary Developmental Biology (evo-devo) to the evolution of the genome and the role of the genome in organism development. This challenges both the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, the dominant view in evolutionary theory for much of the 20th century, and the typically unreflective analysis of heredity by evo-devo. First, the history of the marginalization of applying system-thinking to the genome is described. Next, the suggested framework is presented. Finally, its application to the evolution of genome modularity, the evolution of induced mutations, the junk DNA versus ENCODE debate, the role of drift in genome evolution, and the relationship between genome dynamics and symbiosis with microorganisms are briefly discussed.
In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy.In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question.
I consider some hitherto unexplored examples of teleological language in the sciences. In explicating these examples, I aim to show (a) that such language is not the sole preserve of the biological sciences, and (b) that not all such talk is reducible to the ascription of functions. In chemistry and biochemistry, scientists explaining molecular rearrangements and protein folding talk informally of molecules rearranging “in order to” maximize stability. Evolutionary biologists, meanwhile, often speak of traits evolving “in order to” optimize some fitness-relevant variable. I argue that in all three contexts such locutions are best interpreted as shorthands for more detailed explanations which, were we to spell them out in full, would show that the relevant process would robustly converge towards the same end-point despite variation in initial conditions. This suggests that, in biology, such talk presupposes a substantial form of adaptationism. The upshot is that such shorthands may be more applicable in the physical sciences than the biological.
A common misunderstanding of the selected effects theory of function is that natural selection operating over an evolutionary time scale is the only function-bestowing process in the natural world. This construal of the selected effects theory conflicts with the existence and ubiquity of neurobiological functions that are evolutionary novel, such as structures underlying reading ability. This conflict has suggested to some that, while the selected effects theory may be relevant to some areas of evolutionary biology, its relevance to neuroscience is marginal. This line of reasoning, however, neglects the fact that synapses, entire neurons, and potentially groups of neurons can undergo a type of selection analogous to natural selection operating over an evolutionary time scale. In the following, I argue that neural selection should be construed, by the selected effect theorist, as a distinct type of function-bestowing process in addition to natural selection. After explicating a generalized selected effects theory of function and distinguishing it from similar attempts to extend the selected effects theory, I do four things. First, I show how it allows one to identify neural selection as a distinct function-bestowing process, in contrast to other forms of neural structure formation such as neural construction. Second, I defend the view from one major criticism, and in so doing I clarify the content of the view. Third, I examine drug addiction to show the potential relevance of neural selection to neuroscientific and psychological research. Finally, I endorse a modest pluralism of function concepts within biology.
In this paper, we develop an organizational account that defines biological functions as causal relations subject to closure in living systems, interpreted as the most typical example of organizationally closed and differentiated self-maintaining systems. We argue that this account adequately grounds the teleological and normative dimensions of functions in the current organization of a system, insofar as it provides an explanation for the existence of the function bearer and, at the same time, identifies in a non-arbitrary way the norms that functions are supposed to obey. Accordingly, we suggest that the organizational account combines the etiological and dispositional perspectives in an integrated theoretical framework.
• Introduction
• Dispositional Approaches
• Etiological Theories
• Biological Self-maintenance
• 4.1Closure, teleology, and normativity
• 4.2Organizational differentiation
• Functions
• 5.1C1: Contributing to the maintenance of the organization
• 5.2C2: Producing the functional trait
• Implications and Objections
• 6.1Functional versus useful
• 6.2Dysfunctions, side effects, and accidental contributions
• 6.3Proper functions and selected effects
• 6.4Reproduction
• 6.5Relation with other ‘unitarian’ approaches
• Conclusions
There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as “There is a fly here.” Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view.
It’s recently been argued that biological fitness can’t change over the course of an organism’s life as a result of organisms’
behaviors. However, some characterizations of biological function and biological altruism tacitly or explicitly assume that
an effect of a trait can change an organism’s fitness. In the first part of the paper, I explain that the core idea of changing
fitness can be understood in terms of conditional probabilities defined over sequences of events in an organism’s life. The
result is a notion of “conditional fitness” which is static but which captures intuitions about apparent behavioral effects
on fitness. The second part of the paper investigates the possibility of providing a systematic foundation for conditional
fitness in terms of spaces of sequences of states of an organism and its environment. I argue that the resulting “organism–environment
history conception” helps unify diverse biological perspectives, and may provide part of a metaphysics of natural selection.
In the biological realm, a complete explanation of a trait seems to include an explanation in terms of function. It is natural
to ask of some trait, “What is its function?” or “What purpose in the organism does the particular trait serve?” or “What
is the goal of its activity?” There are several views concerning the appropriate definition of function for biological matters.
Two popular views of function with respect to living things are Cummins’ organizational account and the Griffiths/Godfrey-Smith
modern history account. Whereas Cummins argues that a trait functions so as to contribute to the general organization of some
organism’s present structure, Griffiths, and Godfrey-Smith argue that a trait functions because of its fitness with respect
to the organism’s recent evolutionary history. In this paper, I show how these accounts can be made compatible and compliment
one another. Given that structure, organization, operational flexibility, function, and evolutionary history are all factors
to be considered in an organism’s makeup, we should expect that the traits of an organism function the way they do because
such traits presently contribute to the overall organization of the organism (Cummins) as well as were selected for in the
organism’s species’ recent ancestry (Griffiths/Godfrey-Smith).
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.
Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification
of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology
and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly
regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement in philosophy of science drew attention to
the fact that many experimental phenomena have a ‘life of their own’: the conviction that they are real is not dependent on
the theories used to characterise and explain them. I suggest that something similar can be true of descriptive phenomena,
and that many homologies are phenomena of this kind. As a result the descriptive biology of form and function has a life of
its own—a degree of epistemological independence from the theories that explain form and function. I also suggest that the
two major ‘homology concepts’ in contemporary biology, usually seen as two competing definitions, are in reality complementary
elements of the biological explanation of homology.
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.
Because much of the recent philosophical interest in functions has been motivated by their application in biology and other
sciences, most of the ensuing discussions have focused on functional explanations to the neglect of the practical role of
functional knowledge. This practical role is essential for understanding how users form plans involving artifacts. We introduce
the concept of instrumental function which is intended to capture the features of functional claims that are relevant to practical—in
particular, instrumental—reasoning. We discuss the four primary features of an instrumental function ascription, the teleological
component of such ascriptions and give a clear definition of malfunction in terms of incapability to perform as well as “normal”
tokens of the same type.
Many philosophers believe that 1) most uses of functional language in biology make implicit reference to natural selection and 2) the fundamental way in which biologists identify parts and processes in organisms is by their selected function(s). Both these claims are mistaken. Much functional language in biology refers to actual causal roles, and if this were not so, biology would be impossible. The extensive biological literature on the ‘character concept’ focuses on another principle of biological identity, namely homology. I outline some of this work and use it to refute philosophical arguments for the importance and ubiquity of classification by adaptive function.
The aim of this paper is to show that the widespread opinion, according to which functional role theories of representation fail to account for content explanations of human and animal behaviour, cannot be confirmed with respect to each type of functional role theory. Functional resemblance theories (as referred to by O'Brien and Opie in Representation in mind, Elsevier, 2004) allow for content explanations of successfully performed cognitive abilities as much as for explanations of systematic errors resulting from misrepresentation. How functional roles do their explanatory work in actual scientific research examples is shown by a detailed exploration of model assumptions about homing performances based on path integration mechanisms in humans and animals.
This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual practice of biological inquiry.
It is reported a great variety of functional actions of GABA in auditory system. Although many studies reports the presence and distribution of GABA receptors; nevertheless, the studies about the inhibitory GABA-dependent neurons distribution in the Inferior Culliculus are scarce. We are interested in studies on the role played by GABAergic neurons in the acoustic information transmission in the Central Nucleus of Inferior Culliculus. The existence and distribution of GABAergic neurons in CNIC, could give us understandings on how the inhibitory actions of neurotransmitters are participating in ways which the information flow is spatial-temporal associated with the firing synchrony in each isofrequency region. And with these results, we could achieve some insights over the emergence of certain mind properties from neurons dynamic interactions.
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