Online research in philosophy

Ruth Millikan and others adopt a normative definition of biological functions that is heavily used in areas such as Millikan’s teleosemantics, and also for emerging efforts to naturalize other areas of philosophy. I propose an experiment called the Lapse Test to determine exactly what form of normativity, if any, truly applies to biological functions. Millikan has not gone far enough in playing down as “impersonal” or “quasi” the precise mode of normativity that she attributes to biological functions. Further, her mode fails to qualify as genuine normativity at all, lacking an essential feature: some lapse of responsibility on the part of any entity or system that is charged with failing to do as it is “supposed.” Nor, as we will see, is there anything in English idioms used to describe biological functions that can provide a persuasive argument to rehabilitate Millikan’s normative definition.

Many areas of science develop by discovering mechanisms and role functions. Cummins' (1975) analysis of role functions-according to which an item's role function is a capacity of that item that appears in an analytic explanation of the capacity of some containing system-captures one important sense of "function" in the biological sciences and elsewhere. Here I synthesize Cummins' account with recent work on mechanisms and causal/mechanical explanation. The synthesis produces an analysis of specifically mechanistic role functions, one that uses the characteristic active, spatial, temporal, and hierarchical organization of mechanisms to add precision and content to Cummins' original suggestion. This synthesis also shows why the discovery of role functions is a scientific achievement. Discovering a role function (i) contributes to the interlevel integration of multilevel mechanisms, and (ii) provides a unique, contextual variety of causal/mechanical explanation.

Function and teleology can be naturalized either by reference to systems with a particular type of organization (organizational views) or by reference to a particular kind of history (etiological views). As functions are generally ascribed to states or traits according to their current role and regardless of their origin, etiological accounts are inappropriate. Here, I offer a systems-theoretical interpretation as a new version of an organizational account of functionality, which is more comprehensive than traditional cybernetic views and provides explicit criteria for empirically testable function ascriptions. I propose, that functional states, traits or items are those components of a complex system, which are under certain circumstances necessary for their self-re-production. I show, how this notion can be applied in intra- and trans-generational function ascriptions in biology, how it can deal with the problems of multifunctionality and functional equivalents, and how it relates to concepts like fitness and adaptation. Finally, I argue that most intentional explanations can be treated as functional explanations.

It has been suggested that we might treat the meaning of literary works as a matter of their function. In this paper I investigate what such an account might look like, given a defensible theory of artificial functions. I consider two teleological accounts of work meaning: one that takes the meaning of a literary work to be determined by its design function and one that takes meaning to depend on use function. It might be thought that an account centring on design functions would be a robustly intentionalist account; in contrast, I argue that such an account would take authors' intentions to be one factor among others determining the meaning of literary works. An account centring on use functions will be a robustly anti-interpretationalist account; but I argue that it is a less attractive version of the account, because it cannot distinguish between a reasonable and an unreasonable reading of a literary work.

The survival enhancing propensity (SEP) account has a crucial role to play in the analysis of proper function. However, a central feature of the account, its specification of the proper environment to which functions are relativized, is seriously underdeveloped. In this paper, I argue that existent accounts of proper environment fail because they either allow too many or too few characters to count as proper functions. While SEP accounts retain their promise, they are unworkable because of their inability to specify this important feature. However, I suggest that this problem can be overcome by the application of a new strategy for specifying proper environment that is grounded in the operation of natural selection and I conclude by offering a first approximation of such an account.

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).

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”.

Most philosophers adopt an etiological conception of functions, but not one that uniformly explains the functions attributed to material entities irrespective of whether they are natural or man-made. Here, I investigate the widespread idea that a combination of the two current etiological theories, SEL and INT, can offer a satisfactory account of the proper functions of both organisms and artifacts. (Roughly, SEL equates a function with a selected effect and INT with an intentional content). Making explicit what a realist theory of function supposes, I first show that SEL offers a realist theory of biological functions in which these are objective properties of a peculiar sort. I argue next that an artifact function demonstrates the same objective nature as a biological function when it is accounted for by SEL, but not when it is accounted for by INT. I explain why a dual theory of artifact functions admitting both INT and SEL functions is to be dismissed. I establish that neither INT nor SEL alone can account for all artifact functions. Drawing the conclusion that we need a new etiological theory of function, I show how one can overcome the apparent inevitability of INT for some artifact functions. Finally, I outline a new etiological theory of functions that applies equally to biological entities and to artifacts.

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.