Abstract
In this paper we chart epistemological similarities between shared function talk in biology and the engineering sciences, focusing on the notions of biological advantage function and technical advantage function. We start by showing that biological advantage function ascriptions are common in biology and that technical advantage function ascriptions are common in engineering science. We then proceed to show that these ascriptions have a very similar structure and that their epistemic value also is similar: both biological advantage function and technical advantage function ascriptions provide the means to answer what-would-happen-if questions. We develop and illustrate our claims with four case studies: two from biology, and two from engineering design research. Our results offer new insights into a relatively neglected (but very important) issue in both philosophy of biology and technology, viz. assessing the explanatory and predictive utility of function ascriptions.
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Notes
Kroes and Krohs (2009) gives a good overview of these other projects.
Of course, not every higher order capacity gives better life chances. The ones figuring in BA ascriptions (are taken to) do so. Furthermore, the notion of ‘better life chances’ is not be confused with the notion of ‘inclusive fitness’ as used in evolutionary biology. Inclusive fitness refers to evolutionary history and is consistent with ‘less life chances’ of the individuals of a species s, such as in the case of the mating behavior of cannibalistic spiders. The notion of ‘better life chances’ is a-historic and hinges on useful effects of a trait, i.e., biological advantages. In Sect. 2.5 we spell out differences between BA and selected effect function (ascription) in more detail.
Wouters says that the ‘basic form’ of BA ascriptions is: “One biological advantage to organisms in condition c of having trait t rather than trait t’ is that those organisms can do v better if they have t than if they had t’.” This formulation is meant for all kinds of traits, while we focus on traits that are properties of items (see Sect. 2.1). Note that the idea that the trait makes a difference with respect to ability v (ability f in our scheme) is present, while the idea of positive biological value of this ability is absent.
TA ascriptions are also common in a variety of other engineering design contexts, such as change engineering, failure analysis, and conceptual design. We focus on redesign contexts since a lot of engineering design is redesign in one form or another (see the references above; see also e.g., Erden et al. 2008; Hirtz et al. 2002; Goel and Bhatta 2004), and since redesign is a context in which TA ascriptions are highly salient.
In this method, competitor products that are on the market are reverse engineered in order to understand their functioning and to subsequently optimize aspects of them in a redesign phase. Such reverse engineering and redesign differs from ‘engineering change’, which concerns the design modification of product features that are already released during the design phase, but after release turn out to require modifications after all. The fairly recent ‘spontaneous’ ignition of a number of smartphones of a specific type and brand, which attracted a lot of media attention recently, is an example where engineering change is called for.
To be sure, the having of thick bowls is one among several factors that are predicted to contribute to c. Other factors are, inter alia, different configurations of the heating components and adaptive design modifications to some of these components, e.g., the replacement of a heating coil by a halogen heat lamp. This is not surprising of course, since c’s are (virtually) always produced by (abilities of) more than one I (and furthermore, c’s are, often, multiple realizable by different configurations of I’s and/or different I’s).
Otto and Wood (1998, p. 232, Fig. 6) speak about the customer need ‘temperature uniform across inner surface’ and the capacity of the wok ‘to deliver a uniform temperature distribution across the bowl’ (p. 235). These statements refer to the same thing, i.e., a capacity of the wok. We therefore phrase the goal g, which is a desired state of affairs outside the artifact and to be realized by using the artifact, as ‘efficient cooking’. This accords with Otto and Wood’s (1998, 2001) method in which customer needs are translated into desired capacities in the redesign process.
A caveat is in order. In philosophy of technology quite a few efforts have been devoted to assessing the prospects of applying selected effect (etiological) accounts of functions to the technical domain, viz. to describe the causal history of artefacts (e.g., Houkes and Vermaas 2010). These efforts essentially concern developing philosophical theories of technical functions, not analyses of the usage of function talk in scientific practice. Our focus in this paper concerns this latter project. In engineering practice, as far as we can tell, engineers and engineering designers do not use a selected effect notion of function in their research endeavors.
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Weber, E., van Eck, D. & Mennes, J. On the Structure and Epistemic Value of Function Ascriptions in Biology and Engineering Sciences. Found Sci 24, 559–581 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09584-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09584-w