The Function Debate in Philosophy

Abstract

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.

Amusing ourselves to death? Superstimuli and the evolutionary social sciences

“…However, this etiological theory has many problematic features (Wouters 2005), some of which have a bearing on the distinction at stake here. This is particularly true for the problem of functional indeterminacy (or, more precisely, the problem of the extensionality of natural selection):…”

In What Sense Does ‘Nothing Make Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’?

“…In the past few years a number of other philosophers of science have questioned the idea that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, whether in Dobzhansky's original sense of shared history or in the revised sense of a history of adaptation (Weber, 2005;Wouters, 2005aWouters, , 2005bWouters, , 2007. They have pointed out that much successful research in fields such as physiology and molecular biology is conducted by scientists who have minimal information about the evolution of the parts and processes they study, that those scientists often evince little interest in finding out the details of their evolution, and that the acquiring knowledge of those details would be very difficult.…”

“…On Millikan's account, Nahvi et al were correct and this process is part of the biological functioning of E. coli only if it has the selected function of controlling gene expression, that is to say, if the nucleic acid sequences involved were designed by natural selection to control gene expression in the way that they do. However, as some critics have pointed out, molecular and cell biologists show little concern to provide evidence for such evolutionary assumptions when determining the function of molecular parts and processes (Weber, 2005, 35-41;Wouters, 2005b). Nahvi et al no doubt assumed that the btuB riboswitch was the product of natural selection, but they do not explicitly discuss this.…”

“…The leading advocate of the view that some areas of biology can do without an evolutionary perspective is Arno Wouters (1995Wouters ( , 2003Wouters ( , 2005aWouters ( , 2005b:…”

Design explanation: determining the constraints on what can be alive

“…The question of how functional explanations contribute to scientific understanding is a long-standing issue in the philosophy of science (see Wouters 2005 for an overview). I discuss this question in view of the causal-mechanical approach to explanation.…”