Abstract

“Modality” refers to the concepts (and surrounding controversies) of “possibility” and “necessity.” Recently, a great deal of attention paid to these concepts in metaphysics. Not surprisingly, this literature has not been adopted in the field of philosophy of biology. In this work, I ague that there is a need to understand how modal concepts function in biology. Biologists already employ modal concepts in a variety of contexts. However, they do not explain how these concepts function or ought to function within the biological domain. From a philosophical perspective, there is a framework for how modal concepts operate in physics. But this framework cannot be adopted by the biological sciences. Since work on modality is relatively new to philosophy of biology, I spend the first three chapters justifying, defining, and restricting the project of creating a modal framework in biology. In the penultimate chapter, I present and criticize the single account of “biological possibility” found in the literature, which is offered by Daniel Dennett. Finally, I provide a positive account of how we should apply modal concepts in the biological sciences