Abstract

The use of functional language in biology creates a philosophical difficulty for anyone who, for whatever reason, maintains that biological entities were not consciously designed. Since a majority of biologists presently holds this view, many philosophers have attempted to provide a "naturalized" account of what it means for a given biological trait to possess a function. Naturalized accounts seek to capture all that biologists mean functional language is used, yet without making reference to teleological terms such as "goal," "purpose," "design," intention," etc. The difficulty arises once it is realized that our everyday use of functional language seems to be inseparable from such teleological concepts. This thesis has three objectives. The first is to show that the attempt to naturalize the concept of function is a task more suited to a particular community of biologists or philosophers who share certain metaphysical presuppositions than to a broad community seeking the widest possible consensus about the properties of living things. The second is to demonstrate that the attempts to naturalize the concept of function have failed due to insurmountable obstacles of both a conceptual and a practical nature. And the third is to offer and defend an account of function which retains the intuitive link to teleological concepts, but which also preserves the logical consistency of making functional ascriptions in a neo-Darwinian biological context (i.e., of ascribing functions to things which one believes were not in fact designed). Such an account would also remove the need to interpret functional language metaphorically, as some have done. The account offered here disjunctively combines actual design with very strong appearance of design to achieve this desired result