There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of (...) this paper. I begin with an overview of McShea’s field theoretic account of teleology. I start with the field theoretic account because it presents a promising analysis of teleological systems. It is promising because, in not making any assumptions about life’s special status in teleological systems, it avoids counterexamples that have problematized other accounts. I then consider some of the prominent efforts that have been made to attempt to avoid ascribing functions or teleology to some form of inanimate nature. In my assessment, none of the efforts are successful. I conclude by offering mineral evolution as a case study to show how inanimate nature can be both teleological and functional. The evolution of mineral species reveals that teleology and function extend to inanimate nature, and that teleology and function come in degrees. (shrink)

The ultimate source of explanation in biology is the principle of natural selection. Natural selection means differential reproduction of genes and gene combinations. It is a mechanistic process which accounts for the existence in living organisms of end-directed structures and processes. It is argued that teleological explanations in biology are not only acceptable but indeed indispensable. There are at least three categories of biological phenomena where teleological explanations are appropriate.

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because (...) teleological entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism. (shrink)

In empirically informed research on action explanation, philosophers and developmental psychologists have recently proposed a teleological account of the way in which we make sense of people’s intentional behavior. It holds that we typically don’t explain an agent’s action by appealing to her mental states but by referring to the objective, publically accessible facts of the world that count in favor of performing the action so as to achieve a certain goal. Advocates of the teleological account claim that this strategy (...) is our main way of understanding people’s actions. I argue that common motivations mentioned to support the teleological account are insufficient to sustain its generalization from children to adults. Moreover, social psychological studies, combined with theoretical considerations, suggest that we do not explain actions mainly by invoking publically accessible, reason-giving facts alone but by ascribing mental states to the agent. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Descartes’ Sixth Meditation dropsy passage on the difference between the human body considered in itself and the human composite of mind and body. I do so as a way of illuminating some features of Descartes’ broader thinking about teleology, including the role of teleological explanations in physiology. I use the writings on teleology of some ancient authors for the conceptual (but not historical) help they can provide in helping us to think about the (...) Sixth Meditation passage. From this, I draw several points, most notably that the Sixth Meditation passage is primarily concerned with the natures of body and composites, and that the issue of teleological explanation is derivative of this primary interest. So, we – and Descartes – must come to terms with what he takes the nature of the composite to be such that it has an intrinsic end-referred nature which grounds teleological explanations. I consider three possibilities: the human composite is a third type of substance – a hylomorphic substance; there is a sort of “satisfaction” relationship between mind and body (each of which retains its own distinct nature in the composite) such that the mind confers teleological value on the body; and there is a sort of “satisfaction” relationship between mind and body (each of which retains its own distinct nature in the composite) such that the mind recognizes teleological value in the body. None of these interpretations is without problems. So in the concluding section, I sketch a program for future research, specifically, trying to render Descartes’ teleological thinking consistent by distinguishing between the metaphysical natures of things (the concern of his Sixth Meditation passage) and the physical natures of things (his concern in his physiological writings). (shrink)

This paper gives an account of evolutionary explanations in biology. Briefly, the explanations I am primarily concerned with are explanations of adaptations. These explanations are contrasted with other nonteleological evolutionary explanations. The distinction is made by distinguishing the different kinds of questions these different explanations serve to answer. The sense in which explanations of adaptations are teleological is spelled out.

Teleological terms such as "function" and "design" appear frequently in the biological sciences. Examples of teleological claims include: A (biological) function of stotting by antelopes is to communicate to predators that they have been detected. Eagles' wings are (naturally) designed for soaring. Teleological notions were commonly associated with the pre-Darwinian view that the biological realm provides evidence of conscious design by a supernatural creator. Even after creationist viewpoints were rejected by most biologists there remained various grounds for concern about the (...) role of teleology in biology, including whether such terms are: 1. vitalistic (positing some special "life-force"); 2. requiring backwards causation (because future outcomes explain present traits); 3. incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); 4. mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none); 5. empirically untestable (for all the above reasons). Opinions divide over whether Darwin's theory of evolution provides a means of eliminating teleology from biology, or whether it provides a naturalistic account of the role of teleological notions in the science. Many contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology believe that teleological notions are a distinctive and ineliminable feature of biological explanations but that it is possible to provide a naturalistic account of their role that avoids the concerns above. Terminological issues sometimes serve to obscure some widely-accepted distinctions. (shrink)

Neo-teleology is the two part thesis that, e.g., (i) we have hearts because of what hearts are for: Hearts are for blood circulation, not the production of a pulse, so hearts are there--animals have them--because their function is to circulate the blood, and (ii) that (i) is explained by natural selection: traits spread through populations because of their functions. This paper attacks this popular doctrine. The presence of a biological trait or structure is not explained by appeal to its (...) function. To suppose otherwise is to trivialize natural selection. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers developed their thinking in conversation with various bodies of literature. The influence of ancient Greek – primarily Aristotle (and pseudo-Aristotle) – and Arabic sources was fundamental for the very constitution of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse. Toward the late Middle Ages Jewish philosophers also established a critical dialogue with Christian scholastics. Next to these philosophical corpora, Jewish philosophers drew significantly upon Rabbinic sources (Talmud and the numerous Midrashim) and the Hebrew Bible. In order to clarify (...) the unique as well as shared elements in the thought of medieval Jewish philosophers, we will begin this chapter with a brief study of some early Rabbinic sources on the purpose of the world, i.e., why it came to be and why it is sustained in existence. In the second part of this chapter, we will study Maimonides’ critique of the veracity and usefulness of the belief in (anthropocentric) teleology, and the critical reception of his views by later philosophers. The third part will address discussions of divine teleology in Kabbalistic literature. Our exposition will concentrate mostly on a specific early-eighteenth-century text that is one of the most lucid and rigorous presentations of Lurianic Kabbalah. The fourth and final section will elucidate Spinoza’s critique of teleology, its precise target and scope, and its debt to earlier sources discussed in this chapter. (shrink)

Two separate research programs have revealed two different factors that feature in our judgments of whether some entity persists. One program—inspired by Knobe—has found that normative considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when the changes it undergoes lead to improvements. The other program—inspired by Kelemen—has found that teleological considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when it preserves its purpose. Our goal (...) in this paper is to determine what causes persistence judgments. Across four studies, we pit normative considerations against teleological considerations. And using causal modeling procedures, we find a consistent, robust pattern with teleological and not normative considerations directly causing persistence judgments. Our findings put teleology in the driver’s seat, while at the same time shedding further light on our folk notion of an object. (shrink)

When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is “Yes, we should.” This essay argues to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to (...) the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, this essay argues, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value—and, by extension, epistemic goals—are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION I What is teleology? If you ever look closely at an ants' nest, you will see an intricate network of pathways and chambers teeming with ...

Following Chalmers, I take the most promising response to the meta-problem to be a realizationist one on which (roughly) consciousness plays a role in realizing the processes that explain why we think that there is a hard problem of consciousness. I favour an interactionist dualist version of realizationism on which experiences are non-physical states that non-redundantly cause problem judgments. This view is subject to the challenges of specifying laws that would enable experiences to cause problem judgments and of explaining why (...) it's not a lucky coincidence that experiences' causal and rational powers converge on problem judgments. I propose a strategy for solving the meta-problem and meeting these challenges. According to it, a fundamental teleological law operates on normative features of experiences in ways that bias experiences towards causing effects that they rationalize, including problem judgments. I conclude by applying the strategy to other luck-avoidance challenges. (shrink)

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments (...) used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3) and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments. (shrink)

The teleological approach to an epistemic concept investigates it by asking questions such as ‘what is the purpose of the concept?’, ‘What role has it played in the past?’, or ‘If we imagine a society without the concept, why would they feel the need to invent it?’ The idea behind the teleological approach is that examining the function of the concept illuminates the contours of the concept itself. This approach is a relatively new development in epistemology, and as yet there (...) are few works examining it. This paper aims to fill this gap and engender further understanding of the teleological method. I first contrast the teleological method with more orthodox approaches in epistemology. I then draw a three-way taxonomy of different kinds of teleological approach and provide an example of each kind. The teleological approach is often presented as antithetical to the more orthodox approaches in epistemology, and so in competition with them. I demur. I argue that the methods can be fruitfully combined in epistemological theorising; in the final section I suggest specific ways the teleological approach can be incorporated alongside more orthodox methods in a general methodological reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we (...) find support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments. (shrink)

There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account of (...) human flourishing that is not dependent on teleology. In the fourth section, we shall speculate as to the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning. (shrink)

Teleology in biology is making headline news in the United States. Conservative Christians are utilizing a teleological argument for the existence of a supremely intelligent designer to justify legislation calling for the teaching of "intelligent design" (ID) in public schools. Teleological arguments of one form or another have been around since Antiquity. The contemporary argument from intelligent design varies little from William Paley's argument written in 1802. Both argue that nature exhibits too much complexity to be explained by 'mindless' (...) natural forces alone. We need to postulate the existence of an intelligent designer, a creator with forethought and purpose. The inference to an intelligent creator harkens back to Plato’s teleological argument for the order of the cosmos. Plato’s demiurge is a creator that imposes order on the cosmos. Yet, as we shall see when we analyze the distinctly biological form of the more contemporary teleological arguments we will find remanants of Aristotle’s distinctive argument from functional arrangement, but without his distinctive form of telos which is unconscious and immanent rather than intelligent and creative from on high. The aim of this article is to survey various teleological arguments since Antiquity. Since a variant on Paley's argument—ID—is getting so much recent press I will start with a discussion on the nature of Paley’s teleology. (shrink)

Constitutivists seek to locate the metaphysical foundations of ethics in nonnormative facts about what is constitutive of agency. For most constitutivists, this involves grounding authoritative norms in the teleological structure of agency. Despite a recent surge in interest, the philosophical move at the heart of this sort of constitutivism remains underdeveloped. Some constitutivists—Foot, Thomson, and Korsgaard (at least in her recent *Self-Constitution*)—adopt a broadly Aristotelian approach. They claim that the functional nature of agency grounds normative judgments about agents in much (...) the same way that the functional natures of artifacts and bodily organs ground normative judgments about those kinds of things. I argue that the neo-Aristotelian conclusions about goodness which follow so straightforwardly from teleological premises are not genuinely normative. Functions are not by their very nature normatively significant. Other constitutivists—notably J. David Velleman and Paul Katsafanas—eschew Aristotelian talk of functions in favor of an approach based on the idea that agency has a constitutive aim. Velleman and Katsafanas both claim that aims are normatively significant. I argue that the fact that agency has a constitutive aim is merely a fact about the motives that produce and regulate actions. And so we are still left with a gap between the teleological and the normative. I conclude by suggesting that constitutivists have failed to find a way to bridge this gap not because none exists, but rather because they have been looking in the wrong place. The constitutivist project can be salvaged, but only if it is supplemented with a reductive metanormative account of reasons for action, an account that links reasons to sound or successful practical reasoning. (shrink)

Teleology is about functions, ends, and goals in nature. This Element offers a philosophical examination of these phenomena and aims to reinstate teleology as a core part of the metaphysics of science. It starts with a critical analysis of three theories of function and argues that functions ultimately depend on goals. A metaphysical investigation of goal-directedness is then undertaken. After arguing against reductive approaches to goal-directedness, the Element develops a new theory which grounds many cases of goal-directedness in (...) the metaphysics of powers. According to this theory, teleological properties are genuine, irreducible features of the world. (shrink)

I explain what teleological reasons are, distinguish between direct and indirect teleological reasons, and discuss both whether all practical reasons are teleological and whether all teleological reasons are direct.

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological (...) explanation. No consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

Generic statements, such as "Bees are striped" are thought to be a central vehicle by which essentialist beliefs are transmitted. But work on generics and essentialism almost never focuses on the type of properties mentioned in generic statements. We test the hypothesis that teleological properties, what something is for, affect categorization judgments more strongly than behavioral, biological, or social properties. In Experiment 1, participants categorized properties as being either behavioral, biological, social, or teleological. In Experiment 2, we used the top (...) four properties from each group to describe a generic noun or a specific individual. Participants then categorized creatures that had one of their properties transformed. We found that changes to teleological properties had the strongest impact on categorization judgments. In Experiment 3, we also found that teleological properties mattered more in an induction task. We suggest that teleological properties play this privileged role in categorization because they are treated as essential properties. (shrink)

Using the language of common-sense psychology, we explain human behavior by citing its reason or purpose, and this is central to our understanding of human beings as agents. On the other hand, since human beings are physical objects, human behavior should also be explicable in the language of physical science, in which causal accounts cast human beings as collections of physical particles. CSP talk of mind and agency, however, does not seem to mesh well with the language of physical science.In (...) Teleological Realism, Scott Sehon argues that CSP explanations are not causal but teleological -- that they cite the purpose or goal of the behavior in question rather than an antecedent state that caused the behavior. CSP explanations of behavior, Sehon claims, are answering a question different from that answered by physical science explanations, and, accordingly, CSP explanations and physical science explanations are independent of one another. Common-sense facts about mind and agency can thus be independent of the physical facts about human beings, and, contrary to the views of most philosophers of mind in recent decades, common-sense psychology will not be subsumed by physical science.Sehon defends his non-reductionist account of mind and agency in clear and nontechnical language. He carefully distinguishes his view from forms of "strong naturalism" that would seem to preclude it. And he evaluates key objections to teleological realism, including those posed by Donald Davidson's influential article "Actions, Reasons and Causes" and some put forth by more recent proponents of causal theories of action. CSP, Sehon argues, has a different realm than does physical science; the normative notions that are central to CSP are not reducible to physical facts and laws. (shrink)

This work is an examination of teleological attributions i.e. ascriptions of proper functions and natural ends) to the features and behavior of living things with a view to understanding their application to human life.

The etiological account of teleological function is beset by several difficulties, which I propose to solve by grafting onto the etiological theory a subordinated goal-contribution clause. This approach enables us to ascribe neither too many teleofunctions nor too few; to give a unitary, one-clause analysis that works just as well for teleological functions derived from Darwinian evolution, as for those derived from human intention; and finally, to save the etiological theory from falsification, by explaining how, in spite of appearances, the (...) theory can allow for evolutionary function loss. (shrink)

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

This MPhil dissertation presents a novel account of teleological explanations in biology. I outline the “shorthand approach” to such explanations, on which they are taken to convey implicit evolutionary explanations. “Selected effects” accounts of teleological explanation dominate recent literature, but they struggle to accommodate teleological explanations of complex traits built through cumulative selection. I articulate the general notion of a landscape explanation, which, applied to biology, explains the evolution of complex features in a population by citing salient features of the (...) population’s fitness landscape. I show that such explanations lend themselves to a teleological shorthand. I close with remarks concerning when a teleological explanation of a trait is legitimate, and why teleological language strikes us as appropriate when we give evolutionary explanations. (shrink)

This work is an examination of teleological attributions i.e. ascriptions of proper functions and natural ends) to the features and behavior of living things with a view to understanding their application to human life.

Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...) of a different natural kind (e.g., a spider) and these effects were similar in magnitude to altering the surface-features of a natural kind. Our results suggest that we might view teleological properties as partially constitutive of the essence of natural kinds. (shrink)

Aristotelian natures – internal principles of motion and rest – provide a rich account of the goal-directed behaviour of natural entities. What such natures cannot account for, on their own, are cases of teleology across natures, where an entity, due to its nature, furthers the goals of another entity. Nevertheless, Aristotle admits such teleological configurations among natures: most notably Politics I.8 1256b15-20 claims that plants are for the sake of animals and animals are for the sake of humans. The (...) paper first scrutinizes two recent attempts– by Mohan Matthen and David Sedley – at an explanation of such teleology across natures. The fundamental move these proposals make is that they claim that the universe has a nature of its own. Accordingly, teleology across natures could be explained as the operation of this single cosmic nature. But the introduction of a cosmic nature contravenes fundamental strictures of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Hence the third section of the paper formulates an alternative proposal, that the teleological interaction across different natures is underpinned by the self-benefittingactivityofindividualnaturalentities,whichareable to use the natural processes of their environment to their own advantage. (shrink)

Cover Date: July 2006.Source Info: 115(3), 317-354. Language: English. Journal Announcement: 41-2. Subject: ACTION; CAUSATION; METAPHYSICS; REPRESENTATION; TELEOLOGY. Subject Person: SPINOZA, BENEDICT DE (BARUCH). Update Code: 20130315.

Ernest Nagel, one of the world's leading philosophers of science, is an unreconstructed empirical rationalist who continues to believe that the logical methods of the modern natural sciences are the most successful instruments men have devised to acquire reliable knowledge. This book presents "Teleology Revisited"-the John Dewey lectures delivered at Columbia University- and eleven of Nagel's articles on the philosophy of science.

INTRODUCTION The appeal to teleological principles of explanation within the body of natural science has had an unfortunate history. ...

The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role. Historical and recent examples of teleological claims include the following: The chief function of the (...) heart is the transmission and pumping of the blood through the arteries to the extremities of the body. (Harvey 1616 [1928: 49]) The Predator Detection hypothesis remains the strongest candidate for the function of stotting [by gazelles]. (Caro 1986: 663) The geographic range of human malaria is much wider than the range of the sickle-cell gene. As it happens, other antimalarial genes take over the protective function of the sickle-cell gene in … other warm parts. (Diamond 1994: 83) Despite the substantial amount of data we now have on theropod dinosaurs, more information is necessary in order to determine the likelihood that early feathers served an adaptive function in visual display as opposed to other proposed adaptive functions such as thermoregulation. (Dimond et al. 2011: 62) The ubiquity of claims such as these raises the question: how should apparently teleological notions in biology be understood? Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology. For instance, Ernst Mayr (1988), identified four reasons why teleological notions remain controversial in biology, namely that they are: vitalistic (positing some special ‘life-force’); requiring backwards causation (because goal-directed explanations seem to use future outcomes to explain present traits); incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none). A fifth complaint is that they are not empirically testable (Allen & Bekoff 1995). The current philosophical literature offers both Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of teleology in biology that aim to avoid these concerns. In this article, we hope to bring some clarity to the contemporary debates over the role of teleological notions in biology by sketching a taxonomy of the various accounts of biological function on offer (see Allen & Bekoff 1995 for a more comprehensive taxonomy that forms the basis of this presentation). We primarily focus on naturalistic accounts of biological function, since this is where we see the most lively and productive current debates (see, e.g., Garson 2016 for an extended survey). We also briefly discuss the notion of goal-directedness in section 2. (shrink)

In his widely read book, Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), C.D. Broad introduced the distinction between two approaches to ethics: teleology and deontology. In the second half of the twentieth century, these terms found their way into Christian ethics, giving rise to a problem. Christian ethics seems to be straightforwardly teleological, but it also seems to be straightforwardly deontological. In this article, I argue that the problem is largely a product of the way teleology is construed: the (...) ends in teleological ethics are implicitly assumed to be outcomes or states of affairs. I demonstrate the point through a reading of both the early philosophical sources and the more recent works of Charles Camosy and John Perry. I then argue that major sources in the Christian tradition, including those used by Camosy and Perry, are better understood as offering a more expansive picture of teleology in which ends are not always outcomes or states of affairs. I conclude by arguing that this more expansive picture of teleology resolves some important problems that have plagued debates about teleology and deontology in Christian ethics. (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the (...) account, however, it considers whether the proportionality condition is necessary to a theory of morally justified surveillance. The article concludes that we need and should apply only a necessity condition, but notes that proportionality considerations may retain some use in in practice, as a form of coarse‐grained filter applied before assessing necessity when deliberating the permissibility of potential forms of surveillance. (shrink)

It is now generally understood that constraints play an important role in commonsense moral thinking and generally accepted that they cannot be accommodated by ordinary, traditional consequentialism. Some have seen this as the most conclusive evidence that consequentialism is hopelessly wrong,1 while others have seen it as the most conclusive evidence that moral common sense is hopelessly paradoxical.2 Fortunately, or so it is widely thought, in the last twenty-five years a new research program, that of Agent-Relative Teleology, has come (...) to the rescue on all sides. While consequentialism says that every agent ought always to do that action that will bring about the most good, according to Agent- Relative Teleology. (shrink)

This book develops a unified theory of moral progress. The author argues that there are mechanisms in place that consistently drive societies towards moral improvement and that a sophisticated, naturalistically respectable form of teleology can be defended. The book's main aim is to flesh out the process of moral progress in more detail, and to show how, when the right mechanisms and institutions of moral progress are matched together, they create pressure for the desired types of moral gains to (...) manifest. The first part of the book deals with two issues: the conceptual one about what moral progress is, and the broadly empirical one whether it is possible. It shows that cultural evolution successfully explains the origins of modern forms of morally welcome change. The second part argues that there is logical space for a moderate, scientifically credible form of teleology, and that the converse case for moral decline is weak. It addresses the types, drivers and institutions of moral progress that allow for the storage, transmission and cumulative improvement of our normative infrastructure over time. Finally, the third part demonstrates why moral progress cannot be accounted for in metaethically realist terms. Moral Teleology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics, moral epistemology and moral psychology. (shrink)

Can young children such as 3-year-olds represent the world objectively? Some prominent developmental psychologists—such as Perner and Tomasello—assume so. I argue that this view is susceptible to a prima facie powerful objection: To represent objectively, one must be able to represent not only features of the entities represented but also features of objectification itself, which 3-year-olds cannot do yet. Drawing on Burge's work on perceptual constancy, I provide a response to this objection and motivate a distinction between three different kinds (...) of objectivity. This distinction helps advance current research on both objectivity and teleological action explanations in young children. (shrink)

Heidegger, like Kierkegaard, has recently been claimed as a narrativist about selves. From this Heideggerian perspective, we can see how narrative expands upon the psychological view, adding a vital teleological dimension to the understanding of selfhood while denying the reductionism implicit in the psychological approach. Yet the narrative approach also inherits the neo-Lockean emphasis on the past as determining identity, whereas the self is fundamentally about the future. Death is crucial on this picture, not as allowing for the possibility of (...) a final meaning to our lives, but as determining Dasein as ‘pure unactualizable possibility.’ Ultimately, therefore, narrative is not what constitutes selfhood – but this does not mean that narrative is not relevant to personal identity, because narrative allows identity to be expressed in action. (shrink)

Teleological theories of content are thought to suffer from two related difficulties. According to the problem of indeterminacy, biological function is indeterminate in the sense that, in the case of two competing interpretations of the function of an evolved mechanism, there is often no fact of the matter capable of determining which function is the correct one. Therefore, any attempts to construct content out of biological function entail the indeterminacy of content. According to the problem of transparency, statements of biological (...) function are transparent in that a statement of the form 'the function of evolved mechanism M is to represent Fs' can be substituted salva veritate by a statement of the form 'the function of evolved mechanism M is to represent Gs' provided that the statement 'F iff G' is counterfactual supporting. Therefore, any attempt to construct content out of biological function must fail to capture the intensionality of psychological ascriptions. This paper argues that the teleological account is undermined by neither of these problems. Failure to appreciate this point stems from a conflation of two types of proper function - organismic and algorithmic - possessed by an evolved mechanism. These functions underwrite attributions of content to distinct objects. The algorithmic proper function of a mechanism underwrites attributions of content to the mechanism itself, while the organismic proper function of a mechanism underwrites attribution of content to the organism that possesses the mechanism. However the problems of indeterminacy and transparency arise only if the attributions of content attach to the same object. (shrink)

People often think of objects teleologically. For instance, we might understand a hammer in terms of its purpose of driving in nails. But how should we understand teleological thinking in the first place? This paper separates mere teleology (simply ascribing a telos) and teleological explanation (thinking something is explained by its telos) by examining cases where an object was designed for one purpose but is now widely used for a different purpose. Across four experiments, we show that teleology (...) judgments and teleological explanation judgments are dissociable, and identify three factors that influenced teleology judgments (and one that did not). (shrink)