Abstract
Some time ago, I sketched an etiological account of functions and goals [13] (Wright 1976) that has occasioned many thoughtful criticisms and emendations over the intervening years. In one of the more interesting of these, Tyler Burge has objected to my analysis of functions by suggesting that I seriously mischaracterized my interest as being in that noun (“function”) rather than in a certain “pattern of explanation” ([5], Burge 2003, p. 512, fn). In the long retrospect now possible, this does capture something important about my youthful thinking, if perhaps too generously. I originally recognized the contextual resilience of “function” by distinguishing a number of its uses – some explanatory, some not. But I failed altogether to anticipate the gaudy variety subsequent literature would find in its adjectival modification, as well as in other, related grammatical forms, and these developments have increasingly obscured, even to me, the relatively modest insight I had at the time.
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Notes
- 1.
A sample: “proper function,” “species function,” “token function,” “as-if function,” “biomedical function,” and “fully specified function”.
- 2.
Paradigms of the function pattern would be the heart’s beating in order to circulate blood or even having kidneys in order to extract waste from the bloodstream; of goal-directedness a paradigm would be the hawk diving in order to catch a rodent.
- 3.
Over the years, this division of labor has struck me increasingly as rather like that Kant attributes to the contrast between theoretical and practical reason. But at the time, I did not have command of this subtlety and was thus unequipped to press it very far.
- 4.
The homeostatic behavior of organic or mechanical systems, for instance.
- 5.
Even the intermediate case in which a single individual creates in a single episode an artifact that we would be inclined to call “designed” (e.g., rigs up a brace for an antenna or frost protection for the garden) is distinguished from the paradigms of simple voluntary action in much the same way.
- 6.
This reservation was often expressed by resisting the label “the function of” for the consequence in question, but, for the reasons mentioned, it is better not to place such weight on this noun.
- 7.
In the concluding section below, I treat the topic in more deserving detail in the fourth chapter of Wright (forthcoming).
- 8.
- 9.
This is the position of the 3-year-old who responds “Why?” to any answer provided to a previous question: she’s not yet ready to play the explanation game.
- 10.
Ron Amundson (1994) describes usefully detailed biological examples in which context sorts through such causal factors rather as it does in the valve-train example of artifact development.
- 11.
Again, dispositions to engage in risky mating or rearing behavior, which are not clearly good for the individual, will have the same function-pattern virtue etiology.
- 12.
- 13.
I have in mind primarily the conversation extending back at least to Aristotle’s De Anima and reaching its twentieth-century apotheosis in Heidegger’s Being and Time, though the tough going extends as well too much of the recent analytic literature on action and agency.
- 14.
These appear perhaps most explicitly in discussion of the first-person pronouns in the Paralogisms of Kant (1781/1997), which Heidegger picks up and embellishes at the beginning of Division I of Heidegger (1927/1962), leading to his giving agency a distinctly adverbial cast, which in turn doubtless influenced Ryle’s similar treatment of mental terms in general (Ryle 1949, especially Chapters IV and X). I address these in yet another way in Wright (forthcoming).
- 15.
The requirement of finite antecedent plausibilities does not distinguish this from any other explanatory diagnosis. As the Bayes formula makes explicit, the suspicions we begin with determine the relevance of evidence. And as with any such suspicions, those about interests and competence are empirically corrigible: we may discover a beast’s bad eyesight or peculiar interest in blue things, just as we may discover that it was a not an empty tank, but a plugged fuel filter that stalled the car just short of the filling station.
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Wright, L. (2013). Epilogue. In: Huneman, P. (eds) Functions: selection and mechanisms. Synthese Library, vol 363. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5304-4_12
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