Abstract
According to recent work in experimental philosophy, folk intuitions concerning various metaphysical issues are heavily teleological. The experiments in question, which belong to a broader research program in psychology about ‘promiscuous teleology’, have featured prominently in debates about the methodology of metaphysics, with some authors claiming that the folk’s teleological bias debunks everyday intuitions concerning composition, persistence, and organisms. The present paper argues for a possibility that is very rarely discussed in that debate, namely the idea that the folk’s intuitions could be veridical. Our argument is based on an emerging naturalistic theory of biological functions called “the organismic view”. The gist of the organismic view is that biological systems are characterized by a special circular causal regime where each part of the system contributes to the boundary conditions of some other parts, as well as of the whole. We argue that teleological folk intuitions are veridical in the biological domain under such a view, and they are veridical in the social and artefactual domains under coherent extensions of the organismic view.
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Notes
The definition should introduce a series of times t1 … tk and corresponding state types S1 … Sk such that each Si is a boundary condition of Si+1 (with k + 1 = 1, to complete the cycle). Next, one should identify each Si with the activity of the xis at ti. The resulting precise version of the definition will make it possible to relativize parthood to times, so that x can be part of an organism O at t (because x is caught up in one of the relevant Si at t) without being part of O at a later time T (because it was expelled by O in the meantime).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this example.
Rose (2019) denies that this interpretation fits the experiments.
More precisely, Sally is an external organ of Tom, and vice versa, during their handshake, and (presumably) the resulting statue is an external organ of both.
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Acknowledgements
The research presented in this paper was supported by the University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The opinion expressed in the publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the John Templeton Foundation. Gergely Kertész also wishes to thank Teloi.org and both the Morals and Science and the Values and Science ‘Lendület’ research groups at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for their support while working on this paper.
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Kertész, G., Kodaj, D. In defense of teleological intuitions. Philos Stud 180, 1421–1437 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01937-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01937-3