Abstract
The debate on the notion of function has been historically dominated by dispositional and etiological accounts, but recently a third contender has gained prominence: the organizational account. This original theory of function is intended to offer an alternative account based on the notion of self-maintaining system. However, there is a set of cases where organizational accounts seem to generate counterintuitive results. These cases involve cross-generational traits, that is, traits that do not contribute in any relevant way to the self-maintenance of the organism carrying them, but instead have very important effects on organisms that belong to the next generation. We argue that any plausible solution to the problem of cross-generational traits shows that the organizational account just is a version of the etiological theory and, furthermore, that it does not provide any substantive advantage over standard etiological theories of function.
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Notes
One can see many of the differences among these accounts as stemming from the different possible unpackings of “… in the relevant way” in the definition. In particular, Etiological Function is compatible with, but not committed to, a selected-effects theory of function.
We follow Mossio et al. (2009) and Saborido et al. (2011) in using the dispositional label for this other tradition. Other authors have talked of systemic approaches to refer to closely related accounts. We also follow Mossio and colleagues (and others such as Allen 2009; Davies 2001) in adopting this coarse-grained perspective on the function debate, as taking place between two main opposing camps—dispositional and etiological. Our discussion does not interact in any substantial way with this choice; thus, we believe, the dialectically most prudent option is to respect the terms in which the proponents of the view we are criticizing have chosen to frame it.
As we read it, this objection differs from Davies’ (2001, chap. 5), who argues that the etiological theory of functions is committed to the existence of non-causal abstract entities and that this assumption is in tension with naturalism. In contrast, the epiphenomenality problem points out that on this approach the function of an entity does not depend on what that entity does or can do. Thus, according to the etiological theory, a token trait has a function in virtue of something that is not directly related to that particular token. Whether this other entity that grounds the function attribution is abstract or not, and whether it is compatible with a metaphysical interpretation of naturalism is a different question altogether. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this connection.
Mossio and colleagues are happy to acknowledge the etiological dimension of OA (see, e.g., Mossio et al. 2009, p. 836). Nevertheless, this etiological dimension is limited to the fact that the performance of a functional trait in an individual help explain the maintenance of the trait in the very same individual—by helping to prevent the individual from disappearing, for example. We, on the other hand, are using “etiological function” in its most prominent, distinctly historical sense, as made clear by the definition in page 2 of this paper. The claim is that OA is an etiological account in this sense.
We should probably point out that we are do not regard the epiphenomenality problem as particularly pressing—we are, that is, happy to accept that a device can fail to perform the function it has; this is plausibly the case with flawed corkscrew prototypes, or congenitally defective kidneys, for example.
Our point, here and throughout the paper is, merely, that OA is no better off than other prominent etiological accounts in this or any other respects.
A minor problem with the definition given in Organizational Function is that it doesn’t comment on which is the function of, e.g., kidneys—it only entails that they have one (pace their suggestion that it warrants the claim that the heart has the function of pumping blood.) We will assume that modifying Saborido and colleagues’s definition so as to ground the relevant type of which claims would not prove too difficult. For more details, see Artiga (2011).
Saborido et al. (2011) do not consider this kind of social traits in their discussion.
This appears to be Saborido et al.’s (2011, p. 600) own gloss on encompassing systems: “The crucial point is that the organization of the system constituted by the conjunction of the reproducing and reproduced organisms (in this specific case, a minimal lineage with two elements) has exactly the same status, in terms of self- maintenance, as that of the individual organisms”. It should be said that identifying an encompassing system with a lineage does not necessarily entail that one is interpreting the lineage as a set of ‘successive systems’, as opposed to an extended self-maintaining system, even if the second interpretation leads to its own problems, as we discuss in the sequel. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for prompting us to clarify this point.
In the definition provided in Mossio et al. (2009), a self-maintaning system also requires organizational differentiation, i.e., that ‘the system itself generates distinct structures contributing in a different way to self-maintenance (Mossio et al. 2009, p. 826). However, it is debatable whether encompassing systems also satisfy this requirement. Take a lineage of birds: what are its functionally differentiated parts? Individual birds, maybe? In any event we will not press this issue any further.
Again, the claim about organizational differentiation is disputable, but we will simply grant it for the sake of the argument.
If the supporter of the Organizational Account makes a distinction between types and tokens and claims that tokens have functions in virtue of belonging to certain types, then (1) Organizational Theories would indeed adopt a sort of splitting account, according to which the way cross-generational traits acquire functions differs from the way standard traits acquire them (2) the epiphenomenality problem would even be more pressing.
Also, notice the following asymmetry: only traits with cross-generational functions have to be individuated cross-generationally. So, while my heart is different from my father’s heart, my sperm is the same as my father’s sperm. This is surely implausible.
And, for behavioral traits such as the one in in geese discussed above, dubiously coherent.
It is worth stressing that the individuation problem is rooted in the etiological aspect of OA. OA is committed to this counterintuitive individuation of traits because one of the conditions for function attribution is forward-looking (C1) while another one is backward-looking (C2).
A possible reply by the OA-proponent would be to claim that the function of individual hearts is fixed by its role in the maintenance of individuals, but that the function of the mereological sum of all hearts in a lineage is fixed by its role in the maintenance of the encompassing system. At first glance, this does not look like a comfortable resting point for the organizational account, although it is perhaps worth exploring.
Note that the OA cannot be considered a ‘forward-looking’ theory of functions (such as Bigelow and Pargetter 1987) because, if we are right, according to the OA the function of a trait depends on the fact that this trait contributed to the maintenance of the lineage in the recent past. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for making this proposal.
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Acknowledgments
Financial support for this work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2011-26853 and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056; the Generalitat de Catalunya, under grant 2014-SGR-81; a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas (UNAM) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
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Artiga, M., Martínez, M. The Organizational Account of Function is an Etiological Account of Function. Acta Biotheor 64, 105–117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-015-9256-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-015-9256-x