Abstract
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 in his account of the 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 a 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.
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Notes
The use of ‘artifact model’ here is different than Lewens’ use of the term. Lewens’ notion of an “artifact model” is when biologists “talk of organisms as though they were designed objects” (Lewens, 2004, p. 2).
To be clear, Aristotle does not suggest that internal natures imply anything akin to an intelligent designer. For example, Aristotle says that when spiders weave webs they are clearly goal directed. However, Aristotle says spiders have no intelligence. Therefore, there is no reason to think internal natures that direct entities need to possess, or have been created by, anything like intelligence.
See Lennox (2001) p. 244 for interpretive reasons to think that the Physics predates the biological works.
Testacea are invertebrate animals with shell coverings, such as mollusks or shellfish. Given that Aristotle’s writing predates (and is partly responsible for) any sort of systematic taxonomy, it’s not entirely clear what species he thought were spontaneously generated, though many of the animals he describes are generally translated as ‘testacea’ in Aristotelian scholarship.
Interestingly, Boorse (1976) does note that things like ecology can direct certain biological entities. Something like ecology is external in our view. Insofar as Boorse gestures at these types of external sources of direction, we’re sympathetic to his view.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support (grant #61408,"Increasing Complexity: The First Rule of Evolution?"), which helped make the work that contributed to this paper possible. We would also like to thank Mark Brennan and the anonymous referees who provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Babcock, G., McShea, D.W. An externalist teleology. Synthese 199, 8755–8780 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03181-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03181-w