Abstract
Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goaldirected entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature.
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Notes
This is due to the fact that, while some scholars are more explicit about the kinds of problems they take themselves to be answering, many are not (and this is precisely what we deem problematic). This may be because it is not always possible to pin down a single set of motivating factors for a framework, especially when it is developed by multiple scholars. Furthermore, a certain account of teleology may prove to be well suited for answering questions which its originators did not intend to answer.
It is worth noting that Deacon puts a strong processual understanding of emergence at the center of his project, going so far as to reinterpret constraints and work from an emergence perspective (Deacon, 2011, chap. 11). The overall picture one gets from Deacon’s project is therefore not merely an account of the emergence of life, but a metaphysics of nature as radically emergent and processual.
According to Deacon, his model resembles a kind of ‘non-parasitic virus’ (2021) rather than an autopoietic protocell.
Deacon sees the basic logic of teleodynamics as recurring nested levels of emergent dynamics, and key to eventually understanding the biological basis of the human mind (Deacon, 2011).
Agency is therefore much like fluid viscosity, which is considered a real phenomenon even though “it is not specified in terms of the properties of its molecular realizer but in terms of other concepts at the same gross dynamical scale, such as density or surface tension.” (Fulda, 2017, p. 82; see also Walsh, 2018, pp. 171–172). Fluid viscosity, on this view, is a natural phenomenon because it is an indispensable explanans in the prediction and explanation of fluid behavior (Fulda, 2017, p. 83).
Though this approach is the least ‘organism-centered’ of those we are discussing here, we include it insofar as it is “an account of teleological systems, not an account of function” (Babcock & McShea, 2021, p. 8766).
This distinction is similar to, but arguably distinct from, Price et al.’s (2013) distinction between “object naturalism” and “subject naturalism”, since subject naturalism can include what the sciences say about human cognitive capacities and incapacities.
Ellis (2014), for instance, suggests that McDowell’s arguments for the reality of value in a suitably expanded naturalism can also be used to expand naturalism even further to include God.
We say “contemporary liberal naturalism” because liberal naturalism has mid twentieth century antecedents that have today fallen into relative obscurity; see Krikorian (1944)
We also think that the case of teleology and biological individuality would mirror each other insofar as the relationship between theory and practice would be symmetrical, with both sides ought to have input on the debate, change it in the process (Love, 2018, p. 170).
We are, in effect, suggesting that advancing these kinds of debates require something like what Godfrey-Smith (2001) and Brancazio and Meyer (2022) call “philosophy of nature” though they use the term to label schools of thought (such as enactivism) rather than questions, which is our preferred framing of the issue.
As Fox-Keller (2003) argues, terminological ambiguity has in the past been essential to the establishment of a global narrative relating different biological phenomena, and thereby advancing research.
It is also possible for closure of constraints might play different roles in different contexts, such as those described in Sects. 3.1 and 3.2. But where closure of constraints may have strengths in one context, we expect it to have weaknesses in another. One may want to leverage it to make more radical statements about the ontology of living systems, and in this context Cusimano and Sterner’s worries would take on a different hue. Furthermore, it is not necessarily the case that closure would be able to play no other role than one of a model in practice. These are the kinds of questions that we believe are in urgent need of elaboration (see Bich & Mossio, 2014).
We find it revealing that the authors suggest they are solving ‘the philosophical problem of teleology’ in the singular, and without specifying what, exactly, they take this problem to be. The authors seem to think —though it is never clear—that this apparently singular problem has to do solely with advancing biology, and should be evaluated on those terms. But as we argued in the previous section, this is far from self-evident and cannot be assumed.
The idea being that a heat-seeking missile would be goal-directed in the same way as a bacterium, insofar as they are both directed by environmental fields (heat and sucrose gradients respectively).
This is not to say that the explanatory success of a model of teleology should have no impact on broader philosophical questions. It is simply that the relation between these areas, in our view, is far more complex than McShea and Babcock assume it to be.
Besides, they make these claims despite never defining the standards by which they deem their explanation successful.
Garcia-Valdecasas refers to this as “an illuminating principle that was lost in modernity” (ibid). At stake in teleology is therefore far more than what biology needs, but also an implicit critique of modernity in the style of Jonas (2001).
On the face of it, a second-order constraint would have to be constituted by interlocking constraints—otherwise it would not be a second order constraint, a constraint that constrains constraints. In other words, we are inclined to think that the OA does account for second-order constraints, though it does not emphasize, as Deacon does, the importance of two different kinds of self-organizing systems that are mutually inhibiting.
For those familiar with Deacon’s project, the teleodynamic level constrains the morphodynamic and homodynamic levels below it; see the discussion of Deacon in Sect. 1.
While the Organizational Approach does appeal to a certain conception of normativity, we find it to be thinner than Garcia-Valdecasas’s for the reasons described above.
Notice that it would not suffice to simply point out, as Garcia-Valdecasas does, that Kant takes teleology to be a subjective heuristic that our finite minds cannot avoid; one can be a realist about teleology in Kant’s sense (Gambarotto & Nahas, 2022), which means that one need not be an Aristotelian about teleology to be a teleological realist.
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We would like to thank Alan Love, Denis Walsh, David Harrison, Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice and feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Nahas, A., Sachs, C. What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate. Synthese 201, 142 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w