Teleological Explanations and Selective Mechanisms: Biological Teleology Beyond Natural Selection

Abstract

From a naturalistic approach, several attempts have been made to justify teleological explanations by appealing to the action of selective mechanisms. In philosophy of biology, natural selection has often been assumed to be the paradigmatic case of selective mechanism, and, on this basis, different generalized biological selective explanations have been proposed in an attempt to substantiate natural teleology. In this paper we use a different strategy. Starting from a general definition of selection as differential reinforcement, we interpret the different types of teleological explanation, both biological and non-biological, as specific cases of selective explanations, of which evolutionary explanations would be only a specific subset (rather than the only ones). We illustrate this by analyzing teleological explanations that make reference to biological regulatory processes.

The authors are listed alphabetically. Both of them have contributed equally to this work. We are especially grateful for the feedback from the editors of this volume, as well as from the PBCX attendees. We also thank audiences at the University of Bielefeld, Complutense University (Madrid), the University of Helsinki, the National University of Colombia (Bogotá), Nova University of Lisbon, the University of Oslo, the University of Prague, UAM (Madrid), the University of the West of England Bristol, and UNED (Madrid). Special thanks to Leonardo Bich, Matteo Mossio and several anonymous reviewers. Thanks as well to Megan J. Watkins for the linguistic revision of the article. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government research projects APID2021-128835NB-I00 and PID2021-123938NB-I00.