The extensive philosophical discussions and analyses in recent decades of function-talk in biology have done much to clarify what biologists mean when they ascribe functions to traits, but the basic metaphysical question—is there genuine teleology and design in the natural world, or only the appearance of this?—has persisted, as recent work both defending, and attacking, teleology from a Darwinian perspective, attest. I argue that in the context of standard contemporary evolutionary theory, this is for the most part a verbal, rather than a substantive dispute: the disputants are talking past one another. To justify this claim I develop a general framework within which reductionist views, such as the standard ‘etiological’ account of biofunctions, occupy an intermediate position between what I call full-blooded realism and full-blooded anti-realism, and suggest that whether such views count as ‘realist’ views has no objective, theory-neutral answer.

近几十年来，关于生物学中功能对话的广泛哲学讨论和分析，在阐明生物学家将功能归因于性状时的意义上起了很大作用，但基本的形而上学的问题是，自然界中是否存在真正的目的论和设计，或者仅仅是这种现象的出现一直持续下去，因为最近的工作既从达尔文主义的角度捍卫和攻击目的论，也证明了这一点。我认为，在标准的当代进化论的背景下，这在很大程度上是一种口头上的而不是实质性的争执：争执者彼此交谈。为了证明这一主张的合理性，我建立了一个通用框架，在该框架中，还原论者的观点（例如，对生物功能的标准“病因学”说明）在我所谓的全面现实主义与全面反现实主义之间处于中间位置，