According to recent work in experimental philosophy, folk intuitions concerning various metaphysical issues are heavily teleological. The experiments in question, which belong to a broader research program in psychology about ‘promiscuous teleology’, have featured prominently in debates about the methodology of metaphysics, with some authors claiming that the folk’s teleological bias debunks everyday intuitions concerning composition, persistence, and organisms. The present paper argues for a possibility that is very rarely discussed in that debate, namely the idea that the folk’s intuitions could be veridical. Our argument is based on an emerging naturalistic theory of biological functions called “the organismic view”. The gist of the organismic view is that biological systems are characterized by a special circular causal regime where each part of the system contributes to the boundary conditions of some other parts, as well as of the whole. We argue that teleological folk intuitions are veridical in the biological domain under such a view, and they are veridical in the social and artefactual domains under coherent extensions of the organismic view.

根据最近在实验哲学方面的工作，关于各种形而上学问题的民间直觉在很大程度上是目的论的。所讨论的实验属于心理学中关于“混杂目的论”的更广泛研究计划，在关于形而上学方法论的辩论中占据突出地位，一些作者声称人们的目的论偏见揭穿了关于构成、持久性和有机体的日常直觉. 本文提出了一种在那场辩论中很少讨论的可能性，即人们的直觉可能是真实的。我们的论点基于一种新兴的生物功能自然主义理论，称为“有机体观点”。有机体观点的要点是，生物系统的特征是一个特殊的循环因果机制，其中系统的每个部分都会影响其他部分以及整体的边界条件。我们认为，在这种观点下，目的论民间直觉在生物学领域是真实的，在有机体观点的连贯扩展下，它们在社会和人工制品领域也是真实的。