Abstract
In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems.
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Notes
This usage of the phrase ‘proper function’ follows Millikan (1984, p. 2). Often, ‘teleological function’ is used to mean what I intend by ‘proper function’ (e.g., Maley & Piccinini, 2017). Not all accounts of proper function (as I am using the term) provide for a notion of malfunction. It should also be noted that, at least on some views, traits can have multiple proper functions; for example, it might be said that the hind legs of turtles have the proper functions both of locomotion and of excavation (Preston, 1998).
As far as I know, no perspectival version of process reliabilism has been offered, perhaps because process reliabilists tend to be epistemic externalists. Sosa (1991, pp. 290–291) offers a perspectivalist solution to generality problems that arise for virtue epistemology.
My internal perspectivalism is therefore very different from that of Sinnott, who argued that “biological organization … and psychical activity … are fundamentally the same thing” (1961, p. 48). Pattee, whose work partly inspired the present view, might also be read as an internal perspectivalist about biological function (e.g., 1970, p. 130; 1982).
This paper is concerned with metaphysical questions, i.e., questions about the nature of proper functions themselves, rather than epistemological questions about how humans can/should go about investigating them. In this paper, I do not address questions about how humans discover, test/confirm hypotheses about, or reason about proper functions.
See Neander (1995, p. 113) for a useful breakdown of several kinds of function indeterminacy that have been previously discussed.
I count the etiological approach as non-perspectival because, as many authors have pointed out (e.g., Darwin, 1876, p. 63; Polányi, 1958, p. 385; Nagel, 1977, pp. 286–287; Nyberg, 2009, p. 187; Okasha, 2009, p. 720), “natural selection” does not involve the presence of something in the background picking winners and losers according to its own normative standard or perspective. Instead, organisms succeed or fail at reproducing merely because of whatever particular traits happen to be helpful (or “adaptive”) in specific environments on specific occasions (Beatty, 1984, pp. 192–193). I will revisit this point in “Pattee, Dretske, and selective loss of detail” section, where I consider the question of what it means for something to have a perspective. See Footnote 13.
This example is loosely inspired by one given by Walsh (1996), but it is being used to make a different kind of argument.
Neander addresses this type of problem by arguing that when there are multiple ways to characterize functions, “we should give priority to that description of a trait's function that is the lowest level in the analysis (most mechanistic),” where mechanistic levels are connected by “asymmetrical by-relations” (1995, p. 137). But in the above case, unlike the cases Neander considers, the varying characterizations do not correspond to different mechanistic levels connected by asymmetrical by-relations.
Enç (2002) enumerates a series of arguments against etiological theories of proper function along similar lines as well.
Moreno and Mossio’s solution to this problem is to relativize function attributions to self-maintenance regime descriptions (2015, p. 74). While this allows them to circumvent generality problems, it arguably does so at the cost of rendering the notion of proper function less interesting and useful.
Mark Bedau (1992, p. 37) makes similar arguments against what I am calling external perspectivalism about goal-directedness.
I can now say with greater precision why (as noted earlier in Footnote 6) natural selection and the accounts of function that appeal to it are non-perspectival: because natural selection does not operate with a determinate scheme of sorting tokens (phenotypes, tasks, environmental conditions, outcomes, outcome histories, etc.) into types that systematically ignores information at a certain level of detail, i.e., into types at a fixed level of generality.
My main reason for adopting Dennett’s and Ladyman, Ross, and Collier’s use of ‘perspective’ rather than Dretske’s, Popper’s, and Hautamäki’s term ‘point of view’ here is to highlight that the key advantage that external perspectivalism has over forms of non-perspectivalism can be retained while dropping the dependence on mentality or cognition. Generally, the two terms are treated as synonymous. I would define ‘perspective’ as an isolated set of pattern-types which the system uses to implicitly carve its own world of interaction (cf. Varela, 1997). My use of ‘perspective’ is also similar to Devlin’s (1991, p. 151) notion of a ‘scheme of individuation’. Dennett’s (and my) use of ‘perspective’ should not be confused with his use of ‘stance’; a perspective counts as a “stance” for Dennett when it is adopted by minded beings as a “predictive strategy” (1981, p. 15).
Haugeland (1990, p. 147) credits Heidegger, Sellars, and Brandom as forerunners of the position he is advancing.
This is similar to Popper’s point I mentioned earlier, that “for logical reasons, there must always be a point of view … before there can be any repetition; which point of view, consequently, cannot be merely the result of repetition” (2002, p. 59).
Schroeder has argued that
Regulating involves creating a rule of some sort, as the word ‘regulate’ suggests. This is the sort of activity that can be expected to create norms, for a rule is just one sort of norm. Hence it should be no surprise that a regulated object is subject to a norm of performance: that it has a function. (2004, p. 118)
However, not all forms of regulation rely on fixed typing schemes that define sorts in Haugeland’s sense. Simple forms of negative feedback, for example, are insufficient for normativity because it is a matter of interpretation how far the variable being controlled has to be from the set point until malfunction should be ascribed.
Stated another way: Conformist norms need not be categorically binding (in the sense of Copp, 2015), and need not be constrained by categorically binding norms.
Or, again in Copp’s (2015) terminology, the performance norms grounded by the censuring patterns of the alphas are not categorically binding.
Garson (2019) has argued that because they tend to rely on statistical norms, even accounts that do not define function explicitly in terms of selection history should yet be classified as history-dependent. Performance norms such as those described in this section, however, are not history-dependent because such norms derive from the recognition and response behaviors of the alphas, which are in turn realized by their own mechanistic constitution. The norms fall out of the fact that, as Haugeland put it in the above quotation, the alphas “are simply built that way.” Performance norms in Haugeland’s sense are therefore not statistical norms. They are recognition and response norms that are realized by the internal dynamical properties of the alphas. There is no difficulty for “swamp man” scenarios here; if alpha creatures spontaneously appear in a system and begin enforcing performance norms, those norms will apply to the system immediately.
The hypothalamus plays a key role in regulating heart rate, but this is not quite the same thing: the hypothalamus only makes adjustments to normal heart functioning. It has no way to detect and “censure” the heart based on macro-level conditions of heart malfunction, like congestive heart failure or cardiac arrest.
Since it explains the normative status of proper functions in terms of such non-normative facts as the special dynamical properties of enzymes discussed by Pattee, as well as how they are situated within cells to realize such regimes of censorious recognition and response, the present view might be considered a form of reductionism.
Unfortunately it isn’t possible to go into empirically detailed concrete biological examples of this, simply because we don't know in detail about how the activities of thousands of “alpha creature” individual proteins collectively sustain the organization of a system like the heart. It would require reverse-engineering the heart in total molecular detail, all the different genes that get expressed under what circumstances (and exactly what molecular pathways they are triggered by) in all the different types of cells of the heart and what their intercellular and intracellular effects are, and all of the non-linear interactions of those effects, etc., something we cannot yet approach. I don’t, however, believe that such an exhaustive level of knowledge is necessary for scientists to competently discover and investigate macro-level proper functions, just as knowledge of molecular structure is not necessary for competently discovering and classifying crystals (Polányi 1958, pp. 43–48).
For a thorough discussion of this type of conflation, see Evans (1975).
This response was not available to the etiological theorist because again, natural selection does not involve a scheme of typing and sorting at a fixed level of generality. See Footnotes 6 and 13.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to William Bechtel, Mark Bedau, Andrew Bollhagen, Dan Burnston, Rick Grush, Rebecca Hardesty, Jay Odenbaugh, Ben Sheredos, participants of the 2017 Active Matter Workshop at Georgetown University, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for valuable discussions and comments on previous drafts.
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Winning, J. Internal perspectivalism: the solution to generality problems about proper function and natural norms. Biol Philos 35, 33 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09749-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09749-z