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Whose purposes? Biological teleology and intentionality

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Abstract

Teleosemantic theories aspire to develop a naturalistic account of intentional agency and thought by appeal to biological teleology. In particular, most versions of teleosemantics study the emergence of intentionality in terms of biological purposes introduced by Darwinian evolution. The aim of this paper is to argue that the sorts of biological purposes identified by these evolutionary approaches do not allow for a satisfactory account of intentionality. More precisely, I claim that such biological purposes should be attributed to reproductive chains or lineages, rather than to individual traits or organisms, whereas the purposes underlying intentional agency and thought are typically attributed to individuals. In the last part of the paper I suggest that related difficulties are also faced, despite appearances, by accounts of intentionality relying on alternative organizational approaches to biological teleology.

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Notes

  1. Arguably, there may be intentional states that do not target real world objects or properties (e.g. fictional thinking). In this paper, however, I focus on intentional states that are about features of the external world.

  2. Of course, it is an open possibility to give an observer-dependent explanation of biological teleology and then to try to account for the intentionality of the relevant observers in a way that does not presuppose biological purposes. For instance, one could argue that intentionality emerges with complex socio-linguistic practices (see Brandom 1994). Although this is an interesting possibility, in this paper I leave it aside and I focus instead on the project of accounting for intentionality in terms of biological teleology.

  3. I am calling this view, on the one hand, evolutionary because it appeals to Darwinian evolution in order to account for biological purposes; on the other hand, it is called etiological because it accounts for the purposes of entities in terms of the etiology (i.e. causal history) of such entities, in contrast to other evolutionary accounts that focus on current or future contributions to fitness [for instance, the propensity account defended by Bigelow and Pargetter (1987) and Canfield (1964)]. As I will discuss below, organizational views (for instance, Mossio and Bich 2017; Mossio et al. 2009; Christensen and Bickhard 2002) can be counted as etiological, even if not evolutionary, insofar as they consider the causal contribution of a current purposive trait to maintaining the conditions necessary for the existence of that very same trait.

  4. I will use the terms ‘selective pressures’ to refer to whatever forces or mechanisms by virtue of which selective reinforcement is produced (i.e. these forces contribute to preserving/inhibiting the persistence of the things under selection).

  5. The view I want to examine here is that purposes can be introduced by selective processes, not that this is the only way in which purposes can arise.

  6. It may be argued that entities are sometimes evaluated in certain ways by virtue of being tokens of a certain type. So, murder as a type act is wrong, which makes each token act of murder wrong. Note however that, still, each token act of murder is taken to be wrong as a token act, and that therefore agents will be disposed to address sanctions to the specific individual responsible for a particular token-act of murder. In the case of natural selection, in contrast, it is common that the token trait that fails to achieve a biological goal is not sanctioned or reinforced in any way: the only reinforcing pressures affect the potential offspring of the organism that token trait belongs to.

  7. Assume that sanctioning others is not an indirect way of sanctioning the individual in question (you could punish someone indirectly by punishing her friends, since this will presumably upset her).

  8. In a similar spirit, Foot argues that teleological thinking in relation to Darwinian evolution involves regarding species as time-extended organisms: ‘In such contexts it is supposed to make sense to speak of the good of a species, as if a species were itself a gradually developing, one-off organism, whose life might stretch for millions of years. Perhaps the extinction of a species is imagined as a kind of death, and therefore as if it were an evil, with that which makes for its continuance thought of as ‘for its good’!’ (2001, p. 32, fn. 37). The thesis that species should be thought of as time-extended individuals has been defended by Ghiselin (1974) and Hull (1976).

  9. One may object that the difficulty faced by etiological-evolutionary views also arises here, under a new guise. The problem would be that the purposes introduced by the interactions of self-maintaining organism with their environments cannot be attributed to momentary time-slices of token traits or organisms, but rather to time-extended sections of those tokens, since what is sustained in the relevant interaction is such time-extended entities and not momentary time-slices of the interacting organism (in other words, the evaluative pressures associated with the interaction do not target momentary time-slices, but time-extended entities). However, I do not take this to be a problem. It is very plausible to think that, in general, purposes can only be attributed to subjects with a sufficient temporal extension. It seems that it does not make sense to attribute goals to entities whose existence lacks temporal duration—and that therefore cannot guide their behavior in pursuit of those goals, or track the progress of such purposive endeavors. At any rate, in general intentional agency is underlain by goals of time-extended individuals, and not merely of some of their momentary time-slices.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Marc Artiga, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Manolo Martínez, Cristian Saborido, Jonathan Way and Daniel Whiting for their comments and feedback. I am also grateful to audiences at the University of Southampton, the iCog conference at the University of Sheffielf and the VI Research Workshop on Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Barcelona. This work has been supported by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2014-57258-P (Normative inferences and interferences in scientific research).

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  1. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Madrid, Spain

    Javier González de Prado Salas

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González de Prado Salas, J. Whose purposes? Biological teleology and intentionality. Synthese 195, 4507–4524 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1416-x

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