Biological Teleology, Reductionism, and Verbal Disputes

Abstract

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.