Title: How objective are biological functions?
Abstract: “Biological functions, due to their teleological ring, have always been shady citizens of the objective world. In a somewhat recent attack, John Searle has argued that functions owe their existence to the value that we put into life and survival. In a first part of my talk, I will show that Searle’s argument rests on a simple mistake, namely the failure to understand that functional predicates are (at least) three-place. These predicates relate not only a biological entity (e.g., the heart) and an activity that constitutes the function of this entity (e.g., pumping blood), they also contain a place for a goal state (e.g. survival or evolutionary fitness). A functional attribution without specification of such a goal state has no truth-value (of course, the goal state is often implicit in biological practice). But if completed with a goal state, functional attributions understood as three-place relations attain a truth-value, which is at least as objective as causal statements (provided that the latter are objective). Thus, Searle critique breaks down. What Searle ought to have said is that our valuing survival or other goal states is the reason why biology seeks functional knowledge, but this has nothing to do with ontology.
In a second part of my talk, I will explore how the objectivity of functions could be challenged even if what I said above is understood. A potential threat comes from considerations about the nature of biological mechanisms.”
Objectivity2015 