Functions

Wright, Larry

doi:10.2307/2183766

Cited by 970 publications

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“…So, that maneuver would not work for them. Wright (1973) that in order for a trait to have a function, it must have done something that contributed to its own persistence or recurrence. He also agrees with Wright that natural selection in the evolutionary sense is too narrow a basis for functions.…”

Section: Organizational Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against Organizational Functions

Garson¹

2017

Philos. of Sci.

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Over the last 20 years, several philosophers developed a new approach to biological functions, the organizational (or systems-theoretic) approach. This is not a single theory but a family of theories based on the idea that a trait token can acquire a function by virtue of the way it contributes to a complex, organized, system, and thereby to its own continued persistence, as a token. I argue that the organizational approach faces a serious liberality objection. I examine three different ways organizational theorists have tried to avoid that objection and show how they fail.

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Section: Organizational Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against Organizational Functions

Garson¹

2017

Philos. of Sci.

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“…Other accounts are also possible. Most notably Larry Wright proposes an account whereby normal function depends on history (Wright 1973). In the case of biological functions, the function of a subsystem will be whatever it has been naturally selected to do.…”

Section: Descriptive Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being ill and getting better: recovery and accounts of disorder

Cooper¹

2012

Recovery of People With Mental Illness

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The aim of psychiatric treatment is to help patients to get better, but working out what getting better should be taken to mean can be problematic. This chapter explores how one's view of what counts as recovery will depend on the account of disorder that one adopts. Accounts of disorder can be split into two main categories. Biologically based accounts (paradigmatically those of Christopher Boorse) claim that disorder is purely a matter of biological dysfunctioning. According to such accounts the aim of treatment will be to restore functioning such that ultimately the patient's psychological subsystems will function in the same way as those of other humans of the same age and gender. Accordingly, whether a patient is getting better will be seen as the sort of thing that can be fairly assessed by standardized rating scales. In contrast, accounts which hold that disorder is a value-laden concept will lead one to view recovery differently. According to such accounts, for a condition to count as a disorder it must be bad. It will be argued that whether a condition is bad or not will vary with factors such as the social environment, and also with the aims, desires, and self-understanding of the individual patient. One consequence of this is that a condition that was once bad for the patient can be rendered neutral or good for them not only by altering the functioning of their psychological subsystems, but also by altering the patient's social environment or their own assessment of the situation. This means that measuring “recovery” will not be a straightforward matter. The chapter ends by considering how treatment efficacy might best be assessed according to such a view of recovery.

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“…Lombrozo and Carey (2006) adopted, and found evidence supporting, a view of functional explanation that was firmly rooted in the work of Wright (1973). According to this view, functional explanations are licensed when the history of the explanandum indicates that it was intended to fulfill that function.…”

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confidence: 94%

“…Salmon, 1998), functional or teleological explanation (e.g. Cummins, 1975;Wright, 1973), and the unification approach to explanation (e.g. Kitcher, 1981).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Chaigneau, Barsalou, and Sloman (2004) tested the relative contributions of the history and causal structure to an appreciation of function in a series of experiments. Within the framework of their HIPE theory, they posited that an item would be identified with a particular function either by having been made to fulfill that function, a historical account in line with Wright (1973), or by having an appropriate causal structure for the function, as suggested by Cummins (1975). Their study showed that knowing the history was sufficient only if the immediate causal structure was unknown or there were no contradictions to the intended use in what was known.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Pragmatics of Explanation

Fraassen¹

The Nature of Scientific Thinking

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The pragmatic theory of explanation (Van Fraassen, 1988) proposes that background knowledge constrains the explanatory process. Although this is a reasonable hypothesis and research has shown the importance of background knowledge when evaluating explanations, there has been no empirical study of how the background constrains the generation of explanations. In our study, participants viewed one of two sets of preliminary movie clips of some novel items engaged in a series of actions and then all were asked to explain the same final clip. Between conditions, we varied whether the events in the preliminary clips completed a system. In the systematic condition, a greater proportion of functional explanations were generated for the final clip compared to the non-systematic condition. Interestingly, despite the difference in the types of explanations generated, the participants showed high agreement in the evaluation of explanations provided by the experimenters.

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Functions

Cited by 970 publications

References 0 publications

Against Organizational Functions

Against Organizational Functions

Being ill and getting better: recovery and accounts of disorder

The Pragmatics of Explanation

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