Colin Allen

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The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role. Historical and recent examples of teleological claims include the following: The chief function of the heart is the transmission and pumping of the blood through the arteries to the extremities of the body. (Harvey 1616 [1928: 49]) The Predator Detection hypothesis remains the strongest candidate for the function of stotting [by gazelles]. (Caro 1986: 663) The geographic range of human malaria is much wider than the range of the sickle-cell gene. As it happens, other antimalarial genes take over the protective function of the sickle-cell gene in … other warm parts. (Diamond 1994: 83) Despite the substantial amount of data we now have on theropod dinosaurs, more information is necessary in order to determine the likelihood that early feathers served an adaptive function in visual display as opposed to other proposed adaptive functions such as thermoregulation. (Dimond et al. 2011: 62) The ubiquity of claims such as these raises the question: how should apparently teleological notions in biology be understood? Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology. For instance, Ernst Mayr (1988), identified four reasons why teleological notions remain controversial in biology, namely that they are: vitalistic (positing some special ‘life-force’); requiring backwards causation (because goal-directed explanations seem to use future outcomes to explain present traits); incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none). A fifth complaint is that they are not empirically testable (Allen & Bekoff 1995). The current philosophical literature offers both Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of teleology in biology that aim to avoid these concerns. In this article, we hope to bring some clarity to the contemporary debates over the role of teleological notions in biology by sketching a taxonomy of the various accounts of biological function on offer (see Allen & Bekoff 1995 for a more comprehensive taxonomy that forms the basis of this presentation). We primarily focus on naturalistic accounts of biological function, since this is where we see the most lively and productive current debates (see, e.g., Garson 2016 for an extended survey). We also briefly discuss the notion of goal-directedness in section 2.

The naturalistic theory of mind that arises from ethology is faced with the question of continuity between human mind and animal mind. In particular, the applicability of intentional, mentalistic terms to animals arises. I argue that cognitive ethologists can and should operate with a realistic conception of intentional states in animals. ;I start by considering arguments claiming to show that the attribution of intentional states presents special difficulties in the case of animals, because the contents of such states cannot be specified. I argue that this claim is not well-supported. ;After defending against these attacks on the attribution of intentional states to animals, I develop the positive thesis that the evolutionary concerns of cognitive ethology require the use of intentional descriptions. I argue that natural selection operates on the intentional properties of organisms, and that a full evolutionary account therefore requires the attribution of the intentional states. I illustrate this in detail, using examples of ethological research on vervet monkeys. ;This leads me to discuss how biologists have made use of intentional concepts and I specifically describe some influential work on communication. In this work, biologists have attempted to give a non-intentional characterization of communication. I discuss why such approaches fail, again raising the issue of the importance of intentional descriptions for evolutionary explanations. ;I conclude by discussing consequences of my view for designing ethological experiments. I suggest that ethologists can divide their task into two parts. Evidence for complex intentional states in animals can be obtained separately from evidence that supports particular content attributions