Philippe Huneman

Recently some philosophers have emphasized a potentially irreconcilable conceptual antagonism between the statistical characterization of natural selection and the standard scientific discussion of natural selection in terms of forces and causes. Other philosophers have developed an account of the causal character of selectionist statements represented in terms of counterfactuals. I examine the compatibility between such statisticalism and counterfactually based causal accounts of natural selection by distinguishing two distinct statisticalist claims: firstly the suggested impossibility for natural selection to be a cause acting upon populations and secondly the conceptualization that all evolutionary causes occur at the level of interactions between individual organisms. I argue that deriving the latter from the former involves supplementary assumptions concerning precisely what causation is. I critically examine two of these assumptions purportedly preventing natural selection being regarded as a cause: the locality claim and the modularity claim. I conclude that justifying the strongest version of statisticalism—i.e. evolutionary causation only occurs at the level of individual interactions between organisms—would require further metaphysical arguments that are likely to be deemed highly problematic. Additionally, I argue that such a metaphysical position would be considered incongruous with both our scientific and ordinary use of the concepts of causality and explanation as employed within our everyday epistemological framework

Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature’s paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together—as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis—new collective individuals can emerge. In this book, leading scholars consider the biological and philosophical implications of the emergence of these new collective individuals from associations of living beings. The topics they consider range from metaphysical issues to biological research on natural selection, sociobiology, and symbiosis. The contributors investigate individuality and its relationship to evolution and the specific concept of organism; the tension between group evolution and individual adaptation; and the structure of collective individuals and the extent to which they can be defined by the same concept of individuality. These new perspectives on evolved individuality should trigger important revisions to both philosophical and biological conceptions of the individual. Contributors: Frédéric Bouchard, Ellen Clarke, Jennifer Fewell, Andrew Gardner, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Charles J. Goodnight, Matt Haber, Andrew Hamilton, Philippe Huneman, Samir Okasha, Thomas Pradeu, Scott Turner, Minus van Baalen

This paper proposes an interpretative framework for some developments of the philosophy of nature after Kant. I emphasize the critique of the economy of nature in the Critique of judgement. I argue that it resulted in a split of a previous structure of knowledge; such a structure articulated natural theology and natural philosophy on the basis of the consideration of the order displayed by living beings, both in their internal organisation and their ecological distribution. The possibility of a philosophical discourse on nature that is neither mathematical nor theological stemmed from this shift. I call “hermeneutics of nature” such a program, since it aims at unpacking an immanent meaning in nature that is not explicated by the sciences of nature, which are dealing with the laws of nature. The Naturphilosophie, undertaken by Schelling, as well as the philosophies of nature of Hegel and Schopenhauer, are several realizations of this program. I highlight the structural traits that they share, such as a pregnant sense of conflicts in nature, an emphasis on the riddles of gender, and above all a prominent status given to organisms as a clue to the meaning of nature. Finally, I try to sketch the ramifications of this hermeneutics of nature in contemporary philosophy, especially phenomenology, and argue that the coming philosophy of nature, as shown by the attempts of syntheses between phenomenology and ecology, seems to depart from this hermeneutical program.

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence in general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining.

ArgumentThis paper considers how certain ideas elaborated by the Montpellier vitalists influenced the rise of French alienism, and how those ideas framed the changing view of passions during the eighteenth century. Various kinds of evidence attest that the passions progressively became the focus of medical attention, rather than a theme specific to moralists and philosophers. Vitalism conceived of organisms as animal economies understandable through the transformations of the various modes of their sensibility. This allowed some physicians to define a kind of anthropological program, which viewed human beings as a whole, with no distinction betweenle physiqueandle moral. The passions in this context became a specific alteration of the animal economy. Such an anthropological program was the framework within which Pinel understood the various classes of madness as disease – those troubles being general disturbances of the animal economy, which presupposed a knowledge of the latter, to be addressed and cured. In this view, and departing from the vitalist writers with regard to the specificity of mental illness as such, Pinel proposed another conception of the relations between passions and madness, and elaborated a general view of their status in etiology and therapeutics; those views were taken up and systematized by Esquirol, who finally defined a new kind of continuity between passion and madness, demonstrated by the idea that some kinds of madness that he called “monomania” had as a principle a “ruling passion” that the alienist, this novel medical specialist, had to unveil and address.

Biological individuals are usually defined by evolutionists through a reference to natural selection. This article looks for a concept of individuality that would hold at the same time for organisms and for communities or ecosystems, the latter being unaffected by natural selection. In the wake of Simon’s notion of “quasi-independence,” I elaborate a concept of “weak individuality” defined by probabilistic connections between sub-entities, read off our knowledge of their interactions. This formal scheme of connections allows one to infer what are the individuals in the domain addressed by the theory of the interactions. The article argues that if ecosystems do not have strong individuality, they still possess a weak individuality, ecological theories providing the values of the variables in the formula for individuality.

This chapter surveys the philosophical problems raised by the two Darwinian claims of the existence of a Tree of a life, and the explanatory power of natural selection. It explores the specificity of explanations by natural selection, emphasizing the high context-dependency of any process of selection. Some consequences are drawn about the difficulty of those explanations to fit a nomological model of explanation, and the irreducibility of their historic-narrative dimension. The paper introduces to the debates about units of selection, stating the compelling force of genic selectionnism but highlighting some critiques. Then it addresses the limits of selectionist explanations : the compared status of selection, drift and phylogenetic inertia are investigated, and the debates over adaptationism are presented, with the aim of defining the varieties of adaptationisms as research programs. In order to assess the scope of natural selection, the chapter addresses weak and strong challenges to the Synthetic theory of evolution, both from paleontology (punctuated equilibria, Gould’s contingency thesis) and evolutionary theory of development. We finally sketch some consequences of evolutionary theory concerning philosophical questions about human nature, on the basis of the hypothesis of the universality of selectionist explanations: this part deals mostly with epistemology and psychology.

This paper interprets the two pages devoted in the Critique of Pure Reason to a critique of Leibniz’s view of organisms as infinitely organized machines. It argues that this issue of organisms represents a crucial test-case for Kant in regard to the conflicting notions of space, continuity and divisibility held by classical metaphysics and by criticism. I first present Leibniz’s doctrine and its justification. In a second step, I explain the general reasoning by which Kant defines the problem of the Antinomies, and then I specify the case of the Second Antinomy. Then, I ask why the organism raises specific issues for Kant’s solution of the Second Antinomy, and why it sheds light on the nature of Leibniz’s metaphysical assumptions about organisms. The last section considers this critique of Leibniz from the perspective of Kant’s future theory of organisms in the third Critique, specifying its role in the development of a Kantian view of organisms with regard to the changes occurring at the same time in the life sciences.

This volume handles in various perspectives the concept of function and the nature of functional explanations, topics much discussed since two major and conflicting accounts have been raised by Larry Wright and Robert Cummins’s papers in the 1970s. Here, both Wright’s ”etiological theory of functions’ and Cummins’s ”systemic’ conception of functions are refined and elaborated in the light of current scientific practice, with papers showing how the ”etiological’ theory faces several objections and may in reply be revisited, while its counterpart became ever more sophisticated, as researchers discovered fresh applications for it. Relying on a firm knowledge of the original positions and debates, this volume presents cutting-edge research evincing the complexities that today pertain in function theory in various sciences. Alongside original papers from authors central to the controversy, work by emerging researchers taking novel perspectives will add to the potential avenues to be followed in the future. Not only does the book adopt no a priori assumptions about the scope of functional explanations, it also incorporates material from several very different scientific domains, e.g. neurosciences, ecology, or technology. In general, functions are implemented in mechanisms; and functional explanations in biology have often an essential relation with natural selection. These two basic claims set the stage for this book’s coverage of investigations concerning both ”functional’ explanations, and the ”metaphysics’ of functions. It casts new light on these claims, by testing them through their confrontation with scientific developments in biology, psychology, and recent developments concerning the metaphysics of realization. Rather than debating a single theory of functions, this book presents the richness of philosophical issues raised by functional discourse throughout the various sciences.​ Content Level » Research Keywords » Causal role theory of functions - Determination of content - Ecosystem selection - Etiological theory of function - Evolutionary biology - Functional explanations - Historical concepts in biology - Larry Wright - Neurosciences - New mechanism - Selected effects functions - Systemic theory of functions - William Wimsatt Related subjects » Anthropology & Archaeology - Epistemology & Philosophy of Science - Evolutionary & Developmental Biology - Neuroscience - Philosophy TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.- Section I. Biological functions and functional explanations: genes, cells, organisms and ecosystems.- Part 1.A. Functions, organization and development in life sciences.- Chapter 1. William C. Wimsatt. Evolution and the Stability of Functional Architectures.- Chapter 2. Denis M. Walsh. Teleological Emergence: The Autonomy of Evo-Devo.- Chapter 3. Jean Gayon. Does oxygen have a function, or: where should the regress of biological functions stop?.- Part 1.B. Functional pluralism for biologists? Chapter 4. Frédéric Bouchard. How ecosystem evolution strengthens the case for functional pluralism.- Chapter 5. Robert N. Brandon. A general case for functional pluralism.- Chapter 6. Philippe Huneman. Weak realism in the etiological theory of functions.- Section 2. Section II. Psychology, philosophy of mind and technology: Functions in a man’s world.- Part 2.A. 2A. Metaphysics, function and philosophy of mind.- Chapter 7. Carl Craver. Functions and Mechanisms in Contemporary Neuroscience.- Chapter 8. Carl Gillett. Understanding the sciences through the fog of ”functionalism.’.- 2.B. Philosophy of technology, design and functions.- Chapter 9. Fran¸ coise Longy. Artifacts and Organisms: A Case for a New Etiological Theory of Functions.- Chapter 10. Pieter Vermaas and Wybo Houkes. Functions as Epistemic Highlighters: An Engineering Account of Technical, Biological and Other Functions.- Epilogue.- Larry Wright. Revising teleological explanations: reflections three decades on.

This paper investigates the conception of causation required in order to make sense of natural selection as a causal explanation of changes in traits or allele frequencies. It claims that under a counterfactual account of causation, natural selection is constituted by the causal relevance of traits and alleles to the variation in traits and alleles frequencies. The “statisticalist” view of selection (Walsh, Matthen, Ariew, Lewens) has shown that natural selection is not a cause superadded to the causal interactions between individual organisms. It also claimed that the only causation at work is those aggregated individual interactions, natural selection being only predictive and explanatory, but it is implicitly committed to a process-view of causation. I formulate a counterfactual construal of the causal statements underlying selectionist explanations, and show that they hold because of the reference they make to ecological reliable factors. Considering case studies, I argue that this counterfactual view of causal relevance proper to natural selection captures more salient features of evolutionary explanations than the statisticalist view, and especially makes sense of the difference between selection and drift. I eventually establish equivalence between causal relevance of traits and natural selection itself as a cause

‘Statisticalists’ argue that the individual interactions of organisms taken together constitute natural selection. On this view, natural selection is an aggregated effect of interactions rather than some added cause acting on populations. The statisticalists’ view entails that natural selection and drift are indistinguishable aggregated effects of interactions, so that it becomes impossible to make a difference between them. The present paper attempts to make sense of the difference between selection and drift, given the main insights of statisticalism; basically, it will disentangle the various kinds of indistinguishability between selection and drift that happen within biology, by examining the epistemological and metaphysical nature of the distinction between selection and drift. It will be based on a ‘difference-making account’ of selection. The first section will explicate the inscrutability of selection and drift, its various types in the statisticalist writings, and its implications. The second section specifies concepts of natural selection and drift in the difference making account of selection I am using, and shows that one can derive from this the statistical signatures of selection and drift. On this basis I focus on one sort of indistinguishability issue about selection and drift, which I call epistemic opacity, and explain why it mostly affects small populations. The last section explains why epistemic opacity does not raise an genuine epistemic problem for evolutionary biology

This paper uses the framework of Formal Darwinism (FD) to evaluate organism-centric critiques of the Modern Synthesis (MS). The first section argues that the FD project reconciles two kinds of selective explanations in biology. Thus it is not correct to say that the MS neglects organisms—instead, it explains organisms’ design, as argued in the second section. In the third section I employ a concept of the organism derived from Kant that has two aspects: the parts presupposing the whole, and the productivity of the parts in relation to the whole. The first aspect corresponds to the “design” that FD explains, whereas the second aspect is something about which the MS is largely silent