Gunnar Babcock

Among much else, Peirce was concerned with understanding the nature of experimentation. And while Peirce scholarship frequently appeals to the role of experimentation in his philosophy, no one has yet provided the account appealed to. This is not because Peirce's understanding of experimentation is too obvious to deserve discussion, nor is it because Peirce was quiet on the subject. Indeed, Peirce attempted to articulate what he meant by an experiment in many ways over the course of decades. But these articulations have received limited attention and have not been brought together with the aim of understanding Peircean experimentation. Notably, two of the key sources—Peirce's writings on Petrus Peregrinus de Maricourt and his many drafts of "What Pragmatism Is"—have received little critical engagement. This essay has two aims. The first is to lay out and bring together Peirce's various discussions on the nature of experimentation, providing a sketch of the whole picture. The second is to draw attention to three aspects of this sketch—(1) that experimental inquiry is interest-based, (2) that abduction occurs at key stages throughout, not merely in the production of hypotheses, and (3) that experimental inquiry clarifies and distinguishes two roles for doubt: as a skeptical attitude held towards a hypothesis, and as an uncomfortable state caused by surprise, with only the first sense being crucial.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its widespread use and contentiousness, there has sometimes been confusion about what exactly constitutes ‘teleology’. This paper provides a classification system of _types of teleological phenomena_ and applies the framework to debates on the suitability of teleology in the life and physical sciences. The first part of the paper draws from accounts of goal-directed behaviour in biology and cosmology to construct the classification. I argue that there are _two distinct behaviours_ that have traditionally been labelled ‘teleological’: (i) end-directedness and (ii) self-determination. I then highlight three other, orthogonal distinctions which further clarify the type of teleology in question, namely _internal vs. external_,_ intentional vs. non-intentional_, and _specific vs. unspecific._ The second part of the paper applies this framework to two cases: debates between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology in biology, and anthropic principles and fine-tuning arguments in cosmology. In the first instance, I show how the distinction between the two concerns not just whether the teleology is internal or external, but also the _type_ of teleology (end-directedness or self-determination) posited. In the second instance, I show how anthropic principles posit substantively different kinds of teleological behaviour, some of which, I argue, are usually viewed as unscientific, whereas others are generally considered admissible in science. The final part of the paper sketches some suggestions for how the problems surrounding teleology in science should be reconceptualized and applies the framework to resolve a current debate: between the organizational account and field theory.

Externalist theories of teleology are views that explain the actions and ends of living beings in terms of nonnormative phenomena. “Field theory” (FT) adds to them that teleology arises from external guidance. Embracing an artifact model, it considers all systems as functional by-products of their field relationships, whether these are internal or external to an organization. The key categories to understand how they do this are persistence (the tendency of an entity to return to the same trajectory after being perturbed) and plasticity (the tendency of an entity to find a particular trajectory from varying starting points). While FT offers a nuanced analysis of field relationships, it describes too many physical processes as teleological. Emblematic of it is that it pays no attention to the difference between two types of asymmetric change: the linear processes governed by global thermodynamic tendencies, which I call “terminal” because their end is increasing entropy, and the processes that utilize these same tendencies to stay away from equilibrium by creating local deviations of the second law, which I call “targeted”. Living systems use terminal field effects to prevent thermodynamic degradation and promote their own forms of organization. They generate their sources of guidance and are not just targeted with respect to external fields but also to themselves. Since the artifactual model of FT does not seem able to account for targeted tendencies, adopting the distinction between terminal and targeted processes could help FT overcome some of the perceived limits of its deflationary stance.

In recent times, the exponential growth of sequenced genomes and structural knowledge of proteins, as well as the development of computational tools and controlled vocabularies to deal with this growth, has fueled a demand for conceptual clarification regarding the concept of function in molecular biology. In this article, we will attempt to develop an account of function fit to deal with the conceptual/philosophical problems in that domain, but which can be extended to other areas of biology. To provide this account, we will argue for three theses: (1) some authors have confused metatheoretical issues (about the meaning and application criteria of terms) with metaphysical ones (about teleology); this led them to (2) look for explicit definitions of “function”, in terms of necessary and sufficient criteria of application, in order to make the concept of function eliminable; however, (3) if one leaves metaphysical worries aside and focuses on functional attribution practices, it is more adequate to say that the concept of function has an open texture. That is, that a multiplicity of application criteria is available, none of which is sufficient nor necessary to attribute a function to a trait, and which only in concert form a clear picture. We distinguish this thesis from some usual forms of pluralism. Finally, we will illustrate this account with a historical reconstruction of the ascription of a water transport function to aquaporins.