The Organizational Account of Function is an Etiol

Authors: Marc Artiga Manolo Martínez

Publish Date: 2015/05/12

Volume: 64, Issue: 2, Pages: 105-117

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Abstract

The debate on the notion of function has been historically dominated by dispositional and etiological accounts but recently a third contender has gained prominence the organizational account This original theory of function is intended to offer an alternative account based on the notion of selfmaintaining system However there is a set of cases where organizational accounts seem to generate counterintuitive results These cases involve crossgenerational traits that is traits that do not contribute in any relevant way to the selfmaintenance of the organism carrying them but instead have very important effects on organisms that belong to the next generation We argue that any plausible solution to the problem of crossgenerational traits shows that the organizational account just is a version of the etiological theory and furthermore that it does not provide any substantive advantage over standard etiological theories of functionFinancial support for this work was provided by the DGI Spanish Government research project FFI201126853 and ConsoliderIngenio project CSD200900056 the Generalitat de Catalunya under grant 2014SGR81 a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas UNAM and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LudwigMaximiliansUniversität München

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