M. A. Bedau, "Naturalism and Teleology," in S. Wagner and R. Warner, eds., Beyond Naturalism and Physicalism, forthcoming.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....be just an accident. cf. also Bedau 1986, 489; Bedau 1992a, 32, emphasis added; Bedau 1992c, pp. 285 6) My sympathies lie with the answers to these objections given by the early Bedau rather than the late Bedau modal intuitions are relevant in the search for adequate definitions; reading Bedau s work (late 80s early 90s vs. mid 90s) leaves me at a loss to explain the shift in his argumentation. However, Bedau may be more sympathetic to the statement of a couple of researchers whose outlooks are in greater sympathy to his own. Langton writes, It was only within the context of this much larger set ....

Bedau, M. 1992a. Naturalism and Teleology. In Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, edited by S. Warner and R. Wagner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 23-51.

....chemistry) and find functions in things which fail to interest us. Further, we believe that things would have had functions even if 2 For accounts of the difficulties involved in this seemingly straightforward idea, see Bigelow and Pargetter (1987, 101 2) Griffiths (1993, 7 8) 3 See Bedau (1990) for a convincing case against mentalism in teleology. See Nissen (1997) for a defense. 171 there had been no one around to take interest in the structures that have them (1987, II) Various authors appeal to the persistence of functional attribution: despite hundreds of years of ....

....has undertaken the challenge of understanding biological teleology without resort to mentalism, panpsychism or eliminitivism. 7 We may thus note a condition of adequacy that the main contemporary approaches to biological teleology have attempted to satisfy: an adequate account 4 See Bedau (1990): even if a theory of teleology does not take natural teleology at face value, it should provide some sort of explanation of why organic nature appears teleological (66) 5 David Buller says, In spite of the difficulties associated with teleology, however, biologists continued to use the ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Bedau, M. 1992b. Naturalism and Teleology. In Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, edited by S. Warner and R. Wagner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

No context found.

M. A. Bedau, "Naturalism and Teleology," in S. Wagner and R. Warner, eds., Beyond Naturalism and Physicalism, forthcoming.

.... to the persistence of functional attribution: despite hundreds of years of philosophical antagonism to teleology, biological science has 2 For accounts of the difficulties involved in this seemingly straightforward idea, see Bigelow and Pargetter (1987, 101 2) Griffiths (1993, 7 8) 3 See Bedau (1990) for a convincing case against mentalism in teleology. See Nissen (1997) for a defense. 4 made little effort to remove teleological language from its explanations and reflective biologists are positively resistant to the idea that teleology should be eliminated from their field. 5 Finally, it ....

....onto the world, but is a real feature of the world that we discover through investigation. Condition one: the realist stance. It is a condition of adequacy on an account of biological functions that the account respect the apparent commitment in common sense and science s to teleology as 4 See Bedau (1990): even if a theory of teleology does not take natural teleology at face value, it should provide some sort of explanation of why organic nature appears teleological (66) 5 David Buller says, In spite of the difficulties associated with teleology, however, biologists continued to use the ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Bedau, M. 1992b. Naturalism and Teleology. In Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, edited by S. Warner and R. Wagner. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 23-51.

....contexts and rule proving exceptions arise in contexts in which some other means better achieves the same purpose. The teleology in supple laws can be mental but it can also be merely biological, as examples below show. Further details of my preferred understanding of teleology are developed in Bedau 1990, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, Bedau Packard 1992. Hofstadter (1985) describes mental regularities as fluid and Horgan and Tienson (1990) talk of soft laws of intentional psychology. But the teleology in supple laws makes them not just fluid or soft but aptly so. The fluidity or softness of supple laws involves the ....

Bedau, M. A. 1993. Naturalism and teleology. In S. J. Wagner & R. Warner (Eds.), Naturalism, a critical appraisal. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

.... loop [Varela91, Parisi92, Nolfi93] The survival and flourishing of agents, especially those that must act autonomously in an unpredictably changing environment, depends on the functionality of these sensorimotor couplings i.e. the non accidental beneficial effects they provide the agents [Bedau92c, Bedau92a, Bedau93a, Bedau91]. On one view, intelligence consists of just this sort of sensorimotor functionality; intelligent agents are those that have the capacity to flourish by means of suitably adjusting their interactions with an environment on which they depend for resources, even though the agent (and the agent s ....

M. A. Bedau. Naturalism and teleology. In S. J. Wagner and R. Warner, editors, Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, pages 23--51. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 1993.

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC