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    The biomedical sciences employ a causal, rather than a te... — Carmelics
    Home/Bioethics
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    The biomedical sciences employ a causal, rather than a teleological, concept of function

    BioethicsCausation
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    Reasons For

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    • 1.Schaffner argues that biomedical science uses causal explanation
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    • 2.Cummins's systemic analysis defines function as the causal contribution a structure makes to the overall operation of the system that includes it
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    • 3.Most theorists who have attended to biomedical contexts agree that the function of an organ or structure can be understood without thinking of it as an adaptation
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Millikan and Neander argue that selected-effects functions—what a trait was selected *for*—are indispensable to explaining pathology in evolutionary medicine.
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    • 2.Cummins-style causal-role accounts cannot distinguish a cancerous tumor's causal contributions from legitimate organ functions without appealing to selection history.
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    • 3.Biomedical practice routinely invokes evolutionary etiology to define normal function, as seen in Nesse and Williams's Darwinian medicine, undermining the purely causal reading.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Boorse's biostatistical theory grounds biological function in species-typical contributions to survival and reproduction, which are irreducibly teleological goals.
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    • 2.Biomedical diagnosis of dysfunction presupposes a normative standard of what an organ is 'supposed to do', which causal/systemic accounts cannot supply without covert teleology.
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    BioethicsCausation

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    Related

    Biomedical diagnosis of dysfunction presupposes a normative standard of what an ...Biomedical practice routinely invokes evolutionary etiology to define normal fun...Boorse's biostatistical theory grounds biological function in species-typical co...Cummins's systemic analysis defines function as the causal contribution a struct...
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    Cummins-style causal-role accounts cannot distinguish a cancerous tumor's causal...Millikan and Neander argue that selected-effects functions—what a trait was sele...Most theorists who have attended to biomedical contexts agree that the function ...Schaffner argues that biomedical science uses causal explanation

    Similar

    Schaffner argues that biomedical science uses causal explanation84%Naturalism insists that disease involves a causal process that include...77%Wakefield's connection of disease to an evolutionary concept of functi...77%Physical science seeks causal explanations of phenomena.76%

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    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: health-disease
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    In effect, Schaffner is arguing that the biomedical sciences employ a causal, rather than a teleological, concept of function. This is in the spirit of Cummins’s (1975) systemic analysis of function as the causal contribution a structure makes to the overall operation of the system that includes it. Cummins’s concept of function is not a historical or evolutionary concept. According to Cummins, a component of a system may have a function even it was not designed or selected for. Wakefield has ti
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    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

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    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit