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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The biomedical sciences employ a causal, rather than a teleological, concept of function

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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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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