Biological Organization and Cross-Generation Functions
By Cristian Saborido, Matteo Mossio, Á. Moreno. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2011
92 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra- and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this ‘ontological problem’, a splitting account has been proposed, according to which the two kinds of functions require distinct organizational definitions. In this article, we propose a solution for the ontological problem, by arguing that intra- and cross-generation functions can be said to contribute in the same way to the maintenance of the biological organization, characterized in terms of organizational self-maintenance. As a consequence, we suggest maintaining a unified organizational account of biological functions. 1 Introduction 2 Self-reproduction of Traits: Proposals and Criticism 2.1 Schlosser’s and McLaughlin’s accounts 2.2 Delancey’s ‘splitting account’ 3 Self-maintenance of Systems 3.1 Functions and organizational closure 3.2 Second order self-maintaining systems? 3.3 A solution to the ontological problem 4 Conclusions 1 Introduction 2 Self-reproduction of Traits: Proposals and Criticism 2.1 Schlosser’s and McLaughlin’s accounts 2.2 Delancey’s ‘splitting account’ 2.1 Schlosser’s and McLaughlin’s accounts 2.2 Delancey’s ‘splitting account’ 3 Self-maintenance of Systems 3.1 Functions and organizational closure 3.2 Second order self-maintaining systems? 3.3 A solution to the ontological problem 3.1 Functions and organizational closure 3.2 Second order self-maintaining systems? 3.3 A solution to the ontological problem 4 Conclusions
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/286911b5c047c5b36fda92c4c28834c3a58ece16
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology (2014, background): “…that adjudicates the ascription of functions to its parts according to how they help it meet its physiological needs and cope with its environmental surroundings (see Schlosser 1998; Collier 2000; McLaughlin 2001; Christensen and Bickhard 2002; Edin 2008; Mossio et al. 2009; Saborido et al. 2011).”