Introduction—Purpose in Biology

I am delighted to introduce the papers in this year's Special Issue. They are a combination of those presented at the annual Ratio one-day conference ‘Purpose in Biology: New Directions’ (held at the University of Reading in September 2023) and some further invited contributions. The one-day conference in 2023 was held under the auspices of a research project at the University of Reading generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation: ‘Mistakes in Living Systems: A New Conceptual Framework for the Study of Purpose in Biology’. This in turn was one of a number of projects across the world, funded by the Foundation under the umbrella of its global research programme, ‘Agency, Directionality, and Function’ (grant 62220). The objective of the global programme was to bring together philosophers, biologists, modellers and researchers in allied disciplines in order to investigate purposiveness and goal-directedness in tight, interdisciplinary collaborations. The members of the Mistakes in Living Systems Team were: myself, as Principal Investigator; Prof Jonathan Hill, of the University of Reading, as Co-investigator; Prof Ingo Bojak, of the University of Reading, as Co-investigator; Prof Jon Gibbins, of the University of Reading, as Co-investigator; Dr Christopher Austin, as Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Reading; and Dr François Cinotti, as Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Reading. All members of the team contributed to the organisation of the one-day conference and the selection of further contributors; I am grateful to the team for all of their hard work in bringing the conference and this Special Issue to fruition. Needless to say, the views expressed in these papers represent those of the authors only, not necessarily of myself or of the other team members, or of the John Templeton Foundation. The reader will find an array of topics examined in this Special Issue. Stephen Boulter, in ‘Prime Matter Emergentism: Unity Without Reduction’, tackles the thorny ‘reduction question’: whether biology can in any clear way be reduced to physics (and perhaps chemistry). For those who take seriously the ontological reality of purposive (or teleological) processes and behaviour in living beings, this foundational question does not go away since reductionism challenges that very ontology. Boulter's strategy is to appeal to what he calls Prime Matter Emergentism. On this view, there are novel biological properties at a level distinct from physics and chemistry, yet these are the result of the actualisation of potentialities already found at the level of Aristotelian prime matter—that indeterminate stuff which underlies all the forms, organic and inorganic, found in nature. Mark Okrent, in ‘On the Concept of “Actively Working at Making a Living”’, discusses the idea of organisms as entities that have to ‘make a living’. He offers an account of what it is for organisms to make their way in the world in terms of counterfactuals. Okrent then articulates why it is that the existence and character of organisms conceived in this way might require a different kind of explanation than those on offer in the sciences of physics and chemistry. Finally, he discusses why it is that it seems appropriate to use teleological locutions in the description of the behaviour, structure and metabolism of entities that actively work at making a living. In ‘Life is Strongly Emergent’, Michele Paolini Paoletti argues that life is a strongly emergent phenomenon, on the ground that the project of drawing a real distinction between living and non-living beings cannot but appeal to strongly emergent powers. First, he introduces some features whose possession is typically taken to be sufficient for possessing life, that is, Life-Sufficient Features. He clarifies what he means by ‘strongly emergent powers’. He then develops and illustrates his argument, in addition to examining a large number of possible reactions to it. He responds that all such reactions turn out to be troublesome or inadequate. In ‘The Property of Goal-Directedness: Lessons from the Dispositions Debate’, Matthew Tugby argues that the well-known system-property or ‘cybernetic’ theory of goals and goal-directedness faces problems when it comes to formulating a counterfactual analysis of goal-directedness that is counterexample-free, non-circular and non-trivial. These difficulties closely mirror those facing reductionists about dispositions, though the parallels between the two debates have been overlooked in the literature. After outlining those parallels, Tugby considers what goal theorists might learn from the dispositions debate. In particular, he discusses the need for a realist, non-reductionist account of goal-directedness, exploring the idea that properties of goal-directedness are themselves dispositions or ‘powers’ of a certain sort. In ‘Organisational Teleology 2.0: Grounding Biological Purposiveness in Regulatory Control’, Leonardo Bich revises the popular organisational account of teleology, which argues that living systems are first and foremost oriented towards a goal—maintaining their own conditions of existence. He points out some limitations of this account, mainly in its capacity to explain the richness and complexity of biological systems and their purposeful behaviours. Bich identifies the reason for these limitations in the theoretical grounding of the account, specifically in the overly narrow notion of ‘closure of constraints’, focused on self-production. He proposes grounding an organisational account of biological teleology in the capacity of living systems not just to produce and replace their parts, but to control their own internal dynamics and behaviours in such a way as to maintain themselves. This theoretical framework, claims Bich, has two advantages: it better captures (i) the distinctive features of biological organisation and (ii) the richness and active nature of organisms' purposeful behaviour. Bich's revision, he asserts, makes it possible to apply this framework beyond minimal theoretical models to real biological cases. In ‘Organisms, Agency and Aristotle’, James Lennox argues that there is a tension at the heart of Aristotle's understanding of organic activities, generated by his appeals to the productive activities of craftsmen and his use of normative language to characterize the goals of such activities. In this paper, Lennox discusses two ways of interpreting Aristotle's teleology aimed at resolving this tension, also examining a closely analogous tension at the heart of a number of contemporary defences of teleological reasoning in biology. To round off this Special Issue, Daniel McShea and Gunnar Babcock examine ‘Four False Dichotomies in the Study of Teleology’. One is the notion that teleological explanations are opposed to mechanistic explanations. A second is that teleology must arise from processes operating either internal to an organism or external to it. A third is that systems are either alive and teleological, or non-living and not teleological. Fourth, humans are teleological on account of our ability to intend, seek, prefer and so on, whilst other systems without these capacities are not. Here, McShea and Babcock use their own account of goal directedness, which they term ‘field theory’, to show for each dichotomy that there is an alternative—a view of teleology that either resolves these dichotomies or demands revision of them. What this reveals are not only the dangers of dichotomous thinking but a widespread lack of clarity about what teleology is. I hope you enjoy and profit from these Special Issue articles as much as it was a pleasure to put together such fine contributions from an array of experts in the current and lively debate about purpose in biology, where there are fascinating new directions to be explored. The author declares no conflicts of interest

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