Biology and Philosophy16: 29–52, 2001.© 2001Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

A Kantian Stance on the Intentional Stance

MATTHEW RATCLIFFEDepartment of History and Philosophy of ScienceUniversity of CambridgeUK

Abstract. I examine the way in which Daniel Dennett (1987, 1995) uses his ‘intentional’ and‘design’ stances to make the claim that intentionality is derived from design. I suggest thatDennett is best understood as attempting to supply an objective, nonintentional, naturalisticrationale for our use of intentional concepts. However, I demonstrate that his overall picturepresupposes prior application of the intentional stance in a preconditional, ineliminable,‘sense-giving’ role. Construed as such, Dennett’s account is almost identical to the account ofbiological teleology offered by Kant inThe Critique of Judgement, with the consequence thatDennett’s naturalism is untenable. My conclusions lead to doubts concerning the legitimacyof any account attempting to naturalise intentionality by extracting normativity from biologyand also point to a novel account of biological function.

Key words: design, design stance, function, intentionality, intentional stance, Kantian tele-ology, naturalism, normativity, transcendental constitution

1. Dennett’s naturalism

Dennett (1987)1 explicitly outlines the starting point which he thinks isthe appropriate place from which to begin an investigation of mental-istic concepts. This starting point is something that he regards as pre-philosophical, by which I mean that it is not something that can be pittedagainst alternative starting points and systematically defended. Instead it is astandard which sets a limit on the kinds of things that can count as legitimateprojects, acceptable explanations or plausible arguments. Dennett explains:

I begin, then, with a tactical choice. I declare my starting point to be theobjective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences. (. . . )My sense that philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, thephysical sciences grounds both my modesty about philosophical methodand my optimism about philosophical progress. (p. 5) I propose to see,then, just what the mind looks like from the third-person, materialisticperspective of contemporary science. (p. 7)

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Dennett suggests that the legitimacy of this naturalistic starting point can bejudged, not bya priori conceptual or metaphysical argument, but insteadby the fruits it yields. He contrasts his own methodological assumptionswith those of Thomas Nagel, who argues that “a great deal is essentiallyconnected to a particular point of view, or type of point of view, and theattempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detachedfrom these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to outrightdenial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all” (1986: 7). Dennettexplains that the difference between his own view and that of Nagel is one ofstarting points or first principles. Thus there is noa priori mode of objectivecomparison between his own foundations and those of Nagel. Instead, hemaintains that the third person, scientific paradigm has yielded fruit whilstNagel’s, in contrast, has yielded only mysticism. Nagel at least agrees so faras the lack of rational comparison is concerned: “The disagreement betweenus will probably end only in the grave, if then” (1995: 86).2

The ultimate goal for a naturalist like Dennett is to understand the mentalin scientific, objective, nonmentalistic terms. Hence a naturalistic account ofa phenomenon must not make use of any subjective or mentalistic presupposi-tions in ways that are fundamental to the account, something Dennett is wellaware of:

Doesn’t the self-styled objectivist covertly depend on some prior commit-ment to irreducible points of view? Or doesn’t the goal of ‘reducing’ thesepoints of view to biology to chemistry to physics defeat itself in the endin any case? (1987: 6)

With this in mind, in the following sections I explore Dennett’s more specificposition concerning the relationship between his intentional and designstances and his ‘reduction’ of intentionality to biology. I argue that hisapproach to intentionality presupposes intentionality in a way that is fatalto the account, if construed naturalistically. I suggest instead that Dennett’sintentional stance is best understood as a transcendental precondition forthe possibility of biology, in a way which is indistinguishable from thecore commitments of Kant’s account inThe Critique of Judgement. HenceDennett’s own presuppositions are at odds with his naturalistic standards and– it will turn out as an added twist – not so different from Nagel’s, despite thefact that the two philosophers are generally regarded, and indeed regard eachother, as polar opposites. Reading Dennett in this way leads to some inter-esting conclusions concerning the more general project of trying to naturaliseintentionality through biology and also suggests a rethink of contemporaryviews on biological function.

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2. Dennett on intentionality and design

For some time, Dennett has defended the doctrine of the ‘intentional stance’or ‘intentional strategy’ (e.g. 1971, 1978, 1981, 1987, 1991a, b, 1995, 1996,1998). To summarise, he maintains that an organism is an intentional systemor ‘true believer’ if and only if its behaviour can be reliably predicted viaadoption of the intentional stance. In other words, if you treat it as an agent,with beliefs, desires, intentions and reasons, and this ‘stance’ pays off so far asbehaviour prediction is concerned, that is all there is to the organism’s beingan agent or ‘intentional system’ (Dennett 1981). However, for a naturalist likeDennett, it becomes readily apparent that there is some further explaining tobe done here. If we adopt an intentional stance towards systems x and y andit pays off in the case of x but not y, there must be some factor that explainsthis difference; there must be something intrinsic to the makeup of x whichis different from y and explains why the stance works in one case and not theother. Whether we explicitly equate this factor with belief or not3, there muststill be some fact of the matter for the naturalist which explains why a strategyworks on some systems and not others. An account of this factor could thenbe construed as a rationale or grounding for our use of the intentional stance;a naturalistic account of why we do use, and perhaps should use, intentionaltalk.

What accounts for the success or failure of the intentional stance? Whatis it about the world that determines whether an intentional interpretationof x will prove fruitful or not? I will now explore Dennett’s (1981, 1987,1995, 1996) account of the relationship between intentionality and ‘design’and suggest that he is best understood as trying to make use of the conceptof design to account for intentionality in terms of a naturalistic picture of theway the world is. In Section 3, I will show why this manoeuvre fails.

How does Dennett conceive of the relationship between intentionality anddesign? He begins by arguing for the plausibility of a distinctive ‘designstance’. As an example of the design stance at work, I am now sat ata computer. I have very little knowledge of its internal workings but nosuch physical knowledge is necessary so far as my knowing how to usethe machine is concerned, as I am taking the design stance towards it. Themachine is designed with a certain end in mind and, as such, it can be guar-anteed to work towards that end more often than not. If something has beendesigned to fulfil a certain task, we need not worry about the physical basisupon which its operations are instantiated. Instead, we understand the systemfunctionally, by appealing to the purpose for which it has been built. Dennettthen suggests that we can “view the intentional stance as a limiting case ofthe design stance”.4 What does he mean by this? Consider the computer – ithas no beliefs about word processing or data bases. It does not work with

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any ends ‘in mind’. However, it still works towards certain ends becausethose ends have been built into it as a result of a designer’s intentions. Ithas what Searle (1983) calls ‘derived intentionality’; its ends are parasiticon or derived from those of its designer who built it ‘for x’ and who has‘original intentionality’. In Searle’s view then, design is always conceptuallyderived from intention which is primary or original. Dennett however takesa different path. In ‘Evolution, Error and Intentionality’5 he asks us to thinkof a drinks machine which he calls a ‘Two Bitzer’. The machine takes twocoins and then releases a can of drink. It takes quarters in The United Statesand has been designed to take quarters. However, one of the machines isshipped to Panama, where it is found that coins called quarter-balboas (ofequal worth to quarters) will also be accepted and a drink will be released.How can we tell whether the machine is a ‘quarter taker’ or an ‘quarter-balboataker’? Dennett suggests that the machine is functioning properly when it istaking quarters because that is what it was designed to do. There is nothinginternal to the machine’s physics to confirm this. The answer is suppliedvia an appeal to the intentions of the designer.6 He suggests that, as in thecase of the machine, if an organism isn’t sophisticated enough to keep acertain rationale in mind, we can “pass the rationale from the individual tothe evolving genotype”,7 analogous to passing on the proper function of thedrinks machine to the projects of its designer. The organism’s intentionality,like the machine’s proper function, is derived from what it’s designed to do.Searle says that design is derived from intentionality; Dennett turns this on itshead and says that a thing’s intentional states are derived from its design. Thedrinks machine ‘has beliefs about’ x’s and not y’s even if nothing intrinsic tothe machine’s physics can distinguish between x’s and y’s and this is becauseit has been designed to respond to x’s and not y’s. Similarly, a frog has beliefsabout flies and not black dots because it has been designed to respond to flies,even though the frog cannot itself distinguish between the two.

So when do we legitimately assign intentional characteristics? Surely notall artifacts have beliefs just because they’ve been designed? A thermostat isdesigned; does that merit an intentional treatment? Dennett turns to a claimabout complexity.8 A thermostat is simple. It can’t detect or respond to manychanges in its environment. It is not tied very closely to its environment,meaning that we can move it to a new environment without its being able todetect the difference. Yet as a designed item becomes more complex and wekeep adding bits and fine tuning it, there comes a point when the item is so finetuned that it can be thought of as operating within a certain environment andonly that environment. A more complex, designed system will be tied moreclosely (in an epistemic sense) to the job for which it has been built. It canonly be understood as ‘acting’ within a certain specific environment, towards

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specific ends. Take ourselves for example; Dennett suggests that humans areso complex and designed so specifically for a certain type of niche that itwould take an extremely elaborate ‘bluff’ to fool us into thinking that twodifferent environments were in fact the same, something as dramatic as a‘Twin Earth9’ case. We are, in an epistemic sense, tied very closely to ourenvironment. A thermostat is much more weakly attached to its world andcan’t detect anything like as many possible different states of the world aswe can. You can move a thermostat from one environment to another verydifferent environment and it can’t possibly ‘tell the difference’. A toad isharder to trick but, even so, it can be fooled into eating ball bearings insteadof bugs. Yet when you reach the level of design complexity found in humans,you find that we really are tied closely to our world; to the objects of our‘beliefs’:

There is no magic moment in the transition from a simple thermo-stat to a system thatreally has an internal representation of the worldaround it. The thermostat has a minimally demanding representation ofthe world, fancier thermostats have more demanding representations ofthe world, fancier robots for helping around the house would have stillmore demanding representations of the world. Finally you reach us. Weare so multifariously and intricately connected to the world that almostno substitution is possible – though it is clearly imaginable in a thoughtexperiment. (. . . ) It iseasy to derive radically different Twin Earths forsomething as simple and sensorily deprived as a thermostat, but yourinternal organization puts a much more stringent demand on substitution.Your Twin Earth and Earth must be virtual replicas or you will changestate dramatically on arrival. (Dennett 1987: 32)

So Dennett postulates a certain kind of graded epistemic link betweenbelievers and their objects. As an artifact gets more complex, its ‘beliefs’become more fine tuned, more precise. In other words, more sophisticatedintentional interpretations of its behaviour prove fruitful. As you go down theladder of complexity10, beliefs become less focused, more rudimentary, untilyou hit a level where intentional attributions are no longer applicable. To beregarded fruitfully as a genuine representational system or believer, one mustbe above a certain minimum level of behavioural/representational complexity,to be understood in terms of the sophistication of one’s evolutionary ‘design’.A thermostat, presumably, falls below the bottom rung of the ladder.11 HenceDennett attempts to account for the legitimacy of intentional talk by appealingto natural selection, construed essentially as a ‘design’ process.

At this point, one might worry that an understanding of design must infact be parasitic on intention, in that the concept of design presupposes adesigner who has intentions, which are primary. If we are to understand

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something as designed, we must understand what it was designed for; ‘whatwere its designer’s intentions? what goals could have warranted this design?’.Of course evolutionary design, as we know, has no designer, so how can wemake sense of references to ‘natural design’?

Dennett’s view is that the ultimate absence of a designer puts paid tothe problem. Intentionality is parasitic upon design, and happily vanishesdue to the final absence of a designer, leaving an ultimately nonintentional,naturalistic account of selection mechanisms and their products; a naturalisticpicture that accounts for our use of the strategy and is ultimately devoidof appeal to mentalistic notions. Evolutionary design, as Dennett explicitlyacknowledges, is just ‘as if design’. There is no intrinsic sense in whichwe have been ‘designed’. Dennett regards design as a ‘stance’, a way ofunderstanding certain things as opposed to a mind-independent ontologicalcategory. He is committed to this interpretation, as real design conceptuallyentails a real designer, something he would under no circumstances want toadmit. However, Dennett is still happy to talk of ‘intentional systems’, whichare treated as such because they have been ‘designed’. For this to make sense,he needs to fall back on some kind of objective system characteristic thatis invariably associated with design. However, I shall argue that it is whenhe tries to do this with the concept of design – a concept which he readilyadmits is to be understood in terms of a stance or strategy which structuresexperience, as opposed to something that simply describes features of themind-independent world – that his naturalistic position becomes untenable.

3. Dennett’s account is nonnaturalistic

I shall now suggest that Dennett’s account conflates claims about the waythe world really is with claims concerning the way our minds structure ourunderstanding of the world. As a result of his naturalistic drive, Dennettwants to make intentionality vanish, leaving a naturalistic picture of selec-tion mechanisms and their products, devoid of any remaining irreduciblymentalistic element. However, it will turn out that his entire picture is concep-tually dependent upon the intentional stance; it only makes sense given priorapplication of the stance, just as the concept of ‘parent’ is unintelligiblewithout the concept of ‘child’. Ultimately the stance is best understood, Ishall suggest, as a transcendental precondition for the intelligibility of thebiological picture that Dennett advocates. Let me explain my reasons formaking this claim:

Dennett talks freely of “Reading Mother Nature’s Mind” (e.g. 1996:298) and suggests that the methodology of evolutionary biologists simplyis ‘Reading Mother Nature’s Mind’. He argues (1995) that his ‘design

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stance’ is the same methodological device as that adopted by adaptationistmethodologies, which employ a form of ‘reverse engineering’ to postulatehistorical reasons for the genesis of evolved structures, based on hypoth-eses pertaining to current utility. Dennett regards such methodologies asindispensable “stances or strategies that serve to organize data, explaininterrelations and generate questions to ask Nature” (1987: 265).12 We canonly postulate evolutionary design if we imagine an admittedly nonexistentdesigner and, unless we do this, we will be unable to structure our biologicalquestioning in a fruitful manner. Ultimately, Dennett is saying that the intel-ligibility and predictive power of our own intentional talk can be groundedin the fact that we are products of natural selection, but only as understoodthrough the design stance. The design stance is more fundamental than theintentional stance; “(the intentional stance) can be viewed, if you like, as asubspecies of the design stance, in which the designed thing is an agent ofsorts” (1996: 30). But the design stance then falls back on the imaginaryintentionality of ‘Mother Nature’ for its sense. The design stance presup-poses prior application of the intentional stance to nature and anything thatDennett says about the nature of design is, I suggest, unintelligible withouta preconditional intentional stance. The reason for this is that the intentionalstance is not simply causally or epistemologically prior to the design stancebut is also conceptually prior. Dennett’s ‘design stance’ view of nature issimply unthinkable without a preconditional intentional stance. In supportof this claim, consider Dennett’s statement that “I recognize that I have yetto persuade many philosophers that they must take seriously my shockingline on how biology depends, in the end, on adopting the intentional stancetowards the evolutionary process itself”.13 He explains how “it is easy forus, constituted as we are, to perceive patterns that are visible from the inten-tional stance – and only from that stance” (Dennett 1987: 39). He regardsbiology itself as such a pattern and describes use of the stance as quite simply‘inescapable’ in biological inquiry (Dennett 1987: 311); it is an essentialprerequisite for the possibility of meaningful biological questioning, for theintelligibility of the patterns that constitute biology. We must assume aninstrumental conception of “Mother Nature (who) doesn’t commit herselfexplicitly and objectively toany functional attributions; all such attribu-tions depend on the mind-set of the intentional stance, in which we assumeoptimality in order to interpret what we find” (Dennett 1987: 320). The stanceis a device which makes possible an interpretation of the natural world asdesigned, and thus functional or adapted, and Dennett wants to say that thisinterpretation quite simply ‘is’ biology. Biology needs the concepts of func-tion and adaptation, and you get them from a construal of Mother Nature as adesigner. Given this design construal, you can then understand intentionality

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in terms of biological function or design. As design is only perceptible toone who employs the intentional stance, it therefore seems, contra Dennett,that the design stance is in fact ultimately derived from the intentional stanceas opposed to the latter being a ‘subspecies’ of the former. It also becomesapparent that we cannot simply ‘deny’ Mother Nature and arrive at a natur-alistic picture of design, because Mother Nature is not part of nature but isinstead a preconditional element in a framework of understanding wherebya certain construal of the natural world as a product of design is renderedintelligible. Mother Nature is not merely an epistemological heuristic forgetting at a design construal of nature, which can then be removed to leavedesignerless design; she is a conceptual precondition for any design construal;remove Mother Nature and everything else collapses, including Dennett’sstance-dependent perspective upon selection mechanisms. We get nothing-ness instead of natural design, as the whole framework of interpretationbreaks down. Dennett’s ‘design’ account of intentional stance applicability istherefore inescapably stance-dependent. Fodor (1996) diagnoses the problemsuccinctly:

Design (as opposed to mere order) requires a designer. Not theologically(. . . ) but conceptually. You can’t explain intentionality by appealing to thenotion of design because the notion of designpresupposesintentionality.(p. 177)14

This might not be a problem for Dennett if he were not trying to pin downsome kind of naturalistic grounding to explain why the stance works and itmight well be contested that I have misrepresented his project in claimingthis as his goal. However, it is unclear what else the project could be, asthere is very little else that might be achieved by accounting for the appli-cability of one stance in terms of another stance which ultimately falls backon prior application of the original stance. There is simply no plausiblemotivation behind his account, other than the ultimate goal of accountingfor intentionality in naturalistic, nonintentional terms. This is exemplifiedby his explicit advocation of a form of ‘homuncular reductionism’: We canconstrue ourselves as intentional because we have been designed by nature.However, complex artifacts like ourselves can be understood as collectives ofless complex artifacts and they in turn in terms of even simpler devices:

We are descended from robots, and composed of robots, and all the inten-tionality we enjoy is derived from the more fundamental intentionality ofthese billions of crude intentional systems. (1996: 55)

As we apply the design stance to ourselves, we can see ourselves as collec-tives of lots of smaller, less complex artifacts, for which an intentionalinterpretation is eventually no longer warranted. Hence we use the design

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stance to ‘disappear’ intentionality and, as we get to even smaller, simplerthings, the design stance drops out too. The motivation for making intention-ality drop out in this way clearly stems from a naturalistic desire to see theworld as fundamentally mindless. Dennett’s appeals to design are motivatedby a desire to justify the ascription of beliefs to an animal and then show thatthese beliefs really aren’t ‘in the creature’s head’, by appealing to the waythat creature has been designed. But this relationship between intentionalityand design is not intelligible in naturalistic terms and instead falls back onour own adoption of the intentional stance to nature and her products forits sense. So it fails to give us a naturalistic picture of the world because itpresupposes the prior application of a framework of interpretation via whichsystems are rendered intelligible to us as designed or intentional. To simply‘switch off’ the stance and claim to have ‘disappeared’ intentionality wouldnot be a legitimate move as the stance is a precondition for the intelligibilityof the strategy of ‘homuncular reductionism’ and remains unaccounted for,always in the background.15

A stance or strategy in Dennett’s sense is a framework or way of inter-preting things. To give a framework-independent account of those things thatare properly approached through the stance and thus a naturalistic justificationfor one’s use of the stance, one must be able to ‘skip outside the stance’ anddefend its domain of application via appeal to stance-independent criteria.Yet, as we have seen, any attempt to ‘ground’ intentionality, ‘reduce’ it or‘disappear’ it, falls back on the stance, even though the fact that Dennettmakes the appeal suggests that he too feels the need for such a grounding.For Dennett, our own intentionality is parasitic on the intentionality ofMother Nature, who has no intentionality, so intentionality evaporates. Butthe stance itself is a precondition for the sense of the whole picture andremains unaccounted for. It may well be applied to systems that seem welldesigned, but the stance is still required to make the very notion of designintelligible in the first place. Hence Dennett’s account of intentional talkcannot cling onto the structure of the world and instead demonstrates thepresuppositional role of the intentional stance in his picture of our interactionswith the natural world. He cannot leap from this presuppositional structure toan ultimately naturalistic construal; you can’t escape the stance in order topin down systems, so you can’t appeal to such systems to explain the stance,which is, alas, something that you need to do if a naturalistic stance-systempicture is to hold together.

We are left with a framework of interpretation which renders intelligible aconstrual of systems as intentional, and yet nothing intrinsic to those systemswhich is independent of that framework and can justify its deployment. Theintentional stance cannot be eliminated, circumvented or explained away and,

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insofar as Dennett’s account conceptually presupposes the intentional stance,it is ultimately nonnaturalistic. The stance is required to ‘give sense’ to acertain kind of biological construal of intentionality.

4. Constitutive standards

This reading of Dennett complements Haugeland’s (1993, 1994, 1998) moregeneral claims concerning stances as constitutive standards. Haugeland, indiscussing Dennett’s (1991b) ‘Real Patterns’, argues that Dennett’s notionof a stance should not be understood as a heuristic tool whose use is tobe explained by appealing to the way the world is. Instead a stance is acommitment to a constitutive standard, meaning a reliance on a precondi-tional framework relative to which a construal of ‘that which in intrinsic tothe world’ is rendered intelligible. Hence the reason why a stance works, incontrast to a hammer or a space shuttle, cannot be supplied by appealing tothe way the world is. A stance is a transcendental precondition for the intel-ligibility of a certain construal of ‘what is’ and therefore can’t be accountedfor by appealing to ‘what is’. Haugeland (1998) repeatedly makes use of theanalogy of a chess game to illustrate this idea and explains that the rules ofchess (what we might call ‘the chess stance’) are not something that can beaccounted for via an appeal to objective features of chessmen or chessboards.Instead they are a precondition for the intelligibility of chess, chessboards,chess moves and chess pieces:

Thenormsgoverning the perceptions as such, and in virtue of which theyare objective, are inseparable from thestandardsgoverning, and indeedconstituting, the chess phenomena as such; or, to make the Kantian para-phrase even more obvious: the conditions of thepossibility of objectiveperceptionas such are likewise the conditions of thepossibility of theobjects of that perception.16

In the same way, Haugeland suggests that the intentional stance might betaken as a constitutive standard in relation to which behaviours are renderedintelligible as intentional. However, he goes on to note that the essentialcomponents of adopting a stance are themselves the key prerequisites forintentionality and hence intentionality is best identified with ‘taking a stance’in general as opposed to ‘having a stance taken towards you’. Taking astance involves a commitment to constitutive standards and “commitmentto standards is the very foundation and essence of intrinsic intentionality’(p. 299);17 it is a transcendental precondition for the possibility of objectivity:“objectivity as such is constituted” (p. 299). Hence intentionality is not some-thing that can be discovered in the world and naturalised; instead it is best

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located in the preconditional standards that give sense to any conception of‘world’, whether that conception is of organisms as intentional or designed,or of anything else for that matter. The ability to take any stance is itself the‘essence’ of intentionality:

If a stance is conceived of as a constitutive commitment, then it can beseen as a transcendental ground for objectivity, subjectivity, and norma-tivity – all of which are prerequisite to intentionality. A committed stanceis the essence ofunderstanding– (1998: 304)

My discussion in 3 above suggests that Dennett’s intentional stance doesindeed map on to Haugeland’s conception. Given that a stance, construedas such, is the ‘essence’ of intentionality, Dennett’s naturalistic construalof intentionality must conceptually presuppose intentionality. If he tries to‘ground’ intentionality in biology, this attempt will fail; the stance remainsas a transcendental precondition for the intelligibility of a certain biologicalperspective, which itself embodies all the essential features of intentionality.The only way Dennett’s account can remain coherent, I suggest, is if theintentional stance is instead construed as a transcendental precondition forthe possibility of biology; constituting a kind of ‘objective perspective’ whichwe call biology and allowing us to think of our minds as design products.In fact, this transcendental interpretation of the intentional stance is plaus-ible to the extent that Dennett’s construal of a biology which is enabledby the intentional stance is, for all events and purposes, indistinguishablefrom Kant’s account of teleology as a regulative principle inThe Critique ofJudgement. . .

5. Dennett and Kant on biological design

Let us summarise the relationship between Dennett’s intentional stance andthe concepts of ‘intentionality’ and ‘design’:1. A design conception of the natural world is itself the possibility of

biology.2. Such a conception is only possible if we presuppose an imaginary or

instrumental agent – ‘Mother Nature’.3. If we conceive of ourselves as products of design, our intentionality can

be regarded as derived from our design.Dennett’s account of the role of the intentional stance in biology – the positingof an instrumental conception of ‘Mother Nature’, relative to which an indis-pensable design construal of the biological world is intelligible – appearsstrikingly similar to Kant’s account of biological teleology/design inTheCritique of Judgement. Kant also argues that biology is rendered intelligible

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by a preconditional conception of organisms and their survival in terms ofthe goals and purposes of some agent (which Kant refers to as ‘God’), whichconceptually enables us to think of them as designed:

Organisms are (. . . ) the only beings in nature that, considered in theirseparate existence and apart from any relation to other things, cannot bethought possible except as ends of nature. (p. 24)18

Kant discusses “the principle on which the intrinsic finality in organisms isestimated” and states that this principle “serves to define what is meant byorganisms” (p. 24). Hence, for Kant a conception of organisms in terms ofthe concerns of some agent is a ‘principle’ which is indispensable if biolog-ical questioning is to be possible; biologists are “quite as unable to freethemselves from this teleological principle as from that of general physicalscience” (that things don’t happen by chance) (p. 25). Hence for Kant, asfor Dennett, biology is enabled by the preconditional positing of an agent,and a design conception of nature is made conceptually possible by this.The biological world is constituted relative to that agent’s plans, goals andintentions and this then enables us to think of organisms as products of his/herdesign.

What is the ontological status of this agent? For Kant, as for Dennett, weare not committed to the actual existence of Divine agency in nature. It is tobe viewed as a ‘regulative’ as opposed to ‘constitutive’ principle:

It is evident that this is a principle to be applied not by the determinant, butonly by the reflective judgement, that it is regulative and not constitutive,and that all that we obtain from it is a clue to guide us in the studyof natural things. (p. 28) We are left (. . . ) with no alternative mode ofestimating nature’s products as natural ends other than that which resortsto a supreme Intelligence as the cause of the world. But this is not aground for the determinant judgement, but only for the reflective judge-ment, and is absolutely incapable of authorizing us to make any objectiveassertion. (p. 47)

Thus for Kant, like Dennett, the possibility of biology depends on the positingof an instrumental agent which structures our understanding so as to makea design construal of nature possible. Kant refers to this agent as ‘God’,Dennett as ‘Mother Nature’ but they amount to the same thing. The agent isnot transcendentally ‘necessary’; it cannot be deduced from the intelligibilityof all experience. Instead it is necessary for the possibility of a specific kindof systematic inquiry, structuring the forms of questioning that we grouptogether as ‘biology’.19 As McFarland (1970) notes, “in calling the (. . . )principle ‘transcendental’, (Kant) appears to mean that it is not deduced fromour experience of nature as systematic but is what makes that experience

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possible” (p. 84). So for both Dennett and Kant, we have a preconditionalregulative principle or stance which cannot be regarded as constitutive – inthe sense that we need not be committed to the actual existence of MotherNature in all our dealings with the world – but does at the same time constituteour sense of the biological world, by which I mean that it is transcendentalprecondition for the possibility of the categorising, systematising frameworkthat we call biology.20 For Kant, and for Dennett, it is effectively a stance:

The essence of Kant’s view seems to be that if we are to get any insightinto the nature of organic life, we must approach it differently from theway we approach particles of matter moving in accordance with mathe-matical laws. We can never hope to understand organisms unless we do,and would, in fact, entirely fail to recognize their essential nature if wedid not. (McFarland 1970: 97)

For Kant, we could in principle refuse to adopt the regulative principle/stancebut, in so doing, we would fail to appreciate the patterns and frameworks thatsimply ‘are’ biology. It is something had in addition to a physical construalof the world that resolves certain kinds of categorisations and structuresunderstanding in certain ways. In the same way, Dennett (1991b) regards theintentional stance as something that is required to resolve a kind of pattern– biology. It is thus contingent and eliminable in principle but not if we areto make sense of the biological world. Dennett (1987) takes the line that theintentional stance is practically indispensable though it is in principle elimin-able; we, as a species, must use it, but it is conceivable that some other speciesmight not. Similarly, Kant regards the principle as necessary for beings likeourselves but finds it conceivable that some other being might not deploy theprinciple (see McFarland, pp. 137–138).

So, it seems that Dennett and Kant agree on 1 and 2 above, but what about3? Kant does not explicitly state anywhere that the principle allows us toconceive of our own intentionality as ‘designed by Mother Nature’. However,it seems that this possibility is implied by Kant’s account (though without amisconceived naturalistic instinct, it is perhaps unclear how such a conceptionwill be of use to us, at least so far as the philosophical study of intentionalityis concerned). If we are to think of ourselves as designed by God and thusconceive of ourselves as artifacts, it seems that an implicit implication isthat our intentionality is no longer original. We believe x because we havebeen designed to do so; intentionality can be construed as something that isderived from our design. However, as the explicit structure of Kant’s accountmakes clear, this would under no circumstances serve to ground or natur-alise intentionality, as the conception presupposes a transcendental principlewhich constitutes the picture and remains unaccounted for.21 It is the abilityto ‘constitute’ more generally that is the source of intentionality and this is

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the point that I think Dennett needs to acknowledge. I therefore recommenda Kantian stance on the intentional stance. Indeed it takes surprisingly littleeffort of interpretation to construe Dennett’s arguments as Kantian. Insteadof informing us about the structure of the world, he is inadvertently chartingthe constituting framework that renders a conception of the biological worldpossible.

Represented as such, the gulf between Dennett and Nagel seems to disap-pear. Nagel protests against the idea of a fully objective perspective in whichall subjectivities, all appearances, are eliminated and argues that “the waythe world is includes appearances, and there is no single point of view fromwhich they can all be fully grasped” (1986: 26). Nagel’s puzzlement seems tohinge around the fact that the very idea of a perspective presupposes a viewerin a conceptual way that a third-person, naturalistic picture cannot capture.If we are able to interpret Nagel as claiming that naturalism misses the factthat any ‘objective’ perspective presupposes a constituting subjectivity forits sense22, Dennett’s intentional stance can then be regarded as an attempt tocapture part of the more specific structure of that subjectivity; the constitutionof a certain kind of objective perspective through the intentional stance. Thestance is thus understood as a preconditional perspectival structure that givessense to a realm of objective inquiry.

I don’t think that there’s anything objectionable in principle about aKantian construal of the ‘intentional strategy’. Indeed, I think it is the routewe should take. However, Dennett is explicitly committed to an ultimatelynaturalistic project within which phenomena are to be explained via appealto an objective, third-person, mind-independent picture of the world. Hiscommitment to this picture, I suggest, results in his giving priority to objectiveintentional systems when he should instead take a Kantian direction andconstrue his stance as an intelligibility condition for such intentional talk,a precondition that cannot be circumvented to give a convenient mind-independence account in terms of systems that are themselves distinct fromthe strategy.

6. Biology and normativity

Dennett’s account of biological design is one specific instance of a moregeneral goal in recent naturalistic philosophy – to get normativity frombiology. One motivation for doing this is that, if we are to account for inten-tionality naturalistically, we require a naturalistic analysis of normativity, ofwhat a thing is ‘supposed to do’. A belief about cows is not just a belief aboutcows because it generally occurs in the presence of cows; it is a belief aboutcows because it issupposed toarise in the presence of cows but not sheep

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or pigs. That’s what makes it a belief about cows rather than sheep or pigsand a mistaken belief if it arises in the presence of sheep or pigs. It is arguedthat we can get this normative element from an account of function or ‘properfunction’ in biology; a thing’s function is what that thing is supposed to doand it is supposed to do what nature built it to do. A naturalistic account ofnormativity in biology can then be used to support the normativity of beliefwithout falling back on anything mentalistic or spooky (see e.g. Papineau1987, 1993; Millikan 1984, 1993; Dretske 1995) and we get an objective,nonmentalistic account of what makes a belief about A rather than B. AsDennett puts it:

The obvious way to go (. . . ) is to substitute for our intentions andpurposes the intentions and purposes of the organism’s designer, MotherNature – the process of natural selection – and ask ourselves what, inthat scheme, any particular type of signal or state is designed to signal,supposed to mean. (Dennett 1987: 301)

I suggest that the importance of Dennett’s account lies in the implication thatyou can’t get normativity from a ‘fully objective’, bare construal of the naturalworld. Instead, a normative conception of the natural world is dependentfor its sense on a preconditional stance, which involves seeing the naturalworld as the product of an imaginary designer. The result is that a biolog-ical naturalism in respect of belief looks dubious. If normativity in nature iscontingent on the way in which we understand nature, then we can’t simplyextract it from the way the mind-independent world is and use it to ground anaccount of intentionality. To do so would involve a tacit circularity. In fact,some accounts seem to do this quite blatantly. As an example of this problem,consider Dretske (1995), who proposes an explicitly naturalistic account ofintentionality by appealing to design:

By conceiving of mental facts – and, in particular, those about senseexperience – as part of the natural order, as manifestations of overallbiological and developmental design, one can see where intentionalitycomes from and why it is there. (p. 28)

He claims that artifacts have derived intentionality (derived from us, theirdesigners) and that the products of natural selection are obviously artifacts,a debatable claim at best. However, seeing as there is no agent that theirintentionality is derived from, they must have original intentionality. Our ownintentionality can then be grounded in this. In assuming something like theclaim that biological structures really are artifacts, such accounts just seemto presuppose intentionality, slipping it in somewhere along the way, whilstclaiming to account for it in terms of a naturalistic framework.23

In contrast, Dennett appears to acknowledge, at least sometimes, that anysuch construal of the biological world requires a presuppositional stance to

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make it intelligible – you can’t get normativity or intentionality out of biologyunless you shove them both in there yourself from the beginning. However,we need to ask whether Dennett and Kant are both simply plain wrongabout this; can we get proper functions in nature without tacitly presupposingan instrumental designer? Are allusions to design really just a peripheral‘window dressing’ on accounts of objective selection mechanisms? In fact,I think there are several other studies which suggest that biology does indeeddepend upon a background stance. It might seem tempting to maintain thatyou can get ‘x is supposed to do A’ from ‘x has been selected by nature forA’. However, as Fodor (1996, 1998) notes, the process of natural selectiondoes not really ‘select’ structures in any meaningful sense. Lots of things arecomplexly caused and lots of things are eliminated but nothing is actually‘selected’. The very idea of nature as a ‘selector’, Fodor suggests, is contin-gent on a tacit conception of Mother Nature as a problem solver. But, asFodor claims, “serious talk about problems and solutions requires a seriousaccount of the differences between designing and merely causing. Notice,moreover, that if your goal is a reductive theory of intentionality, then youraccount of this difference cannot itself invoke (an) intentional idiom in anyessential way” (1998: 178). Fodor argues that the claim that Mother Nature‘really’ solves problems is analogous to explanations such as “the Rockiessolve the problem of how to make mountains just like the Rockies out ofjust the materials that the Rockies are made of and under just the conditionsof upthrust and erosion in which they formed” (p. 177). Any such construalis contingent on a systematising stance that gives sense to a view of natureas the designed product of a Divine Problem Solver. It is not that the stancesomehow ‘reveals’ normativity in nature. Instead it is a precondition for theintelligibility of normativity in nature and hence must itself be its ultimatesource.

The stance-relativity of a picture of nature as normative can be demon-strated most convincingly by describing the actions of a mechanism that isidentical to natural selection but in such a way as to resist any presuppositionof goals, ‘selection for’, design or any other presuppositional notions whichslip in to structure the picture. Bedau (1991) describes a lifeless planet whichis ‘populated’ by types of inorganic crystals of varying complexity. Sometypes are eliminated; others replicate, others come into being and othersincrease in complexity as a result of random additions to their structure,some of which decrease or increase their likelihood of disintegrating. Bedaunotes that the story is an exact analogue of the mechanism of natural selec-tion (and its products) but that any construal of this world as functional orgoal-directed is not intuitively applicable. He observes that “merely having apopulation of replicating entities will not produce teleology (because) intui-

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tively, features of crystals are not the sort of things that fall within the realmof teleology” (p. 654). Bedau tells a story in a way that does not invoke aprior ‘design’ construal of the natural world and his resultant picture lacksteleology/normativity. His argument can be taken to show that a construalof nature as ‘valuable’ requires a certain stance which we may or may notdecide to adopt. However, if we fail to adopt it, what we end up with is sodifferent from biology as not to merit the title ‘biology’.24 Manning (1997)also argues that you can’t get teleology/normativity out of biology withoutthe preconditional inclusion of goals into the account; goals which are notthemselves a part of nature but are tacitly required if a conception of natureas ‘functional’ is to make sense. He suggests that this is exemplified by themany ‘natural selection’ explanations where functions, for some otherwiseinexplicable reason, seem inapplicable.

7. Rethinking function

A resurrection of Kantian teleology points to a fundamental reconsiderationof the way in which ‘biological function’ is analysed and, before I conclude,I shall briefly sketch why this is the case. Recent accounts (e.g., Godfrey-Smith 1993; Buller 1998) generally suggest that there are two distinct sensesof ‘function’ at work in biology, derived from Wright’s (1973, 1976) formula-tion of aetiological function and Cummins’ (1975) account of causal function.to summarise these two senses, Wright (1976: 78) suggests that “the functionof x is that particular consequence of its being where it is which explains whyit is there”. This core idea underlies all subsequent aetiological accounts offunction (e.g. Neander 1991); the function of x is taken to be what x has beenselected to do. The result is a normative conception in which the function ofx informs us of what x issupposedto do. Cummins in contrast suggests that afunction of x is a causal contribution x makes to the capacities of a containingsystem. (The notion of a containing system is left deliberately vague; itis something we are interested in. For instance, if we are interested in theperpetuation of an organism, we can single out the most salient causal contri-bution of the heart as pumping blood.) The result is generally taken to be anonnormative notion of causal function (see Amundson and Lauder 1994).Cummins’ account therefore pins down a broader, more generally applicableconcept. A given x may have a Cummins function and not an aetiologicalfunction, though it cannot have an aetiological function without a Cumminsfunction (see Godfrey-Smith 1993; Kitcher 1993; Buller 1998). Hence thoughthere are contexts where it is appropriate to talk only of Cummins functions,in any circumstance where aetiological functions are at play, it is also appro-priate to discuss Cummins functions. In such circumstances, it is generally

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agreed that we need to identify Cummins functions before we can identifyaetiological functions. For example, in the case of the heart, we must firstask what causal contribution a heart makes to the survival of an organismbefore we can ask whether it was selected for that role. As Buller (1998: 515)explains, “defining an item’s function in terms of what is was selected fordoing must resort to a Cummins-style functional analysis of fitness in orderto characterize the item’s selected-for effect” (see also Kitcher 1993). Putsimply, we need to know what x does before we can ask how it came to do it.

How might Kantian teleology shed new light on what Godfrey-Smith(1993) refers to as this ‘current consensus’? To recap, in Kant’s view, beforewe can conceive of design, we must imagine (or rather tacitly presuppose)an instrumental agent in terms of whose plans and purposes the biologicalworld is constituted. Before we can think of a heart as being designed topump the blood, we must constitute the biological world in such a way asto conceive of organismic survival as a goal of that agent, something s/hewants to achieve. Given this presupposition, we can then inquire as to whetherand how a structure contributes to the goal of perpetuating an organismicsystem. This corresponds roughly to the Cummins function of x. Only afterwe have asked this can we then go on to inquire as to whether x was actuallydesigned to fulfil this role and assign a normative function. Thus a Kantianaccount suggests that both ‘Cummins functions’ and ‘proper functions’ areonly conceivable given the postulation of an instrumental designer in thebackground. We need this preconception of a designer in order to indi-viduate a particular system as important (something our instrumental agentwants to perpetuate or achieve) and hence to pin down a relevant Cumminsfunction, and we also need it in order to provide a normative design concep-tion. A Kantian account can thus encompass both Cummins functions andaetiological functions within a more general unifying ‘device’.26

The importance of a Kantian perspective lies in its reorientation of thekinds of questions we ask of function. Contemporary analyses generally seekto pin down functions by identifying features of the world that correspondto assignments of function. Formulations are almost invariably ontological innature; i.e. ‘x is a function of M if and only if xis A, B and C’, by whichI mean that accounts take it as a premise that we should try to account forour use of ‘function’ in terms of objective features of the biological world.27

In contrast, a Kantian perspective suggests that biological teleology is bestunderstood by concentrating on what wedo with it as opposed to chartingwhat kinds of things functionsare, in maintaining that the intelligibility ofall function assignments rests upon a constitutive heuristic which structuresour interactions with the biological world, making such assignments intelli-gible. Functionality and normativity in nature are symptomatic of the way in

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which we understand the natural world and cannot be taken to be indicative ofthe way that world really is independent of our interactions with it, with theresult that any alleged ontology of function rests on a unifying, background‘stance’28 for its sense. As my discussion in the previous section indicates,there are indeed good grounds for taking such an account seriously, and Itherefore suggest that a fuller understanding of function will be achieved byturning away from the question of what functions actually are and insteadasking ‘what is it that we are already doing that ‘gives sense’ to objectivestatements of function?’. Both Cummins functions and aetiological functions,I suggest, depend for their sense on a preconditional regulative principle; away of looking at things which determines the kinds of things we are able toconceive of. Remove that principle and teleology in nature vanishes, alongwith most of biological practice.

8. Conclusion

To conclude, I suggest that we can adopt a Kantian stance towards Dennett’sintentional stance to argue that any construal of nature as a design processdepends upon a preconditional constituting principle for its sense. Norma-tivity and hence intentionality are not to be found in biology but are insteadtacitly presupposed as intelligibility conditions for the possibility of biology.Hence the possibility of biology tells us as much about the constituting struc-ture of our cognitive apparatus as about the intrinsic structure of the naturalworld. If a biology of intentional states is ever to be possible, we must devisea new form of inquiry; a kind of ‘biological Kantianism’. By this I meanthat we need to have an understanding of how the constituting frameworksthat are a precondition for the conceivability of a biological world mightalso be viewed as a functional part of our own biological equipment. Weneed to get back from unquestioned objectivity in our conceptions of howour minds connect to things in a world, instead conceding that intentionalrelations between agents and objects are constituted, and reflecting on theway in which what we do when we do biology may itself be symptomatic ofa component of our biology. Exploration of the possibility of such a projectconstitutes an intriguing new path for philosophical inquiry. It is not an easyroad but, in spite of what our biology naturalist might maintain, this was neveran easy problem.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Paul Griffiths, Nick Jardine, Martin Kusch, Tim Lewens,Peter Lipton, and audiences at the Universities of Cambridge and Readingand at the Congress of the International Society for the History, Philosophyand Social Studies of Biology (Oaxaca 1999) for comments on the argumentof this paper. I also thank the British Academy: Humanities Research Boardfor funding my research.

Notes

1 ‘Setting Off On The Right Foot’, inThe Intentional Stance.2 See also Rorty in Dahlbom ed. (1993): “Nagel and Dennett beg all the questions againsteach other.” (p. 188)3 Dennett, in ‘Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology’ (1981, 1987), is quite explicit inclaiming that beliefs aren’t real physical entities that account for our use of the inten-tional stance. They are more like “centres of gravity” (p. 52) or Reichenbachian abstracta;“calculation-bound entities or logical constructs” (p. 53). Hence whatever it is that’s ‘in thehead’ and explains our use of the intentional stance, it cannot simply be equated with belief.(Page references refer to the version reprinted in Dennett [1987]).4 ‘Reflections: Instrumentalism Reconsidered’ in Dennett (1987: 73).5 In Dennett (1987). The example is also elaborated in Dennett (1995, 1996).6 He adds that, if the machine is shipped from the US to Panama with the intention of takingquarter-balboas or if it takes quarter-balboas for some time and persists because it does so, wemay legitimately come to regard it as a quarter-balboa taker. Functions are not set in stone anddevices may be exapted (Gould and Vrba 1982) to serve novel functions. New intentions maycome to replace a designer’s intentions in maintaining a device in a certain role.7 ‘Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology’, in Dennett (1987: 259).8 See ‘True Believers’ and ‘Evolution, Error and Intentionality’ in Dennett (1987).9 If I am tricked in to believing that XYZ is H2O, then you can appeal to design considera-tions to show that, even though my own belief systems are incapable of detecting a difference,evolution has designed me to respond to H2O by drinking it, and not to XYZ. Alternatively,if our ‘designer’ could not/did not distinguish between H2O and XYZ either, there is (contraKripke 1972; Putnam 1975) simply no fact of the matter over whether a belief is about H2Oor XYZ. All ultimate rationale for belief attribution falls back on selection/design history.10 See my ‘Evolution and Belief: The Missing Question’ for a critique of the idea that differ-ences between the intentional capacities of different species should be understood in terms ofcomplexity alone.11 However, the claim that a thermostat is an intentional system would not, strictly speaking,be false. An intentional conception of a thermostat would be of little use – the design stanceis enough – but there is no clear fact of the matter that makes it absolutely not an intentionalsystem.12 ‘Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology’ (1983), reprinted in Dennett (1987).13 Dahlbom (1993) Dennett’s reply (p. 224). This is admittedly a much later text than Dennett(1987) so it may be objected that Dennett’s views have changed somewhat in the meantime.However, Dennett is adamant in his later works that his views have not changed. Furthermore,

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the intention/design story told in Dennett (1995, 1996) is an elaborated but philosophicallyindistinguishable version of that found in Dennett (1987).14 Page reference taken from the version reprinted in Fodor (1998).15 As Fodor and Lepore note (Dahlbom 1993: 76) “It’s mysterious, in biology as elsewhere,either how you could make facts out of stances, or how stances could make facts disappear”.16 ‘Objective Perception’ (1996), reprinted in Haugeland (1998: 254).17 ‘Understanding: Dennett and Searle’ (1996), reprinted in Haugeland (1998).18 Page references refer toThe Critique of Teleological Judgment(1952 translation).19 One might object that not all biological questioning involves the positing of agency anddesign; hence the idea that ‘Mother Nature’ is a precondition for the sense of all biologicalinquiry seems a trifle excessive. How might one respond to this? Both Dennett and Kant seemto regard biology as a methodology or set of practices; a systematising framework that resolvescertain kinds of patterns and systems as possibilities. Both could argue that, though ‘MotherNature’ is not all there is to this methodology and is by no means the sole factor structuring allbiological questioning, she is however an essential constituting element of that methodology.Hence she is a necessary but not sufficient component in the structure of biological practice. Itmight be argued that, if we take away the preconception of agency and design, what remainsno longer deserves the name ‘biology’. When we consider what biology would look likewithout the concepts of ‘function’, ‘adaptation’, ‘niche’ and ‘selection’ (the sort of termsthat are arguably parasitic on a preconception of design), the claim that ‘Mother Nature’ is anindispensable precondition for biology does indeed seem somewhat plausible.20 Kant states that it would be absurd for “men even to entertain (. . . ) that maybe anotherNewton may some day arise, to make intelligible to us even the genesis of but a blade ofgrass from natural laws that no design has ordered. Such insight we must absolutely deny tomankind” (p. 54). This comment may seem somewhat misguided in retrospect. In the light ofDarwin, it appears to be one of many examples of philosophers jumping the gun and being alittle too eager to declare a thing to be impossible. However, if we take Dennett at his word,Kant is in fact right about this. Darwin provided an explanation which disposed of the needfor God as a constitutive principle but God/Mother Nature still remains as an ineliminableregulative principle. The intelligibility of ‘the genesis of a blade of grass’ is still conceptuallydependent on the systematising role of a ‘design stance’. Hence, interestingly and contrary tocertain popular views, it is by no means clear that Darwin did away with design altogether.21 The reason why a Kantian account prohibits the biological naturalisation of intentionalitywill become clearer in later sections. However, it should be noted that, seeing as a Kantianaccount allows biology in general to plod along quite happily, there are noa priori groundsfor assuming that biological approaches to aspects of the mind (e.g. those proposed by evolu-tionary psychologists such as Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby eds. [1992]) should not provefruitful. Indeed I am happy to concede that certain limited naturalised conceptions might aidour philosophical understanding of intentionality. However, what I do claim here is that nowholly naturalistic account could amount to a complete theory of or reduction of intention-ality, due to the inability of such accounts to capture the notion of transcendental constitution.A complementary phenomenological perspective, which conceptualises intentionality as notmerely a relation between worldly things but also that which must be the case (conceptually)for a world (biological or otherwise) to be thinkable, is required to do this.22 A point stressed by Husserl in many works. See in particular hisCartesian Meditations.23 One might worry that I have trivialised or misrepresented Dretske’s position here. Howeverit (see pages 7–8 particularly) really does seem to be:

1. Artifact intentionality is derived from human intentionality.2. Biological structures are artifacts.

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3. Biological artifacts have no designer.4. Biological artifacts must therefore have original intentionality.5. So belief intentionality is derived from the original intentionality of biological artifacts.

24 In contrast to such an interpretation, Bedau appears to argue that value notions only prop-erly apply to living things. He advocates a ‘broader naturalism’ which allows values as part ofnature. In contrast, the argument of this discussion suggests that values are required to makethe concept of a living thing intelligible. They are not something that can be applied to apreexistent category of living things. Biology presupposes a constituting structure of valueswhich systematises it and makes the idea of a living thing or teleological system intelligible.25 Note that, as the postulated agent is merely an analogue or heuristic device, we mayconstrue its goals as different from one context to the next. Thus organismic survival isnot the only goal possible. We might also consider gene perpetuation, species survival orecosystem stability amongst others. In each case, the factors focused upon as contributionswill be different and hence different ends can be used to focus on different aspects of biologicalphenomena. A contribution to A may not be a contribution to B and vice versa. Hence this viewaccommodates the relativity of function noted by Boorse (1976) and Searle (1995) amongstothers. Functions are assigned in the light of background goals, which are understood in termsof an imaginary agent’s plans and purposes. If we change the goals, those things that aresingled out as functions also change. A contribution to the third world war is not a contributionto world peace!26 Kitcher (1993) hints at something like this when he observes that in all cases of functionassignment, there is a preconception of design in the background: “I believe that the accountI have offered thus restores some unity to the concept of function through the recognition thateach functional attribution rests on some presupposition about design and pertinent source ofdesign” (p. 272).27 See my ‘The Function of Function’ for a fuller account of such assumptions in contem-porary accounts.28 It is interesting to note that backgrounds of functionality and agency may also playa similar constituting role in our everyday interactions with the world. Phenomenologicalthinkers such as Heidegger (see 1965 and 1982 translations) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) haveargued at length that the function of an object x is not some property of the pre-conceivedobject but is instead something tacit and already given to us in our most fundamental concep-tions of x. Background teleologies structure our interactions with the world and give senseto our conceptions of the objective. Functionality becomes a prerequisite for our everydayconstitution of a sense of ‘world’. Such studies lend further weight to the Kantian idea of ananalogue agent that can actually constitute biology.

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