Walsh, "Teleology"

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1a) How would we characterize the field of Walsh's intervention?  Is this an intervention in philosophy of biology?  In philosophy of science?  What about its scalability to other fields, like social/political or environmental philosophy? 

1b) Can these ideas about non-mechanistic explanation be applied to fields outside of biology and how?

1c) How does this paper relate to interdisicplinary research between philosophy and science?

2) Walsh develops an argument about the relationship between teleology and normativity (7; elsewhere).  How would we characterize this relationship?

3) What does it mean to show a phenomenon's place in the causal order of the world? Is there something beyond biological ascriptions and explanatory practices?

4) How does organism's goal-directedness apply environmentally?

5) What is the relationship between teleology and essentialism?

6) What is the historical apriori for this argument, and for a shift from a populational to an organismic conception of evolution?

We then moved to discussion:

Wrt purpose, it was noted that Hegel salutes Kant for bringing the idea of immanent purpose back into biology but also claims that Kant betrays his own view with a merely regulative conception of purposiveness.

For Walsh, "purpose" and "goal" seem to be coextensive.  What he seems to want to avoid is a conception of purpose as intentional.  This is what is at stake in his argument against a Platonist conception of teleology.  For Walsh, organisms do not represent, such that concepts are not part of the idea of purposiveness.

• There is an important distinction for Walsh between internal purpose and external purpose. External purpose is one that is given or imposed on an object (e.g., a chair is for sitting). Internal purpose is essential to [?] the functioning, maintenance, of a system.
  

But wouldn't Walsh still need a distinction between intentional/conceptual purposiveness and nonintentional purposiveness?  (Wouldn't he accept that some objects or processes, for ex. humans, wield purposes conceptually?)

• Non-goal-directed (nonpurposive)
• Ex. a rock
  
• Non-goal-directed (nonpurposive) self-organizing (systems)
• Ex. a crystal
  
• Goal-directed (purposive) and non-intentional
  
•  Ex. an organism
  
• Goal-directed (purposive) intentional events or processes
  
• Ex. a human belief
  

Walsh's main argument is to establish a distinction between the goal-directed and non-goal-directed events and processes (i.e., his argument is to establish the third category above).

• Evidence for the third category is agency, understood as self-regulative plasticity in response to perturbations
• Paradigmatic instances are persistence, growth, reproduction, etc..