The Inherent Normativity of Functions in Biology and Technology 115
paired items) to be selected by natural selection. It is diffi cult to see how blocking this
route can be anything but arbitrary. In scientifi c practice such opportunities of extending
the explanatory scope of some theoretical concept is usually welcomed. If instead it meets
with rejection, there is reason to be suspicious of the motivation behind the introduction
of the concept.
Note that the CR-type theories also have diffi culties in withholding functions from
organisms, although their proponents share in the widespread aversion to attribute func-
tions to organisms. On Boorse’s GC theory, which favors a technical defi nition of goal-
directedness in cybernetics terms, most ecosystems, and certainly symbiotic systems, are
goal-directed, and the organisms making them up thereby acquire functions through their
causal contributions to the enduring state of the system. On Krohs’s SD theory, organisms
have functions because they are type-fi xed components of ecosystems and ecosystems are
designed systems. At least, it is diffi cult to see how Krohs’s defi nition of a design (2004:
82) makes it possible to draw a principled boundary where design stops. It may be objected
that not all components of an ecosystem are type-fi xed; the soil on which plants grow, for
example, is not. Neither, however, are all components of an organism type-fi xed; the water
it contains, for example, is not. At a suffi ciently elementary level—the molecular, for
instance—the components of any system are no longer type-fi xed (see also Krohs, this
volume).
Summarizing, it is apparent, fi rst, that the attribution of proper functions in biology is
not taken as far as the corresponding etiological theories allow, nor as far as other theories
allow, for that matter, and second, that the normative judgments thought to be grounded
by functions are phrased even more cautiously than are the attributions of proper functions.
This shows that the proponents of PF-type theories, although they advertise their theories
as uniquely capable of accounting for the inherently normative character of the notion of
“function,” do not in fact treat their preferred concept of “function” as being inherently
normative.
7.6 Good and Poor Performances of a Function
Until now I have considered one type of normative statement concerning functional
items only, the type that says of a malfunctioning or dysfunctional item that it nevertheless
“is supposed to” or “ought to” do what it cannot do. In the case of artifacts, the notion
of “malfunction” is generally understood to mean the plain failure of a device to do
what it is designed to do, that is, supposed to do, on suffi ciently fi rm grounds, by its
designer.^16 In biology, however, malfunction may not be such an isolated phenomenon but
may be viewed as an extreme value on a scale running from well to poor functioning. In
the same vein, a well-functioning, or shortly, good, specimen of its (functional or histori-
cal) kind does exactly, or at least closely enough, what it is supposed to do, and a poorly