120 Maarten Franssen
have a reason for F-ing. First-order facts can make such a difference only to beings who
have goals and who can use objects for purposes. In the absence of a context of action,
such facts, including biological facts such as “x is the wing of bird y and contributes to
y’s capacity to fl y or contributed to this capacity in y’s ancestors, by which y came to exist
and to have wings,” express no normative facts. This is so even on the GC theory, with
the assumption that biological organisms can truly be characterized as goal-directed
systems. The fact that the heart’s regular contraction contributes to an organism’s goal to
survive does not make a difference to the organism’s question of how to act in order to
survive, because there is no such question.
7.8 Normativity and Biological Functions
What does this analysis contribute to our understanding of the concept of a “function”? It
shows how this notion can be linked directly to the concept of “normativity” that is central
to philosophy. Normativity belongs to a domain where central notions are the beliefs and
actions of people, and central concerns the extent to which such beliefs and actions can
be justifi ed. This view on what normative statements mean allows for no extrapolation
beyond the domain of intentionality and consciousness. The account here helps to under-
stand the way we extend some of the normativity associated with function talk beyond
this domain. I concede that we have no precise ideas on where to draw the boundaries of
this domain, but that is not essential for judging various other domains as being clearly
elsewhere.
The examples presented in section 7.5 show that we attribute proper functions—the
kind of function that supports normative judgments—to biological objects only up to a
certain level, in a way that is quite arbitrary according to the only theory we have available
to explain or justify the attributions of normativity-supporting proper functions. The level
at which we stop is recognizable as the level of the individual organism. We attribute
proper functions to organs that contribute to the continued existence of an individual
organism, but we do not attribute functions to organisms that contribute to the continued
existence of a species or of other organisms.^23 The reason why we do so is, I suggest,
linked to the attributions of functions to artifacts. Artifact functions fi gure in a context
where we unproblematically use a mental or intentional description: artifacts serve pur-
poses—we use them to achieve some of the goals we have. Here there is no need to give
a naturalized account of such talk of functions apart from the need one might feel to natu-
ralize the intentional description of human thought and action in its entirety, which is an
issue I do not touch upon here. Apparently we see in the individual biological organism
a thing to which we can extend our description of ourselves as intentional beings: indi-
vidual organisms can be thought to have the purposes of staying alive and fl ourishing (as
we have), but that is as far as we are prepared to go. Our normative talk concerning bodily