546 Tim Lewens
overall accounts they offer of ethical qualities. Similarly, the Kantian projectivist
account of functions and goal-directedness which I sketched at the end of the last
section does not invoke any facts denied by science in its explanation of the role
and pattern of function talk in biology, but neither does it give an analysis of
function talk in wholly biological terms. Of course I only sketched the account
very quickly, and I certainly have not shown decisively that it makes sense of the
apparently indispensable nature of heavy function talk in biology. Many difficult
jobs remain for the Kantian projectivist: to show decisively why the goal-directed
view of nature is not just ausefulprojection, but anecessaryone; to explain why
organisms invite the projection of goal-directedness in ways that other collections
of matter do not; and to establish that we cannot give truth conditions for goal-
directedness in terms of the facts about organisms that tempt us to view them as
functional. Yet while these worries might cause problems for the adequacy of the
account, we should not dismiss projectivist views of function on the grounds that
they fail the demands of naturalism. Projectivism about biological functions is, I
think, an account ripe for more detailed examination.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI am grateful to Angela Breitenbach, Paul Griffiths, Mohan Matthen, Karen Ne-
ander, Denis Walsh and John Zammito for comments on an earlier draft of this
paper. I owe both thanks and apologies to Joan Steigerwald: I have not been able
to fully integrate her extremely detailed and illuminating comments on Kant into
this revised version.
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