Field theory offers a new account of how teleology and goal directed systems work. Under field theory, goal-directedness arises from fields that are external to, and envelope, the entities they direct (McShea 2012, 2016; Babcock and McShea 2021). A teleological entity immersed in a field behaves persistently and plastically, following a trajectory directed by the field. When the head of a heliotropic sunflower follows the sun from east to west throughout the day, it is immersed in a field composed of the sun’s rays. Without the sun’s rays, the head would cease to move since there would be no direction. Or consider an autonomous car that is guided to a waypoint by GPS satellite signals. The satellite infrastructure forms a field, and it is the field that guides the car to its destination regardless of where the car starts its trip or what obstacles it may encounter. One virtue of the theory is that it collapses the distinction between natural and artifactual goal-directed systems. In an earlier paper, we established that fields are external and physically describable. Here we explain more precisely what fields are, in a way that operationalizes them so they can be deployed in the sciences and elsewhere. First, we detail some of the features we take to be the hallmarks of fields. And we argue that fields are multiply realizable, not reducible to a single physical description. For example, there are no special physical properties to be found in the sun’s rays that are common to all fields. At the same time, solar radiation is a purely physical phenomenon. What makes the sun’s rays a field is their place in the goal-directed system that consists of the combination of the sunflowers and the sun. Second, field theory helps make sense of the controversial role that mechanisms play in biology in general, and in goal-directed systems in particular. Outside a goal directed system, a field and a mechanism might be interchangeable. However, within the context of a goal-directed system, fields and mechanisms are quite different. Fields guide, while mechanisms respond to guidance, and non-teleological objects do neither. Third, we develop a kind of test for the existence of fields, based on a hypothetical elimination process. For any entity showing teleological behavior, we consider if such behavior could be accounted for without positing the existence of a field. This is to say, we consider whether there could be any teleology absent the existence of spatially larger, physical structures which direct a contained object. We argue that while it is possible to imagine such systems, the teleological systems we find in the world always seem to employ fields. From an engineering perspective, fields seem to be all but essential for teleology.

In this talk we will provide a philosophical account of purposiveness grounded in the organization of biological organisms. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between purposiveness and organization through the concept of self-determination. Our account relies and elaborates on the organicist tradition in philosophy and biology, which traces back to the work of Kant on self-organizing entities (1790), and crosses the 19th and 20th centuries with the contributions of authors such as Bernard (1865), Canguilhem (1965), Varela (Weber and Varela 2002), Rosen (1991) and Kauffman (2000). On this account, biological organisms are capable of actively responding to perturbations and maintaining themselves by exchanging matter and energy with their environment without being completely driven by external factors. This autonomy is achieved by realizing what is referred to as “organizational closure,” a network of mutually dependent constraints that are (1) continuously constructed by an organism and (2) functionally control the flow of matter and energy in far from equilibrium conditions. Accordingly, a biological organization that realizes closure determines itself in the sense that the effects of its own activity contribute to establishing and maintaining its conditions of existence. Several examples of how organisms actively exert control over their own conditions of existence through the coordinated activity of their functional constraints will be provided at different degrees of complexity. We will mention examples in which organisms select between different available courses of action on the basis of their needs and environmental conditions: from chemotaxis and envelope stress response in E. coli, to endocrine control in mammals.

The philosophical foundations of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis were built in opposition to an allegedly essentialist and teleological view of nature going back to Aristotle (Sober 1980). Because essentialism and teleology were regarded as core hindrances for a science of evolution, neo-Darwinian approaches endorsed a view in which evolutionary directionality arose solely from the differential reproduction of individuals in populations (Mayr 1959). This view was in turn based on a strict separation between development and reproduction, and thus between developmental causality and evolutionary causality (Griesemer 2005). However, this separation has recently broken down across various research fields, including epigenetic theories of inheritance, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology. These critical developments in evolutionary theory have led to a revival of Aristotelianism among some philosophers of biology attempting to forge an alternative conceptual framework for developmental evolution (Austin 2016, Nuño de la Rosa 2010, Walsh 2006). In this talk, we argue that the concept of “inherited dispositions,” derived from our interpretation of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (Connell 2016), can play a core role in this enterprise. First, we claim that the Aristotelian focus on organisms as bearers of inherited dispositions aligns with current claims about organisms as directing causes of development and evolution (Laland et al 2015). Second, we discuss the active role of the female body in the work of Aristotle (Connell 2020). On the one hand, we argue that the generative power attributed to female matter provides interesting resources to conceptualize the formative capacities of tissues and the importance of “material overlap” between generations (Griesemer 2000). On the other, we discuss the role of the female body in sexual reproduction, and argue that, in contrast with container views of pregnancy, Aristotle’s view fits with contemporary perspectives on developmental niches as directing, and not merely enabling, factors in reproduction (Nuño de la Rosa et al 2021). Finally, we survey Aristotle’s views on environmental variation in connection with teleological constraints. Although Aristotle has been accused of having a rigid idea of species that excludes many inherited features as “accidental,” we show that his teleological explanation of environmental variations is indeed amenable to current conceptualisations of developmental plasticity. To that end, we discuss Aristotle’s explanation of monsters (Connell 2018) as evidence of functional and developmental tendencies that resonates with recent work on teratologies in evo-devo (Alberch 1989). We conclude that an Aristotelian notion of inherited dispositions provides a bridge for integrating teleology in an understanding of evolution where development and reproduction are meaningfully relinked.

In his landmark “State of the Planet” speech in 2020, UN Secretary-General Guterres said what many scientists believe: “The state of the planet is broken” (Guterres 2020). This language reflects a view of global processes as functional in the sense that components have roles to play in the working of the planet as a whole. For example, scientists describe the thermohaline circulation as a “conveyor belt” that moderates global temperatures (Broecker 2010); polar ice as a planetary “air conditioner” (Urban 2020); and rainforests as “biotic pumps” driving water cycles and atmospheric circulation (Pearce 2020). This perspective has significant normative and teleological elements, suggesting that the components should operate to contribute to the planet’s ability to sustain some goal-state. If they cannot, the planet is “broken.” This view raises obvious philosophical problems. Widely accepted assumptions about the place of teleological and normative concepts in science seem to bar these functional ascriptions from use in large-scale systems, restricting scientific work on global processes to a mechanistic idiom. Yet normative and teleological ideas are widespread in global environmental sciences. They appear mainly in metaphorical forms, including functional metaphors of artifactual design, such as the examples above or organicist metaphors likening the earth to an organism, agent, or community. The prominence of these metaphors in scientists’ research publications and public statements reflects a growing sense among some scientists that recent discoveries of ubiquitous interdependencies and feedback between geologic, thermodynamic, ecological and biological processes reveal the empirical inadequacy of the relatively simple mechanistic picture of the planet and its atmosphere that has guided modelers over the past few decades. Significant predictive failures—including the persistent underestimation of the pace of global-scale change—underscore the limits of this picture and the urgent need for conceptual models that fully capture the import of these discoveries. Some scientists have responded to this need by developing approaches that take a functional perspective (looking at Earth as an integrated functional system of some kind) or an agent perspective (examining the roles of responsive living systems in global processes). These approaches offer a multiplicity of key concepts, from “global ecosystem services” (Costanza et al., 2017) to “planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al., 2009); from “planetary health” (Whitmee et al., 2014) to “Nature-based solutions” (Seddon et al., 2020). Yet we lack a clear and consistent framework that clarifies and assesses how these various ways of thinking about global functions, norms, and goals respond to fundamental philosophical challenges, and shows how they can be integrated with one another—a “geofunctional” framework. Choices between perspectives on global change and stability have potentially consequential implications for scientific knowledge-making. Different perspectives offer different heuristics, which affect the models researchers develop and the evidence they deem relevant. The mechanistic, functional and agential perspectives focus attention on different aspects of the systems they are applied to. These perspectives are not always exclusive and can be complementary. The question is where each can be most illuminating, and how to combine them. To address these questions, a geofunctional framework is required.

Over the past several decades, philosophical analyses have shown that reasoning about purposes in nature is epistemically respectable. However, less attention has been paid to the heterogeneity of aims and commitments that motivate inquiry into apparent purposiveness. Our aim in this paper is to map major contours of the landscape of biological teleology and show how the resulting epistemic precision yields payoffs for different lines of scientific inquiry. We begin with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic forms of teleology (Lennox 1992). Roughly, teleology is intrinsic if purposes arise from some set of properties or relations internal to a system (typically an organism). By contrast, teleology is extrinsic if purposes manifest as a consequence of properties or relations external to a system. The intrinsic/extrinsic distinction has traditionally marked different answers to an ontological question (“what is teleology?”). Yet we treat it as a springboard for making several epistemological observations. First, attributions of intrinsicality or extrinsicality presuppose a system-environment circumscription, but the criteria on which this is based are typically left unanalyzed. Second, they assume that systems are composed of parts that contribute to a characteristic activity or organizational pattern. However, these parts can themselves be treated as teleologically organized wholes in a nested fashion, complicating the analysis. Third, the timescale on which systems manifest purposiveness can be highly variable and is often implicitly keyed to what counts as a whole system, its parts, and relevant features of the environment. These distinctions impact how teleology is modeled and explained in living systems. For example, the boundaries between system and environment can be drawn differently depending on what question is in view (e.g., “what is the source of directionality underlying goaldirectedness?”; “what accounts for the properties of self-maintenance and autonomy in living systems?”). This, in turn, yields different perspectives on what counts as “intrinsic” versus “extrinsic.” Likewise, since research on teleology has multiple aims—prediction, characterization, explanation, and control—which part-whole relations are salient may vary (e.g., a part useful for prediction may be unhelpful in characterizing purposive behavior). More finegrained distinctions reveal additional contours of the epistemic landscape, such as whether purposiveness is explanans or explanandum. Different criteria of adequacy are associated with these aims, such as accounting for what makes living systems distinctive versus offering a unified account of goal-directedness in biology and culture. These differences lead researchers to assign different meanings to shared concepts (e.g., organization) and metaphors (e.g., design), and to adopt divergent modeling strategies, like abstracting away from the environment to model intrinsic dynamics (or vice versa). This complex possibility space implies that traditional controversies may reflect research communities with different priorities talking past one another. Teleology is a multi-faceted phenomenon that involves questions of adaptation, functionality, goal-directedness, agency, and organization. The epistemic precision derived from this mapping exercise thus has immediate payoff. We illustrate the final point by showing how our analysis illuminates modeling and explanation choices for two divergent accounts of biological purposiveness (McShea 2012; Mossio and Bich 2017).