261028 Function and design - contemporary conceptions of scientific understanding (GradS) (SoSe 2011)

• The appearance of teleological concepts in descriptions and understandings of technological artifacts is unsurprising – the functions, design, and purposes, of technological artifacts are traceable to their makers.
• The appearance of teleological concepts in the description of the biologically entities may be somewhat more surprising, especially within the supposedly naturalistic science of biology, but a number of naturalistic accounts attempt to explain function, design, and purpose in non-intentional terms, grounding them in natural biological processes such as evolution or development.
• More surprising, perhaps, is the appearance of purportedly teleological language in physics, chemistry, and other disciplines that do not appear to have available to them either the straightforwardly intentional accounts one would use in the case of technological artifacts, nor the specifically evolutionary or developmental accounts one would use in the case of biological entities.
How are we to make sense of the notion that physical systems “seek the path with least action”, or that “to form bonds, main group elements gain, lose, or share electrons to achieve a stable electron configuration?” More generally, how can the role of function-and-design-talk be understood? Is it just jargon, introduced as shorthand, or for the sake of generating publicity by using sexy terminology, or does it instead serve some serious epistemic goal? In this summer-school, we will explore the relationship between accounts of scientific understanding and the possibility of understanding the epistemic role that functional concepts may play in science, including non-biological sciences.

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