Browsing by Author "Smit, Esmarie"

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    Teleological explanation and the Darwinian argument
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 1999-03) Smit, Esmarie; Van Niekerk, Anton A.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Darwin's development of his theory of descent with modification by natural selection effected a profound transformation of teleological thinking in biology. In what sense, and through which means his theoretical discoveries can be said to have overcome metaphysical teleology and to have initiated and informed current ideas on what scientifically legitimate "teleological" explanation in biology should consist of, is the question investigated by this thesis. Two main claims (which are really two sides of the same coin) are being defended: In the first place, the contention is that Darwin's efforts to elaborate a theory of evolution that could comply with the requirements of a certain empiricist (vera causa) philosophy of science, enabled him to undermine metaphysical teleological explanation in biology. Through having posited natural selection as the empirical causal process responsible for all the wonderful features of living phenomena, Darwin dispensed with the need for appeals to revealed theology's argument from special creation, as well as with appeals to natural theology's argument from design. The collapse of these kinds of metaphysical explanation was an important precondition for the emergence of any properly scientific account of adaptational phenomena, that is to say, of any scientifically legitimate model of "teleological" explanation. In the second place, the contention is - and this again by virtue of the kind of empirical historical process he envisaged as the cause of adaptations - that Darwin indeed initiated such a new scientifically legitimate model of teleological explanation. Darwin provided teleological explanation, for the first time, with a proper causal basis (natural selection) - a crucial legacy to present-day biology. However, the explication of that model had to wait until well into the present century. It now goes under the name of an etiological approach to goals and functions, and is the model which, in my view, not only offers the closest approximation to Darwin's own conceptualisation of the explanation of adaptational phenomena, but which is, moreover, the most fundamental model for both explanatory and historical reasons. Finally, given Darwin's initiating of the latter model, we can now seriously consider altogether discarding the designation "teleological" when speaking of current biological explanation of apparently functional and goal-directed phenomena.