Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

Holism, Coherence and the Dispositional Concept of
Functions
Marcel Weber
Abstract
I argue that the originally interest-relative dispositional concept of biological functions can be narrowed in
a way that makes functions natural but holistic properties of self-reproducing systems. The additional
constraint needed is a coherence relation that obtains exactly between those capacities of an organism's
parts that, together, best explain how the organism can self-reproduce. The basic relation that gives rise to
this kind of coherence is the contribution that a certain capacity makes to another capacity of the containing
system. After developing this account, I show that a system of functions so construed shows the characteristics
of a holistic system, strongly resembling a system of beliefs as conceived by semantic holists. The
implications for a general conception of holism such as Michael Esfeld's are discussed.
1. Introduction: Holism in the Biological Sciences
Holism is a recurring theme in the history of biology (Weber and Esfeld 2003). General
metaphysical ideas in biology that are committed to a form of holism include vitalism
(see Weber 1999) and emergentism (Kim 1999, Stephan 2005). In addition, there are
specific substantive biological theories and concepts that contain an element of holism,
for example, some theories of group selection (Sober 1980), the conception of species as
individuals (Hull 1976), F.E. Clements’s theory of plant succession (Clements 1936), R.
Goldschmidt’s theory of the gene (Goldschmidt 1946), and many more. It is probably
fair to say that all of these ideas had a difficult time to be accepted by the scientific and
philosophical communities, and these difficulties may be partly due to their inherent
holism. By contrast, in physics there exists a very important and uncontroversial theory
that instantiates a form of holism: Quantum systems are thought to be holistic because
they show the phenomenon of non-separability (entangled states). In philosophy, precise
holistic claims have been defended with respect to meaning and confirmation (semantic
holism) and with respect to intentionality and rule-following (social holism). These cases
show that holism is not a fundamentally confused or obscure idea (Esfeld 1998, 2001).
However, a convincing case for holism in biology has yet to be made.
In this paper, I try to provide a rationale for the widely shared intuition that living
organisms are holistic systems in some sense. This will involve an attempt to show that
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005): 189-201
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