Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology

200
Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, Vol. 10 (2005)
Marcel Weber
It is an interesting question whether the successful application of Esfeld's conception
of holism to an organism's functional organization – should it actually turn out to be
successful – shows that this holism is trivial after all. As we have seen, Esfeld himself
uses the example of functional properties in order to show that his conception is nontrivial,
because it excludes cases like functional properties. However, as already indicated,
Esfeld uses the terms "function" and "functional" in a much broader sense than I do in
this work, namely as immediate causal role. Such causal roles are not holistic in any interesting
sense; they are merely relational. But on the present account, we have whole systems
of causal roles each of which become constituents of a functional organization only
by contributing in a suitable manner to the self-reproduction of the whole system.
Finally, it is appropriate to ask if this somewhat formal result has any kind of prima facie
plausibility. Why should organisms have holistic properties? I think there is a robust
intuition that supports the view developed in this paper: While the parts of an organism
have all of their causal dispositions independently of the other parts, it is necessary to
determine how the parts play together to ensure the self-reproduction of the system in
order to single out some of these causal dispositions as biological functions. So far, this
is an epistemic claim, but it has ontological reasons, namely that not every system is capable
of self-reproduction (while any system can be analyzed into its capacities). Only
living things are, and many great thinkers have shared the intuition that, in some sense,
living things are holistic system.
In this paper, I have tried to provide reasons for this intuition. I have suggested that
the holism of living systems can be construed as a form of holism that resembles the
holism claimed for systems of beliefs and some other systems and that satisfies the conditions
of Esfeld's general conception. We are dealing with a non-trivial holistic claim
because the claim is not merely that functions are relational or that the whole system has
properties that its parts in isolation lack. What we have is rather a situation where the
parts of a system have some of their characteristic properties – namely, their biological
functions – only because they form a coherent system with other components that have
biological functions.
References
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Esfeld M. (1998) Holism and Analytic Philosophy. Mind, 107, pp. 365-380.
Esfeld, M. (2001) Holism in the Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Physics. Kluwer,
Dordrecht.
Goldschmidt R. (1946) Position Effect and the Theory of the Corpuscular Gene. Experientia, 2:,
pp. 197-232.