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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2022
I defend the historical definition of “function” originally given in my Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984a). The definition was not offered in the spirit of conceptual analysis but is more akin to a theoretical definition of “function”. A major theme is that nonhistorical analyses of “function” fail to deal adequately with items that are not capable of performing their functions.
I am grateful to John Troyer, Peter Brown, and Jonathan Bennett, and to the members of the philosophy departments at Dartmouth and at Johns Hopkins, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.