Abstract
Functions play an important explanatory role in both psychology and neuroscience. Any effort to integrate psychology and neuroscience must provide an account of functions and how they explain in psychology and neuroscience. Yet the ontological foundations for function attributions and functional explanation remain unsettled. In this chapter, we contribute to an integrated science of cognition and behavior by offering a unified account of the teleological functions of multi-level mechanisms. The account applies to both biological traits and artifacts. Teleological functions are stable causal contributions towards the goals of organisms belonging to a reference class within a biological population. The paradigmatic goals of organisms are survival and inclusive fitness, although organisms may have additional goals. Truthmakers for claims about teleological functions are non-teleological features of the world.
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