Abstract

This paper provides an explication and defense of a view that many philosophers and biologists have accepted though few have understood, the idea that functional language can play an important role in biological discovery. I defend four theses in support of this view: (1) functional statements can serve as background assumptions that produce research problems; (2) functional questions can be important parts of research problems; (3) functional concepts can provide a framework for developing general theories; (4) functional statements can serve as heuristics for generating hypotheses. I develop and defend these four claims by describing a taxonomy of functional discourse, providing an account of scientific discovery, and by applying this framework to some cases of successful research in biology