A Mechanistic Contextual Synthesis

M. Jackson Marr (1993), and Gregory (1981), note the difference between function in a machine and function in an organism. The former has ontological history established through contingencies related to human need and use, and perhaps a bit of adventitious control through evolutionary mechanisms. Both are the outcome of selective contingencies. Although the term “purpose” cannot reasonably be applied to the outcome of biological evolution as it might to a machine, there is no clear necessity to abandon a mechanistic perspective to embrace something called contextualism, when the former already implies the latter.