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  • The Disappearance of Form? Some Methodological Considerations on a Lost Conceptual Dimension in Biology
  • Mathias Gutmann

Introduction

The concept of form belongs—apparently—to an older stage of biological concept formation. Paradoxically, it is even the insistence on the reference to form that shows its very disappearance.1 The more the functionalization2, systematization, and finally algorithmization of modern biology3 advances, in the sense of systems biology, synthetic biology and bioinformatics, the less audible the call for a rehabilitation of the concept of form becomes.

This technomorphic tendency, to deal with living entities in terms of artifacts, increasingly brought the concept of transformation into the forefront—articulated, e.g., in the formal sense by differential equations and their combination on all “levels” of the biological organization of living entities.4 It also coincidentally furthered the skepticism concerning the fundamental difference between artifacts and living entities. By explicitly denying or overlooking the conceptual necessity of this difference, the sensitivity for the peculiarity of living entities also dwindled, which in turn even in the [End Page 666] more recent history of biology regularly evoked debates on the autonomy of biology and the “irreducibility” of its objects.5

Against this background, the concept of form seems to be dispensable, the more so as it is often associated with substantialism or essentialism. By assuming the description-independent existence of some essence, both approaches address organisms or species as belonging to well-defined, unchangeable natural kinds.6 These “-isms” are suspected of being indicators of vitalist obscurantism, as exemplified by the well-known vis vitalis or entelechy and similar metaphysical monsters. In particular, Neo-Aristotelian approaches came under severe criticism7 for being major obstacles to transforming biology into a kind of modern science, because those approaches seemed to be rather susceptible to metaphysical elements.8

This suspicion is not totally unfounded, insofar as even in more recent, albeit closed debates of the 1970s and 1990s, it was structuralist, system-and complexity-theoretical concepts9 that demanded form as relevant in a way, which was often unacceptable for mainstream research.10

The main focus was on the juxtaposition between form-oriented approaches, which tended to consider form a specific factor beside or above pure material dispositions on the one side, and particularly developmentalist approaches on the other side, which dealt with form as an empirical problem. However, a third option was regularly overlooked, namely the reference to form as a categorical necessity, the analysis and elaboration of which is the aim of this paper. In order to achieve this goal a functional11 and by no means substantialist understanding of the predicative mode of “substantial”12 statements is provided, which allows the introduction of form as an integral part of the methodological foundation of biology. [End Page 667]

1. Some Remarks on the Logical Grammar of Shape and Form

When we ask for the “form”13 of something, we have to face certain indeterminacies of natural languages. In Greek the two expressions εἶδος and μορφή are occasionally used synonymously; still there is a difference, which might be perceived by associating μορφή with the sensible appearance of something in terms of its shape. In a certain contrast to μορφή, the εἶδος has some epistemic14 connotations to “knowing something” in a very broad sense covering “esthetic” as well as conceptual judgment. The relation between “shape” and “knowledge” explicated by form-concepts, is essential for the focus of the present paper, because the argument aims at the connection between form and its determination by specific modes of descriptions that articulate some specific knowledge and knowhow about living entities.

Thus, “having or displaying” a shape, or “being shaped” can be considered an object-level expression of an esthetic judgement15 (e.g., about living entities or artifacts), whereas “form” as a meta-level expression articulates these judgements in terms of explicable and explicit knowledge. In order to gain a starting point, we should therefore discern three relevant grammatically and hermeneutically different ways of dealing propositionally with shape, primarily used for the characterization of artifacts:

  1. 1. Something appears predicatively as “having a shape,” in contrast to its negation16, whereby the opposition need not be contradictory, since the state of something thus determined...

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Additional Information

ISSN
1530-9274
Print ISSN
1063-6145
Pages
pp. 666-680
Launched on MUSE
2021-10-11
Open Access
No
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