Rami Koskinen (University of Helsinki)
Recent critics of multiple realizability have argued that we should concentrate solely on actual here-and-now realizations that are found in nature. The possibility of alternative, but unactualized, realizations is regarded as uninteresting because it is taken to be a question of pure logic or an unverifiable scenario of science fiction. However, in the biological context only a contingent set of realizations are actualized. Drawing on recent work in evolutionary systems and synthetic biology, the paper shows that we can have ways of assessing the modal dimension of multiple realizability that does not have to rely on mere conceivability.
