Organisational closure in biological organisms Matteo Mossio, Alvaro Moreno To cite this version: Matteo Mossio, Alvaro Moreno. Organisational closure in biological organisms. History and philoso- phy of Life Sciences, 2010, 32 (2-3), pp.269-288. halshs-00792436 HAL Id: halshs-00792436 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00792436 Submitted on 19 Sep 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Organisational closure in biological organisms Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science University of the Basque Country Avenida de Tolosa 70, 20080, San Sebastian, Spain Tel: +34-943018249 /Fax: +34-943015470 E.mail:
[email protected] The central aim of this paper consists in arguing that biological organisms realize a specific kind of causal regime that we call “organisational closure”, i.e. a distinct level of causation, operating in addition to physical laws, generated by the action of material structures acting as constraints. We argue that organisational closure constitutes a fundamental property of biological systems since even its minimal instances are likely to possess at least some of the typical features of biological organisation, as exhibited by more complex organisms.