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Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior: A Rejoinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Richard Taylor
Richard Taylor*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

In their penetrating and admirably lucid discussion, “Purposeful and Non-purposeful Behavior,” Professors Rosenblueth and Wiener have considerably clarified the point of view expressed in their earlier paper dealing with the conception of purpose, and recently criticized by me. But while their discussion thus removes some of the difficulties which, I think, stood in the way of acceptance of their position, there yet remain fundamental questions which I do not believe have been adequately dealt with.

These authors rebuke me, with justice, for not indicating my own conception of purposiveness, and they add that this omission weakens my criticisms of their view. That the omission detracts from the interest of my paper is doubtless correct, but that it weakens my criticisms of their position is not similarly obvious. I shall, at any rate, attempt to rectify this defect in the present discussion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 1950 , pp. 327 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1950

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References

1 “Behavior, purpose and teleology,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 10, 1943.

2 “Comments on a mechanistic conception of purposefulness,” Philosophy of Science.

3 Op. cit., p. 18.

4 At least, as regards purposes other than one's own. An agent, obviously, need not wait and observe his own behavior in order to infer what his purpose might be.

5 Italics supplied.

6 Cf. R. B. Perry, “Purpose as tendency and adaptation,” Philosophical Review, vol. 26, 1917. Perry, it may be noted, in this paper written more than thirty years ago, reviews a thesis which is virtually identical with that of Professors Rosenblueth and Wiener, even employing examples which are familiar in the literature of cybernetics—e.g., those of the thermostat and the steam engine governor, (p. 488).

7 In my former paper I suggested difficulties in the problem of discriminating the goal of any inanimate behavior sequence, without tacitly introducing human purposes. For another discussion of this, see Y. H. Krikorian, “Teleology and causality,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 2, 1949.

8 By their description of “a goal,” however, this seems nevertheless to be the recourse these writers would be obliged to take.

9 The plausibility of selecting any actually resulting state of affairs as the end or goal of an ostensibly teleological process is cogently argued by C. A. Mace, “Mechanical and teleological causation,” Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 14, 1935.

10 The prevalence of what these authors call “teleological purpose,” i.e., that exhibited by certain active objects, is abundantly illustrated in an early paper by Stevenson Smith, “Regulation in behavior,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 11, 1914. This writer nowhere connects such phenomena with the notion of purpose, however, but describes them simply as cases of auto-adjustment.

11 It may seem incongruous to speak of a tacit (or “unconscious”) belief, but I am using “belief” in the broad sense in which, for example, a man whose chair collapses under him may be said to have believed it would hold him, even though he had not even thought of the chair or its condition. Similar remarks apply to “desire.”

12 A similar conception has been propounded by C. J. Ducasse, “Explanation, mechanism and teleology,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 23, 1926, which suggested the analysis given here.

13 For a discussion of the problem of trying to explain events in terms of the concepts exhibited in such statements, see R. B. Braithwaite, “Teleological explanation,” Aristotelian Society, Proceedings, n.s. vol. 47, 1946–47.