Teleology

Teleology (telos: end, purpose) is the philosophical study of design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in nature or human creations.

Contrasted with philosophical naturalism

Teleology traditionally is contrasted with philosophical naturalism, which views nature as lacking design or purpose. For example, naturalism would say that a person has sight simply because they have eyes. In other words, function follows form (eyesight follows from having eyes). Teleology is the reverse of this position: a person has eyes because they have the need of eyesight. In this case, form follows function (eyes follow from having the need for eyesight).

Two classic examples of these opposing views are found in Aristotle and Lucretius, the former as a supporter of teleology and the latter as a supporter of what is now called philosophical naturalism:

Extrinsic and intrinsic finality

Teleology depends on the concept of a final cause or purpose inherent in all beings. There are two types of such causes, intrinsic finality and extrinsic finality.

Extrinsic finality consists of a being realizing a purpose outside said being, for the utility and welfare of other beings. For instance, minerals are "designed" to be used by plants which are in turn "designed" to be used by animals.
Intrinsic finality consists of a being realizing a purpose by means of a natural tendency directed toward the perfection of its own nature. In essence, it is what is "good for" a being. For example, physical masses obey universal gravitational tendencies that did not evolve, but are simply a cosmic "given." Similarly, life is intended to behave in certain ways so as to preserve itself from death, disease, and pain.

Over-emphasizing extrinsic finality is often criticized as leading to the anthropic attribution of every event to God's will, and mere superstition. For instance, "If I hadn't been at the store today, I wouldn't have found that $100 on the ground. God must have intended for me to go to the store so I would find that money." Such abuses were criticized by Francis Bacon ("De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum," III, iv), Descartes ("Principia Philosophiæ", I, 28; III, 2, 3; "Meditationes", III, IV), and Spinoza (Ethica, I, prop. 36 app.).

Intrinsic finality, while more subtle, provides the basis for the teleological argument for the existence of God, and its modern counterpart, intelligent design. Proponents of teleology argue that it resolves a fundamental defect in philosophical naturalism. They argue that naturalism focuses exclusively on the immediate causes and mechanisms of events, and does not attend to the reason for their synthesis. Thus, it is argued, if we take a clock apart, we discover in it nothing but springs, wheels, pivots, levers etc. But having explained the mechanism which causes the revolutions of the hands on the dial, is it reasonable to say that the clock was not made to keep time?

Philosophers of science respond that since Aristotle, biology has been profoundly concerned with the constraint function places on structure, and that the arrival of Darwinian evolutionary theory did not alter this concern. A classic and early example is Darwin's interest in functional constraints on the evolutionary development of the beaks of Galapagos finches. Of these birds, Darwin wrote, "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends. " (Origin of Species, chapter 19)

Classical Greek teleology

Plato summarized the argument for teleology as follows in Phaedo, arguing that it is error to fail to distinguish between the ultimate Cause, and the mere means by which the ultimate Cause acts:

"Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause. It is what the majority appear to do, like people groping in the dark; they call it a cause, thus giving it a name that does not belong to it. That is why one man surrounds the earth with a vortex to make the heavens keep it in place, another makes the air support it like a wide lid. As for their capacity of being in the best place they could possibly be put, this they do not look for, nor do they believe it to have any divine force, but they believe that they will some time discover a stronger and more immortal Atlas to hold everything together more, and they do not believe that the truly good and "binding" binds and holds them together." (Plato, Phaedo 99bc)

Thus, it is argued, those who attempt to explain nature in terms of nature alone are forced to deny the ultimate binding Good (or other such invisible forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism) in the universe, and hope that they will someday discover a stronger supporting argument ("Atlas" or, for example, God) to hold their universe together.

Similarly, Aristotle argued that it is error to attempt to reduce all things to mere necessity, because such thinking neglects the purpose, order, and final cause that causes the apparent necessity. He wrote:

"Democritus, however, neglecting the final cause, reduces to necessity all the operations of nature. Now they are necessary, it is true, but yet they are for a final cause and for the sake of what is best in each case. Thus nothing prevents the teeth from being formed and being shed in this way; but it is not on account of these causes but on account of the end; these are causes in the sense of being the moving and efficient instruments and the material. …to say that necessity is the cause is much as if we should think that the water has been drawn off from a dropsical patient on account of the lancet alone, not on account of health, for the sake of which the lancet made the incision." Aristotle, Generation of Animals V.8, 789a8-b15

American Philosophy

The relationship of American philosophy to the theory of teleology can as a first approximation be factored into the empiricist and psychological approach of William James, the logical and rationalist approach of Charles Peirce, and the contextual and inquiry-driven approach of John Dewey.

William James remarked in his essay "A World of Pure Experience," that the empiricism of his time "flirts with teleology." Although the character of this flirtation shifts from figure to figure, for James and many other nineteenth-century philosophers it drew on a distinction between science and metaphysics. A mechanical and predictive point of view was appropriate to the natural sciences, but meaning and purpose became important from the broader point of view of metaphysics. In The Principles of Psychology he defines the subject matter of the new natural science as "^*he Pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment," recommending this as "the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon." But this is a modest teleology. It is limited to individual minds, which are assumed as postulates of scientific psychology rather than heralded as first facts about the nature of things; a "positivistic" approach is required at this empirical level, justifying the attribution of mentality by its predictive value, not its correspondence with ultimate facts. Even so, the deeper metaphysical perspective beckons.

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at the heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists. Principles of Psychology

James's well-known individualism extends consequently into the metaphysical realm. An individual make sense of his or her experience on a scale of belief in the teleology of the Kosmos, ranging from the materialist and atheist at one extreme to religions with the highest degree of ``overbelief'' built upon the pure-experiential realities. James's God or gods is a purposive pattern, evolving and imperfect, that he thought could be detected in the world of pure experience, the materialist's or the atheist's failure to see notwithstanding.

James's fellow pragmatist and friend Charles Peirce also projected human purpose onto patterns in nature, but his nature was not James's neither-mental-nor-physical "pure experience" but rather a process that begins with mind and ends with matter (``effete mind''). he theorized this process through Kant and Hegel: a reduced Kantian table of three categories: "Chance is First, Law is Second, Evolution is Third," 6, paragraph 32, Collected Papers and a process of overcoming dualities that makes the world more reasonable (the "Growth of Reasonableness," as Peirce phrased it), a neo-Lamarkian process in which things can be attracted to each other not just by chance but also through their habits and strivings (agape, or love). The beginning of the universe was a chance assemblage of chaotic feeling without personality, Firstness. This mind-stuff gradually becomes more regular through lawlike habit forming, Secondness. Eventually evolution -- not mechanical Darwinian evolution, as Peirce understood it, but a process that will be marked by chance and agape -- will produce an interconnected universal mind, Thirdness, in which mind will predominately have organized itself into various forms of matter.

Peirce does not apologize for the anthropomorphism of his approach.

I hear you say: "This smacks too much of an anthropomorphic conception." I reply that every scientific explanation of a natural phenomenon is a hypothesis that there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous; and that it really is so all the successes of science in its applications to human convenience are witness. 1, paragraph 316, Collected Papers

One of the more visionary aspects of Peirce's teleology is his anticipation of systems theory and its study of their functional states, such as equilibria. For we must "understand by final causation," he writes, "that mode of bringing facts about according to which a general description of result is made to come about, quite irrespective of any compulsion for it to come about in this or that particular way...[volume 1, paragraph 211, Collected Papers]

Peirce's agape gets a grip on such systems, which express "attractions" that may result in an equilibrium, or instead to the "strange attractors" in chaos theory, chance-like motions of great complexity that seem to at least approximate to Peircian Firstness.

In contrast to both James's world of pure experience and Peirce's mind-like nature is John Dewey's concern that knowledge is always relative to a particular purpose, and that the intelligence of those who pursue a given purpose achieves a local unification, or little 'organic unity' in a world that is otherwise untamed. "Knowing always has a particular purpose," he writes in Essays in Eperimental Logic (1916), to accomplish a task or overcome a difficulty, resulting in a "magnification of the work of intelligence in our actual physical and social world." Dewey's contextual teleology is a myriad of purposes that aim, as he writes in the Essays, at "control of the environment in behalf of human progress and well-being, the effort at control being stimulated by the needs, the defects, the troubles, which accrue when the environment coerces and suppresses man or when man endeavors in ignorance to override the environment."

Dewey takes this point all the way down to the stimuli and responses that figure in the so-called "reflex arc" of human psychology. "The fact is that stimulus and response are not distinctions of existence, but teleological distinctions," he writes in the famous essay, "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology." They are "distinction of function, or part played, with reference to reaching or maintaining an end." For this reason he prefers the term 'organic circuit' to the more traditional 'reflex arc'. Stimulus and response "are always inside a co-ordination," he states, "and have their significance purely from the part played in maintaining or reconstituting the co-ordination."

Furthermore the data of inquiry are neither pure-experiential nor mind-like, but rather, as the immediate considerations from which controlled inference proceeds, they are means or instrumentalities of knowledge -- "things by which we know rather than things known," as he writes in the Essays. The reference to we rather than I is important for understanding Dewey's intention. We strive to know the world by achieving control of our environment in ways that it challenges us, in specific situations we are confronted by. Dewey's inquirers are far removed from the rupture between the world and the knower as something outside of it, "engaged in an otiose contemplative survey of it."

Modern/postmodern philosophy

The area in which, within modern philosophy, teleology has had a powerful influence right through to the present has been in Hegel and the various neo-Hegelian schools, including that of Marx. In this interpretation of the history of our species on this globe — an interpretation at variance both with Darwin and with what is now called analytic philosophy — the point of departure is not so much formal logic and scientific fact but 'identity'. (In Hegel's terminology: 'objective spirit'.) Individual human consciousness, in the process of reaching for autonomy and freedom, has no choice but to deal with an obvious reality: the collective identities (the multiplicity of world views, ethnic, cultural and national identities) which divide the human race both now and in the past, and which set off (and always have set off) different groups of people against each other in violent conflict. Hegel conceived of the 'totality' of mutually antagonistic world-views and life-forms in history as being 'goal-driven', i.e. oriented towards an end-point in history in which the 'objective contradiction' of 'subject' and 'object' would eventually 'sublate' into a form of life which has left violent conflict behind it. This goal-oriented, 'teleological' notion of the 'historical process as a whole' is present in a variety of 20th Century authors, from Lukács and Jaspers to Horkheimer and Adorno.

According to Jean-François Lyotard (1979) teleology and "grand narratives" are eschewed in a postmodern attitude. Teleology may be viewed as reductive, exclusionary and harmful to those whose stories are erased. Lochhead, Judy (2000). Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, p.6. ISBN 0815338201.

Science

In recent decades, a form of teleological reasoning has reappeared in certain quarters of physics and cosmology, under the heading of anthropic principle, a term Brandon Carter coined in 1973. The problem the anthropic principle tries to address is: Why did the universe begin in a very simple state (Big Bang) but has since grown ever more complex, to the extent that, at least in our corner of it, it is hospitable to life as complex as homo sapiens?

For a very detailed discussion of this resurgence of teleology in natural science, see Barrow and Tipler (1986). While long stretches of this monograph are technically challenging, it also includes:

A circa 200pp masterly review of much of the intellectual history of teleology and design arguments. Here the authors draw attention to the distinction, drawn by L. E. Hicks in 1883 and since ignored, between teleology and eutaxiology;
A whole chapter on the teleological implications of earth science and chemistry, with special reference to the eclectic but little known work of Lawrence Joseph Henderson;
A fair discussion of the implications of evolutionary biology for teleology, granting pride of place to the writings of Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr;
Teleological speculations on the ultimate fate of the universe.

Barrow and Tipler include many references. Teleological considerations also inform some of the writings of Arthur Eddington, Freeman Dyson, and John Wheeler.

Contemporary accounts of teleology within biology are heavily influenced by Larry Wright's "etiological" account of teleology. Wright's sought to supply a definition of "function" that could be applied to natural phenomena as well as human artifacts - that is, human constructions such as a hammer. Most contemporary accounts of teleology follow in the steps of Wright's etiological account (Millikan for instance). There is, however, disagreement over its use. Some, such as Godfrey-Smith and Ernst Mayr, object to any sort of etiological theory of teleology that attempts to explain both natural phenomena as well as human artifacts. Their accounts therefore are therefore naturalistic accounts of teleology.

Technology

Teleology has a long history in the study of purpose in human creations such as technology. The study of "teleological mechanisms" in machinery (i.e. machines with corrective feedback) dates back at least to the late 1700s when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a governor.

More recently, Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener conceived of teleology in machinery as being a feedback mechanism. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms," which was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and machine (1948). Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback, both in living beings and machines, and in combinations of the two. Since that time the term "teleologic" in particular has been frequently used in the scientific literature to capture the sense of purposeful goal-directed behavior in biological and technological control systems.

Contrasted with philosophical naturalism

Extrinsic and intrinsic finality

Classical Greek teleology

American Philosophy

Modern/postmodern philosophy

Science

Technology

See also

References

Further reading

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Teleology

Contrasted with philosophical naturalism

Extrinsic and intrinsic finality

Classical Greek teleology

American Philosophy

Modern/postmodern philosophy

Science

Technology

See also

References

Further reading