Teleological Reasoning Research Articles

Non-identity accounts: Personal myths, cultural scripts and narrative alignment

This article explores narrative practices of reverse biographical identity work: how people compose and present accounts of non-identity formation. When asked to reflect upon a lost, unlived experience, participants drew upon shared discursive resources: in particular cultural scripts. They performed aligning actions to position their individual tale in relation to dominant, preferred versions of these wider social narratives, making moral status claims to being normative or transgressive. These techniques manifested in three aspects of the stories: personal myths and central themes, sequential ordering and teleological reasoning, and counterfactual emotion tones supporting motive talk. Just like stories of actualised identity, therefore, non-identity accounts forge meaningful connections between self and society, reflecting and enacting modes of narrative power.

Undergraduate students’ perception of cardiorespiratory physiology during exercise: teleological vs. mechanistic thinking

BackgroundPhysiology is widely recognized as a difficult course, which can potentially increase students’ withdrawal and failures rates. Several factors are likely contributing to the difficulties in learning physiology, including inherent features of the discipline as well as aspects related to instructions and/or students’ perception. With regards to the later, it is currently unknown how students of exercise physiology think and explain physiology in terms of its cause or consequence (i.e., teleological or mechanistic thinking). Therefore, the aims of the present study were to determine 1) whether undergraduate students’ perception of cardiorespiratory physiology during exercise follows a predominant teleological or mechanistic thinking, and 2) whether prior enrollment in physiology courses can influence the predominance of teleological vs. mechanistic thinking.MethodsThe test instrument was an online questionnaire about exercise physiology consisting of nine incomplete sentences about exercise physiology where students had to choose between a teleological or a mechanistic complement. The questionnaire was administered to undergraduate students in the following areas: 1) Movement Sciences (n = 152), 2) Health-related (n = 81) and, 3) Health-unrelated programs (n = 64). Students in Movement Sciences and Health-related programs were also analyzed separately in the following categories: 1) students who previously undertook physiology courses, and 2) students who did not take physiology courses.ResultsOverall, all groups presented a percentage of teleological thinking above 58%, which is considerably high. Teleological thinking was significantly higher in health-unrelated programs than health-related and movement sciences programs (76 ± 16% vs. 58 ± 26% vs. 61 ± 25%; P < 0.01). Further, students with prior enrollment in physiology classes presented a significantly lower percentage of teleological thinking than students without physiology classes (59 ± 25% vs. 72 ± 22%, respectively; P < 0.01), but the overall teleological reasoning remained predominant.ConclusionsThese results confirm the hypothesis that undergraduate students tend to present teleological as opposed to mechanistic thinking in exercise physiology. Furthermore, although undergraduate students with prior enrollment in physiology classes presented significantly lower teleological thinking, it remained highly predominant suggesting that teleological thinking is partially independent of the degree of familiarity with this discipline.

Teleological reasoning bias is predicted by pupil dynamics: Evidence for the extensive integration account of bias in reasoning.

Teleological reasoning is the tendency for humans to see purpose and intentionality in natural phenomena when there is none. In this study, we assess three competing theories on how bias in reasoning arises by examining performance on a teleological reasoning task while measuring pupil size and response times. We replicate that humans (N = 45) are prone to accept false teleological explanations. Further, we show that errors on the teleological reasoning task are associated with slower response times, smaller baseline pupil size, and larger pupil dilations. The results are in line with the single-process extensive integration account and directly oppose predictions from dual-processing accounts. Lastly, by modeling responses with a drift-diffusion model, we find that larger baseline pupil size is associated with lower decision threshold and higher drift rate, whereas larger pupil dilations are associated with higher decision threshold and lower drift rate. The results highlight the role of neural gain and the Locus Coeruleus-Norepinephrine system in modulating evidence integration and bias in reasoning. Thus, teleological reasoning and susceptibility to bias likely arise due to extensive processing rather than through fast and effortless processing.

Teleological reasoning for QT prolongation caused by severe bradycardia: Correlation between QT interval and brain natriuretic peptide levels during atrioventricular block

Teleological reasoning for QT prolongation caused by severe bradycardia: Correlation between QT interval and brain natriuretic peptide levels during atrioventricular block

The effects of religious views and creationism on teleological reasoning, acceptance and understanding of natural selection: a preliminary mixed-methods study

BackgroundCreationist religious views have a large influence on the public’s views and learning related to evolution, especially human evolution. Creationism has been shown to reinforce students’ design teleological stance, which creates a challenging conceptual obstacle for learning evolution. The purpose of the current study was to determine if students with creationist views responded differently to education intended to directly challenge design teleological reasoning in the context of a human evolution course, compared to students with naturalist views. In a convergent mixed methods design this study combined pre- and post-semester quantitative survey data (N = 48) on student endorsement of teleological reasoning, acceptance of evolution (Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance), and understanding of natural selection (Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection), with a thematic analysis of student reflective writing on their understanding and acceptance of natural selection and teleological reasoning.ResultsThis study found that students with creationist views had higher levels of design teleological reasoning and lower levels of acceptance of evolution at the beginning of the semester, compared to students with naturalist views (p < 0.01). Students with creationist views experienced significant (p < 0.01) improvements in teleological reasoning and acceptance of human evolution. While the changes in teleological reasoning, understanding and acceptance experienced by students with creationist views were similar in magnitude to changes in students with naturalist views, creationists never achieved levels of evolution understanding and acceptance seen in students with naturalist views. Multiple linear regression showed that student religiosity was a significant predictor of understanding of evolution, while having creationist views was a predictor of acceptance of evolution. Thematic analysis revealed that more students believed that religion and evolution are incompatible than compatible. However, more than one-third of students expressed openness to learning about evolution alongside their religious views.ConclusionsStudents with creationist views made gains on nearly all measures, but significantly underperformed their counterparts with natural views. For many students, religiosity and creationism challenge their thinking about evolution. This paper describes pedagogical practices to help students understand their own teleological reasoning and support students with creationist views who are learning about evolution.

Darryl Robinson, Justice in Extreme Cases. Criminal law Theory Meets International Criminal Law

Justice in Extreme Cases is a book like not many others. There is a profound interplay between notions of international criminal law (ICL), legal theory and philosophy in this volume, which takes the reader to a higher level of reflection. For this reason, one may want to challenge him- or herself with this reading. Robinson argues that the encounter between criminal law theory and ICL can be illuminating: the former can challenge the latter, while the newer ICL issues and problems can also serve as a challenge to and improve criminal law theory. In this respect, the author advocates for a more deontic reasoning in approaching ICL, which he defines as ‘normative reasoning that focuses on our duties and obligations to others’, as opposed to a more classic ‘precedential or teleological reasoning’.1 In other words, Robinson supports a more reasoning- and purpose-based approach to ICL — which takes into account the subjects it affects, including accused persons — as opposed to a mere mechanical development of the field and replication of domestic law principles and theory into ICL. This approach is omnipresent in all three main parts of the book.

Antonym Sequence in Qur’anic Arabic: An Emically Etiological Approach

This article etiologically examines which principles pattern and govern antonym sequences in the Qur’anic discourse and why antonymous pair members are prone to a particularly regular order in the Qur’an. To conduct a rigorous analysis, the article builds on Jones’s (2002) analytic toolkit for antonym sequence (Chapter 8, 120-137) and tests it on a dataset manually collected from the Qur’an (1420 antonymous pairs). The toolkit accounts for antonym order in language use according to sequence rules which include morphology, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology, idiomaticity, frequency, and markedness. The results showed that most of these rules are retrievable and replicable across Qur’anic Arabic, with, however, both quantitative and qualitative variations due to the peculiarly idiosyncratic nature of the Qur’an. Given that not all these sequential rules are applicable, new ones were developed: context, end-rhyme, and distance. The general conclusion is that Qur’anic antonym sequences are ruled by rigorous principles that are sometimes overruled for teleological reasons. Keywords: Qur’anic Arabic, Antonym Sequence, Emic Typology, Etiological Approach.

Teleonomy: Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for Teleology

The concept of teleonomy has been attracting renewed attention recently. This is based on the idea that teleonomy provides a useful conceptual replacement for teleology, and even that it constitutes an indispensable resource for thinking biologically about purposes. However, both these claims are open to question. We review the history of teleological thinking from Greek antiquity to the modern period to illuminate the tensions and ambiguities that emerged when forms of teleological reasoning interacted with major developments in biological thought. This sets the stage for an examination of Pittendrigh’s (Adaptation, natural selection, and behavior. In: Roe A, Simpson GG (eds) Behavior and evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, pp 390–416, 1958) introduction of “teleonomy” and its early uptake in the work of prominent biologists. We then explore why teleonomy subsequently foundered and consider whether the term may yet have significance for discussions of goal-directedness in evolutionary biology and philosophy of science. This involves clarifying the relationship between teleonomy and teleological explanation, as well as asking how the concept of teleonomy impinges on research at the frontiers of evolutionary theory.

Reasons for action: making a difference to the security of outcomes

In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous Drops of water. The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (The dual nature of causation, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation that a cause increases the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this would cause a good outcome and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this could cause a good outcome.

Does Speeded Decision-Making Reveal Tacit Teleological Tendencies?

Previous research suggests that people implicitly believe that biological and nonbiological natural entities exist to fulfil certain functions (i.e., people hold implicit teleological beliefs). The standard experimental paradigm used to demonstrate this is to compare rates of teleological acceptance in an un-speeded condition to acceptance in a speeded condition. As speeded decision-making limits the opportunity to engage in reflective thought, increased rates of teleological acceptance relative to the un-speeded condition are said to provide evidence of implicit teleological beliefs. Across two large online studies, we show that due to the exclusion criteria typically used in this paradigm, the included and excluded participants vary systemically in important ways between conditions, and that increased rates of teleological acceptance during speeded responding does not provide evidence of implicit teleological beliefs. Rather, the difference between conditions can be explained by increased acceptance of explanations which are objectively false. Furthermore, we show that a key assumption underpinning the use of this paradigm – that accepting teleological explanations should be effortless and rejecting them should require effort – is not supported by the data. These results highlight not only a methodological issue, but also a theoretical issue in the current literature. We discuss the implications of these findings in the context of existing theoretical and empirical literature on teleological reasoning and dual-process theory more generally.

The impact of direct challenges to student endorsement of teleological reasoning on understanding and acceptance of natural selection: an exploratory study

BackgroundTeleological reasoning is a cognitive bias purported to disrupt student ability to understand natural selection. Few studies have described pedagogical efforts to decrease student endorsement of teleological reasoning and measure the effects of this attenuation on the understanding and acceptance of evolution. This exploratory study examined the influence of explicit instructional activities directly challenging student endorsement of teleological explanations for evolutionary adaptations on their learning of natural selection over a semester-long undergraduate course in evolutionary medicine. In a convergent mixed methods design this study combined pre- and post-semester survey data (N = 83) on understanding natural selection, student endorsement of teleological reasoning, and acceptance of evolution, with thematic analysis of student reflective writing on their understanding and acceptance of natural selection and teleological reasoning.ResultsStudent endorsement of teleological reasoning decreased and understanding and acceptance of natural selection increased during a course on human evolution with teleological intervention (p ≤ 0.0001), compared to a control course. Endorsement of teleological reasoning was predictive of understanding of natural selection prior to the semester. Thematic analysis revealed that prior to the course students were largely unaware of the concept of teleological reasoning and their own tendency to think about evolution in a purpose-directed way, but perceived attenuation of their own teleological reasoning by the end of the semester.ConclusionsThis exploratory study provides initial evidence that class activities to directly challenge student endorsement of unwarranted design teleological reasoning reduces the level and effects of teleological reasoning in an evolution course. Students were unaware of their high levels of endorsement of teleological reasoning upon entrance into the undergraduate human evolution course, which is consequential because teleological reasoning is a predicter of natural selection understanding. As a result of developed anti-teleological pedagogy, students had decreased unwarranted teleological reasoning and increased acceptance and understanding of natural selection over the course of the semester. The data presented show that students are receptive to explicit instructional challenges to their teleological reasoning and that attenuation of this bias is associated with gains in natural selection understanding and acceptance.

The Role of Teleological Thinking in Judgments of Persistence of Musical Works

AbstractIn his article “The Ontology of Musical Versions: Introducing the Hypothesis of Nested Types,” Nemesio Puy raises a hypothesis that continuity of the purpose is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for musical work’s identity. Puy’s hypothesis is relevant to two topics in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy. The first topic is the prevalence of teleological reasoning about various objects and its influence on persistence and categorization judgments. The second one is the importance of an artist’s intention in the categorization of artworks. We tested the teleological hypothesis across three studies. Vignettes in these three studies describe a musical work being changed in some of these aspects: (1) purpose either changed or retained; (2) score either changed or retained; (3) change is made either by the same or a different composer. The results suggest that teleological considerations impact judgments on the persistence of musical works, but this impact appears to be relatively weak. The results also suggest that persistence judgments strongly depend on whether acoustical properties were changed, while whether the change was made by the original composer seems to be relatively unimportant.

Reasons Things Happen for a Reason: An Integrative Theory of Teleology

Humans default to functions and purposes when asked to explain the existence of mysterious phenomena. Our penchant for teleological reasoning is associated with good outcomes, such as finding meaning in misfortune, but also with bad outcomes, such as dangerous conspiracy theories and misunderstood scientific ideas, both of which pose important social and health problems. Psychological research into the teleological default has long alluded to Daniel Dennett’s intentional-systems theory but has not fully engaged with the three intellectual stances at its core (intentional, design, physical). This article distinguishes the intentional stance from the design stance, which untangles some of the present knots in theories of teleology, accounts for diverse forms of teleology, and enhances predictions of when teleological reasoning is more likely to occur. This article examines the evidence for a teleological default considering Dennett’s intentional-systems theory, proposes a process model, and clarifies current theoretical debates. It argues that people rationally and often thoughtfully use teleological reasoning in relation to both cognitive and social psychological factors. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

Neuronal Avalanches Across the Rat Somatosensory Barrel Cortex and the Effect of Single Whisker Stimulation.

Since its first experimental signatures, the so called “critical brain hypothesis” has been extensively studied. Yet, its actual foundations remain elusive. According to a widely accepted teleological reasoning, the brain would be poised to a critical state to optimize the mapping of the noisy and ever changing real-world inputs, thus suggesting that primary sensory cortical areas should be critical. We investigated whether a single barrel column of the somatosensory cortex of the anesthetized rat displays a critical behavior. Neuronal avalanches were recorded across all cortical layers in terms of both multi-unit activities and population local field potentials, and their behavior during spontaneous activity compared to the one evoked by a controlled single whisker deflection. By applying a maximum likelihood statistical method based on timeseries undersampling to fit the avalanches distributions, we show that neuronal avalanches are power law distributed for both multi-unit activities and local field potentials during spontaneous activity, with exponents that are spread along a scaling line. Instead, after the tactile stimulus, activity switches to a transient across-layers synchronization mode that appears to dominate the cortical representation of the single sensory input.

Basque secondary school students’ understanding of natural selection and teleological reasoning: knowledge vs. knowledge application

ABSTRACT Understanding natural selection requires mentally linking various key concepts and processes. Many students find it difficult to construct scientific explanations about natural selection and might display misconceptions. Our study aimed to investigate the understanding of natural selection and the existence of teleological or other misconceptions on the part of Basque secondary school students. A diagnostic test was completed by 106 Basque secondary students. Students’ responses to knowledge questions and application questions addressing evolutionary trait gain situations were assessed for consistency. Results varied between education levels without showing a clear pattern. Students in the highest grades performed better than 10th graders in knowledge questions but not in all questions requiring them to apply their knowledge. Although teleological expressions addressing intentionality tended to be common in student’s explanations, most students stated that mutations occurred randomly, suggesting that teleological wording might reflect a linguistic issue rather than an actual lack of knowledge. Our results indicate that that caution should be exercised when inferring teleological thinking from open-ended application contexts.

An Ethical Framework for Communicating Public Health Crises: A Case Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic

These Identifying the traditional principle of medical ethics of autonomy as a major factor that hinders epidemiological investigation and the understanding of a novel virus, this study adopts an ethical framework, consisting of the axes of ethical devotions (local, national, continental, and global) and ethical reasoning approaches (deontological and teleological), to analyze the approaches of communicating global public health crises like the COVID pandemic. The argument is made to endorse a global devotion with teleological reasoning in a large-scale public health crisis that needs global collaboration to cope with.

Causal Mapping as a Teaching Tool for Reflecting on Causation in Human Evolution

Teleological reasoning is viewed as a major hurdle to evolution education, and yet, eliciting, interpreting, and reflecting upon teleological language presents an arguably greater challenge to the evolution educator and researcher. This article argues that making explicit the role of behavior as a causal factor in the evolution of particular traits may prove productive in helping students to link their everyday experience of behavior to evolutionary changes in populations in ways congruent with scientific perspectives. We present a teaching tool, used widely in other parts of science and science education, yet perhaps underutilized in human evolution education—the causal map—as a novel direction for driving conceptual change in the classroom about the role of organism behavior and other factors in evolutionary change. We describe the scientific and conceptual basis for using such causal maps in human evolution education, as well as theoretical considerations for implementing the causal mapping tool in human evolution classrooms. Finally, we offer considerations for future research and educational design.

Teaching natural selection in early elementary classrooms: can a storybook intervention reduce teleological misunderstandings?

BackgroundDespite the importance of understanding the mechanism of natural selection for both academic success and everyday decision-making, this concept is one of the most challenging to learn in contemporary science. In addition to cumulative socio-cultural influences, intuitive cognitive biases such as the teleological bias—the early developing tendency to explain phenomena in terms of function or purpose—contribute to the difficulty of accurate learning when the process is taught in high school or later. In this work, we therefore investigate—for the first time—the viability of a teacher-led classroom-based storybook intervention for teaching natural selection in early elementary school. The intervention was designed to counteract teleological explanations of adaptation. In consequence, we specifically examined the nature and extent of elementary school children’s teleological reasoning about biological trait change before and after this intervention.ResultsSecond and third grade students demonstrated a variety of misunderstandings at pretest, including teleological preconceptions. Most of these teleological ideas were explicitly accompanied by incorrect mechanistic ideas, confirming that the teleological reasoning observed in this young sample reflected fundamental misunderstandings of adaptation as a goal-directed event. Overall, learning from the classroom intervention was substantial, with students performing significantly better on all measures of natural selection understanding at posttest. Interestingly, explicit teleological reasoning displayed at the pretest did not have a differentially greater impact on learning than other kinds of marked pretest misunderstandings. One explanation for this might be that children displaying teleological misunderstandings at pretest also tended to demonstrate more biological factual knowledge than other students. Another explanation might be that pretest misunderstandings that were not overtly teleological were, nevertheless, implicitly teleological due to the nature of the mechanisms that they referenced. The differential impact of teleological preconceptions on learning might therefore have been underestimated.ConclusionsIn summary, early elementary school children show substantial abilities to accurately learn natural selection from a limited but scalable classroom-based storybook intervention. While children often display explicit teleological preconceptions, it is unclear whether these ideas represent greater impediments to learning about adaptation than other substantial misunderstandings. Reasons for this, and limitations of the present research, are discussed.

Evolutionary Content Knowledge, Religiosity and Educational Background of Slovene Preschool and Primary School Pre-Service Teachers

Evolution by natural selection is the fundamental backbone of the life sciences. Therefore, it is important for teacher education programs to ensure graduates possess a strong knowledge of evolution in order to teach at all levels of biology education. The main aim was to investigate the impacts of the Slovene pre-service preschool and primary school teachers’ religiosity and educational background on their evolutionary content knowledge. In the present study, understanding of five evolutionary topics, religiosity and educational background of 269 students was studied. Results show that students have a very poor understanding of evolution. They very often use teleological reasoning. Although many pieces of research have shown that religiosity can be in conflict with evolutionary theory, our findings show that religiosity does not significantly correlate with evolutionary knowledge nor to the educational background of students. However, for students’ understanding of evolution, it is important how many years of biology lessons they had in secondary school. This should be better taken into account by educational policymakers because evolutionary principles are becoming increasingly relevant in medicine, agriculture and other socio-scientific topics.

The Relevance of Emotions for Ethical Discourse: A Thesis in Philosophical Anthropology

In this paper I propose a thesis in philosophical anthropology that aims to explain the relevance of emotions in ethical discourse. I introduce the concept of Gönül which, in Turkish language, stands primarily for the faculty of love and, generally, for that of emotions. In my analysis, I rely on the etymological connections between certain concepts in Turkish so as to understand the relevance of love in particular and emotions in general for ethical discourse. I argue that it is not the faculty of mind but that of Gönül which distinguishes humans from animals. Based on the distinction between “to understand” and “to know” in Turkish and their etymological relations with other concepts, I argue that understanding pertains to subjects, while knowledge pertains to objects. In other words, I claim that although we can understand subjects, we cannot know them, and that although we can know objects, we cannot understand them. Furthermore, given the familiar distinction between mechanical causation and teleological causation, I propose that “to know” is “to know how something works in terms of mechanical reasons” and that “to understand” is “to understand why someone acts in terms of teleological reasons.” Accordingly, based on the distinction between knowledge and understanding, the distinction between mind and Gönül can be rephrased: through mind we know how an object works based on mechanical reasons and through Gönül we understand why a subject acts based on teleological reasons. This means that we can understand a subject’s reasons for action only if we can sympathise with her emotions. I conclude that the realm of ethical discourse involves understanding through emotions, which is the task of the capacity of Gönül. In this sense, Gönül is a higher capacity than mind, for it presupposes the knowledge of objects but also requires understanding through emotions.