Teleological Thinking Research Articles

Material Ethics in Trans-corporeal Space: A Study of Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues

ABSTRACT The Rag Doll Plagues, by Mexican American writer Alejandro Morales, underlines the racial dimension of the environmental crisis while also demonstrating the material interdependence between human and more-than-human worlds through the lens of trans-corporeality. By exploring the material connection between the poisoned body and the environment; the interaction between the marginalized body and nonhuman as subject; and the mutant body’s agency as a “habitat” and “thing,” this paper highlights the evolving and dynamic relationship between the porous human body and various forms of living and non-living entities within and beyond its borders. Morales's plague reminds humanity to break away from narrow, teleological thinking in the face of disaster and to adopt a mode of thought that is interconnected with the world as well as attentive to, and appreciative of, the vitality of non-living entities, thus fostering a nonlinear, open “material ethics”.

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.

Poznání sebe sama a teleologie v renesanční anatomii na příkladu Jesseniovy Pražské pitvy

In the article, teleological thinking in Renaissance anatomy is presented by the example of the Wittenberg anatomist Johannes Jessenius (1566-1621), who performed the first public dissection in Prague in 1600 and published a description of it in Wittenberg in 1601. Jessenius, a graduate of the University of Padua, is also concerned with teleology, which he uses both to justify anatomical practice and to incorporate it into his own interpretation of anatomical acts. In my article, I focus primarily on the dedication and introduction to Jessenius's Prague Anatomy, where teleological thinking is most clearly manifested. I present the teleology in Jessenius in two stages with reference to the passage in the dedication to the Prague Anatomy. In keeping with contemporary practice, Jessenius interprets the Delphic oracle “Know Thyself” as a call to anatomical knowledge of the human body. At the same time the self-knowledge is the knowledge of God in the sense of the connection between cognitio sui and cognitio Dei. The knowledge of the principle of purposefulness thus seems to be the culmination of all anatomical study. In terms of teleology, Jessenius focuses on the points in which the human being differs from other creatures: mind, hand, upright figure. Special attention is paid in my paper to the anatomy of the hand, in which Jessenius follows specifically Andreas Vesalius, who adopts a teleological understanding of the hand from Aristotle and Galen.

A forerunner of Darwin in the service of nihilists: the translation and reception of Vestiges in Russia.

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers, a Scottish publisher and popular writer, was one of the most influential evolutionary works in the pre-Darwinian age. This article examines the circumstances in which this treatise was published in Russia in 1863 and went through a second printing in 1868. Vestiges was translated into Russian by Alexander Palkhovsky (1831-1907), a former medical student, ideologically close to the nihilist movement, and was initially printed by the radical publisher Anatoly Cherenin, later prosecuted for his ties with revolutionary circles. Vestiges was translated not from the English original, but from a German translation by Karl Vogt. Given the popularity of German materialism among Russian radicals in the 1860s, association with Vogt's name did much to draw attention to the translation. Contrary to Vogt, who took an anti-evolutionary stance while translating Vestiges, Palkhovsky and other nihilists ardently supported evolution in the hope that it would help them combat religious belief. Praising the author of Vestiges for his evolutionary views, Russian radicals at the same time criticized him for numerous references to God, teleological thinking and blindness to social problems. In their attempts to put Vestiges into service, Russian nihilists were similar to English freethinkers of the 1840s. The study of how Vestiges was read and perceived in Russia provides a better understanding of the cross-cultural reception of evolutionary ideas on the eve of Darwin's Origin of Species.

In the Beginning Was the Wort: A New Natural Theology of Meaning for Ecological Catastrophe

This paper builds upon a recent corpus of popular science that has elevated previously unsung members of the biosphere—“worts.” It argues that the corpus constitutes a new natural theology, a search for meaning in the biosphere, and suggests a theological underpinning to what its authors intuit: that worts give meaning. To do this, the paper draws on Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013) and its examination of meaning as a ubiquitous feature of the multispecies ecosystem. Following on from Kohn, two key arguments are made. First, Kohn’s posthuman anthropology is compatible with a Thomist treatment of organisms in terms of their distinct, life-orientated telos. Second, the current context of potential human extinction puts a life-orientated telos in a new light, reviving the validity of teleological thinking. Sharing the fate of nonhuman subjects, rather than treating them as scientific objects, authors and readers of the new natural theology find meaning among worts.

Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning

Teleological thought - the tendency to ascribe purpose to objects and events - is useful in some cases (encouraging explanation-seeking), but harmful in others (fueling delusions and conspiracy theories). What drives excessive and maladaptive teleological thinking? In causal learning, there is a fundamental distinction between associative learning versus learning via propositional mechanisms. Here, we propose that directly contrasting the contributions of these two pathways can elucidate the roots of excess teleology. We modified a causal learning task such that we could encourage associative versus propositional mechanisms in different instances. Across three experiments (total N= 600), teleological tendencies were correlated with delusion-like ideas and uniquely explained by aberrant associative learning, but not by learning via propositional rules. Computational modeling suggested that the relationship between associative learning and teleological thinking can be explained by excessive prediction errors that imbue random events with more significance - providing a new understanding for how humans make meaning of lived events.

A Brief History of Ends/Goals: How Can Goals (Motivation) Emerge from a Goalless World?

This paper will be devoted to the discussion of the concept of goal in human understanding. The scientific discussion of it can be traced back to ancient Greece, where it was called teleology. This triggered a lot of questions: as theories prostrating the universe as uniformed emerged, these types of teleological ideas were attracted by natural philosophers studying determinism: things do not exist to serve a purpose, they exist only because, under the influence of other things in the world, they have to be there. The sun is not there to provide brightness to the world, it was there long before the exitance of the world. Nevertheless, the unsettling problem is that human beings do, a lot of times, think in a goal-directed way, so how to reconcile the fact that no teleological language can explain natural phenomena with the fact that teleological thinking exists in human understanding becomes the million dollar question. Still, there could be a solution, not as straightforward as the problem, but sufficient to demonstrate how goals can emerge from a goalless nature. With the conatus theory as the basis, this paper is going to review how it can be the building block of the nowadays negative feedback loop model and such a model is also a variation of Hume theory of association and passion.

Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens by Matthew Homan

Reviewed by: Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens by Matthew Homan Yitzhak Y. Melamed Matthew Homan. Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xv + 256. Hardback, €114.39. Like most, if not all, of his contemporaries, Spinoza never developed a full-fledged philosophy of mathematics. Still, his numerous remarks about mathematics attest not only to his deep interest in the subject (a point that is also confirmed by the significant presence of mathematical books in his library), but also to his quite elaborate and perhaps unique understanding of the nature of mathematics. At the very center of his thought about mathematics stands a paradox (or, at least, an apparent paradox): Mathematics provides Spinoza with an epistemic model. Mathematical knowledge is certain (Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt [Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1925], referred to as G and cited by volume.page.line number; G II.138.9), clear (G IV.261.8), and free from teleological thinking (G II.79.33), but the objects of mathematical knowledge—namely, mathematical entities—are nothing but "auxilia imaginationis [aids of the imagination]" (G IV.57.16 and II.83.15; quotations are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, 2 vols. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985–2016]), entities that are not real and merely assist the imagination in carving up the world in a manner that is suitable to our limited and distortive cognitive capacities. Matthew Homan's new book is a study of Spinoza's epistemology "based on an interpretation of the epistemic and ontological status of mathematical entities in Spinoza" (4). The book has many virtues. It is well written, clear, and highly informed by the secondary literature. For the most part, Homan defends his claims through serious engagement and [End Page 329] consideration of objections and alternatives to his reading. The book is also quite ambitious in its scope as it describes Spinoza's response to skepticism, his view of the ontology of mathematics, his scientific methodology, his understanding of essence, and the notion of scientia intuitiva, the highest kind of cognition in Spinoza's epistemology. It is impossible to do justice to such a book in a brief review. For this reason, I will focus my discussion here on two critical points: one related to Spinoza's understanding of mathematics, the other to his understanding of the proper order of philosophizing. According to Homan, Spinoza is a (weak) realist about mathematics and mathematization. He defines this notion of realism as the thesis "that all finite bodies in nature are geometrical inasmuch as they have some figure—whether circular, triangular, or what have you—just by virtue of being spatially extended" (8). Thus, to count as a genuine realist it would suffice to assert that "bodies must have one kind of shape or another" (9). This radically relaxed definition of mathematical realism includes even views that assert that mathematical entities "exist [only] as properties of bodies" (8), as long as these entities (or properties) are mind-independent (views of this latter kind Homan calls "weak realism" [8]). According to Homan, the category of weak realism encompasses not only the views of Aristotle and his followers, but also those of Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and even Spinoza (9). One might question the analytical benefit of employing such a deflationary definition of mathematical realism (few philosophers will count as nonrealist under this definition), but for my part, I was still unsure whether Spinoza would count as a realist even under Homan's permissive definition. In one of his late letters, Spinoza notes that geometrical shapes are just "beings of reason, and not real beings" (G IV.335.4). Addressing this passage, Homan suggests that Spinoza might be referring in this passage only to shapes that are abstracted from concrete bodies, while shapes that are embedded determinations of concrete bodies are—so claims Homan—real (148; cf. 70). Unfortunately, Homan provides hardly any textual support for the suggestion that Spinoza draws such a distinction between different conceptions of shape. Moreover, one may wonder in what sense embedded shapes are the objects of mathematics (prima facie, geometrical proofs seem to be indifferent to the fact...

How and why we should move beyond natural selection in museums to tackle teleology

BackgroundMuseum displays commonly use a “VIST” approach (Variation, Inheritance, Selection, and Time) to explain evolution to visitors. I contend that this framework, by focusing narrowly on natural selection, unintentionally reinforces intuitive teleological thinking and a “survival of the fittest” mentality. Exhibits that incorporate all the forces (or mechanisms) of evolution will instead challenge visitors’ preconceptions and enable them to develop a deeper understanding of evolution. In particular, visitors will appreciate that evolution is not progressive, with modern humans as the “most evolved” species.ResultsExplicit and implicit description of the forces of evolution is surveyed in 12 museums: 4 in Texas, 7 elsewhere in the U.S., and the Natural History Museum in London. Museum exhibits focus primarily on natural selection (explicit in 10 of 12) and often mention mutation (explicit in 7). Only the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in my sample, provides an explicit explanation of genetic drift.ConclusionsHeavy emphasis on natural selection and limited explanation of stochastic forces contributes to an impoverished view of evolution. Exhibits should more effectively convey the complexity of microevolution. Computer simulations showing the interactions of evolutionary forces can accomplish this goal.

"You can be a behaviorist and still talk about the mind - as long as you don't put it into a person's head": An interview with Howard Rachlin1.

"You can be a behaviorist and still talk about the mind - as long as you don't put it into a person's head": An interview with Howard Rachlin1.

Resolving teleology’s false dilemma

Abstract This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism.

Darwinian functional biology

One of the most important things that the Darwinian revolution affects is the previous teleological thinking. In particular, the attribution of functions to various entities of the natural world with explanatory pretensions. In this change, his theory of natural selection played an important role. We all agree on that, but the diversity and heterogeneity of the answers that try to explain what Darwin did exactly with functional biology are overwhelming.In this paper I will try to show how Darwin modified previous functional biology. For pre-Darwinian naturalists did not hesitate to attribute functions in which, for example, the traits of one species were in the service of other species.I will try to show that this has consequences on the discussion regarding the nature of functional language. I will try to show that the main approaches, the systemic and the etiological, do not adequately account for these changes and therefore do not account for the way functional biology regulates the kind of legitimate functions.I will outline a possible new solution to this problem: appropriate functional attributions in Darwinian functional biology could be regulated by a theory or a set of laws that provide the criteria for determining its fundamental concepts.

Virtual Immortality—God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism. by Oliver Krüger

<i>Virtual Immortality—God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism</i>. by Oliver Krüger

Some thoughts on silicon and carbon trade-offs in plants

In 1983, Raven suggested that silica could substitute for lignin or cellulose as a structural material in plants, and should be favoured because of its lower energetic costs. He then asked the question why more plants did not use silica for structural support. Raven’s idea eventually led to a whole series of investigations into the substitution of silicon for carbon in plants, so-called trade-offs. In this Opinion we offer some, hopefully helpful, thoughts on this research, and we attempt to answer Raven’s question. We conclude that more focus on the distribution of silicon and carbon at the cellular level is needed, and that we should be more careful to avoid teleological thinking.

Permissive Laws and Teleology in Kant’s Juridical and Political Philosophy

AbstractIn this article I argue that the current readings of permissive law fall into hermeneutical difficulties and do not completely explain Kant’s complex use of the concept. I argue that the shortcomings of these interpretations can only be overcome by relating permissive law to practical teleology. That teleological thinking has a role in Kant’s moral thought by way of history is not new. Here, however, I argue that the system of rights itself is in some manner teleologically situated. This interpretation allows us to understand that Kant’s Doctrine of Right plays the role of a realist utopia.

Teleology beyond explanation

People often think of objects teleologically. For instance, we might understand a hammer in terms of its purpose of driving in nails. But how should we understand teleological thinking in the first place? This paper separatesmere teleology(simply ascribing a telos) andteleological explanation(thinking something is explained by its telos) by examining cases where an object was designed for one purpose but is now widely used for a different purpose. Across four experiments, we show that teleology judgments and teleological explanation judgments are dissociable, and identify three factors that influenced teleology judgments (and one that did not).

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.

Anthropocentric biases in teleological thinking: How nature seems designed for humans.

People frequently see design in nature that reflects intuitive teleological thinking-that is, the order in nature that supports life suggests it was designed for that purpose. This research proposes that inferences are stronger when nature supports human life specifically. Five studies (N = 1,788) examine evidence for an anthro-teleological bias. People agreed more with design statements framed to aid humans (e.g., "Trees produce oxygen so that humans can breathe") than the same statements framed to aid other targets (e.g., "Trees produce oxygen so that leopards can breathe"). The bias was greatest when advantages for humans were well-known and salient (e.g., the ozone layer) and decreased when advantages for other targets were made explicit. The bias was not eliminated by highlighting the benefits for other species, however, and emerged spontaneously for novel phenomena ("Jupiter's gravity protects Earth from asteroids"). We conclude that anthropocentric biases enhance existing teleological biases to see stronger design in phenomena where it enables human survival. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Roberta Spaemanna próba przywrócenia myślenia teleologicznego we współczesnej filozofii

Artykuł rekonstruuje dzieje likwidacji teleologii bytu w myśleniu filozoficznym. Wskazuje na teoretyczne źródła tego procesu oraz na jego katastrofalne skutki praktyczne. Już pod koniec średniowiecza św. Tomasza genialna synteza teleologii Arystotelesa z chrześcijańską nauką o stworzeniu została zakwestionowana przez teologów nominalistów. Dzieło destrukcji kontynuowała filozofia nowożytna i współczesna. Dziś bez większego trudu można zauważyć, że proces ten teoretycznie prowadzi do samolikwidacji tego myślenia, a praktycznie do katastrofalnych skutków niszczących przyrodę i cielesność człowieka. Przywrócenie myślenia teleologicznego w filozofii pozwala określić granicę, miarę, kryteria i normy aktywności człowieka względem przyrody oraz względem istot żywych i względem niego samego.

Transformation for sustainability: a deep leverage points approach

Change and transformation of human systems are increasingly seen as the fundamental solution space for treating the root causes of unsustainability. What does transformation of human systems for sustainability exactly mean and entail, and how to effectively transform human systems? This paper addresses these essential questions in a holistic, systems thinking approach following and extending the leverage points tool for systemic change proposed by Meadows (Thinking in Systems: a primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, 2008). The paper focuses on the often unquestioned, largely unconscious, systemic realm of mental models and human intent. It targets Meadows’ deepest leverage points of purpose and paradigm; beyond, it deals with worldview, core metaphor, and human thinking. The fundamental outcome of this conceptual study is that unsustainability roots in a cognitive illusion coupled to a lack of teleological thinking. Transformation needs us to see and reconceive the human–world bond through the systemic lens of dynamic inclusion, aliveness, purpose and value. Learning to think in terms of living systems, physical and mental, and substituting the iceberg metaphor-in-use in conventional systems thinking with a holistic metaphor of nested leverage points are the first transformation steps toward a new sustainability paradigm. Practical evidence and ecological content come from the transformative design discipline of biomimicry, which consciously turns to nature as the source of its conceptual system. The paper concludes that transformative practice for sustainability will gain momentum by braiding together systems thinking in practice and biomimicry thinking. In sum, this transdisciplinary approach opens up exciting research horizons in ontological, epistemological, methodological and teleological directions.