Teleological Terms Research Articles

The Evolving Watchdog: The Media's Role in Government Ethics

The mass media's influence on the ethics of public life, as characterized by the press's watchdog role in monitoring the conduct of government officials, is assumed to be vital to democracy. The effectiveness of this watchdog role is less clearly understood. Partial answers are found in the evolving institutional history of the press, including its control, ethics, laws, technology, organization, and the content of news stories. Just as reporters rarely discuss their ethics in terms of teleology and deontology, the press does not conceptualize in sophisticated terms its impact on the ethics of public employees. It traditionally finds motivation from the popular belief in watchdog success models from muckraking to Watergate. As partisanship, news values, and reporting techniques evolve, effectiveness varies. Research sheds light on media trends but focuses more on presidents than county clerks, more on political campaigns than government process. Optimism, as new doors and new technology open to reporters, is tempered by competition from the marketplace and the new digital feast promised consumers.

The experience of nation‐building: some lessons for South Africa

Only three or four years ago the argument of this paper would have run along more or less the following lines: the crisis of the post-colonial state in Asia and particularly Africa lies in its 'artificiality'. Alternative terms used to describe them would be 'weak', 'soft', 'suspended', or as possessing 'juridical' as opposed to 'empirical' statehood.' A more recent term much in vogue even does away with the niceties of placing these new states on a continuum 'soft' versus some standard of 'hardness', 'suspended' as opposed to some state of 'rootedness' whereby they could at least aspire to eventually conforming to the norm. Many states in the Third World are now considered to be 'failed' states.2 While the labels are often applied in terms of the failure of Third World states to initiate and sustain a process of economic development in their territories, or to develop depoliticised, rational bureaucratic/administrative structures along Western lines which would allow for the successful implementation of decisions emanating from the political centre in the peripheral areas, it is also argued that one of the main causes of their weakness lies in their inability to build nations out of the ethnically diverse societies they inherited at independence. The resulting problems of the politicisation of ethnicity, mono-ethnic control of the state apparatus and the related problems of secessionism and irredentism, are ultimately rooted in a crisis of legitimacy on the part of the state in Africa and Asia, an inability to create a central focus for the loyalties of their citizens who are seen to be trapped in their 'pre-modern' parochialisms. Any discussion of nation-building in South Africa would therefore take place against the backdrop of this pessimistic scenario. The sub-text of this discourse was that there was a finished product against which these deviants were measured, paradigmatic cases which set the norm against which one evaluated the internal cohesiveness of Third World states, namely the Western European state and its overseas offspring in North America and the Antipodes. In teleological terms the state in the West had, in a sense, arrived. Its internal legitimacy in territorial terms was uncontested

A survey of students' notions of body function as teleologic or mechanistic.

The objectives of this study were to determine 1) the relative degrees to which students' notions of physiological functions are teleologic or mechanistic in nature, 2) whether these notions differ between students in elementary and advanced-level physiology courses, and 3) whether the degree of teleologic vs. mechanistic thinking can be modified by direct discussion of this topic. A questionnaire that determined whether students thought about body functions in a teleologic (why) or mechanistic (how) manner was administered to the following categories of students: 1) a class of high school biology students, 2) classes of students taking elementary college-level physiology courses, and 3) college students in advanced physiology courses. Overall, there was an average 61% teleologic response among the various classes, and differences between the classes were not statistically significant (P greater than 0.05). To address objective 3, one of the classes was presented the questionnaire after being given a lecture on teleology vs. mechanistic approaches to body function. The average teleological response of this class was only 12%, a value significantly lower in comparison, by a one-way analysis of variance, to any of the other groups (P less than 0.0001). These results indicate that the students have a strong tendency to think of body functions in teleological terms and that this tendency can be modified on a short-term basis by a direct discussion (by an instructor) of teleologic vs. mechanistic thinking.

Justice and Caring and the Problem of Moral Relativism: Reframing the Gender Question in Ethics

Abstract The relatively recent addition of women's voices to the study of moral development has led to the postulation of two separate moral contexts defined by gender, each with its own dominating concerns; guiding principles, forms of reasoning and hypothetical end point. While many developmental theorists agree that mature moral reasoning entails some sort of integration of these two perspectives, the exact nature of that reconciliation is a matter of considerable speculation and debate. This paper begins with the premise that the mark of a moral developmental model's philosophical adequacy is its handling of the problem of moral relativism. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of the justice and caring approaches in regulating the contextual relativism inherent in genderized moralities. And it concludes by proposing that only by reframing the gender question in broader, teleological terms than present theories have attempted can the problem be resolved.

Completing the Incompleteness of Fictional Entities

Fictional entities are inherently incomplete because it is impossible construct a fictional object by specifying its characteristics and relations in every detail (Heintz 1979). This notion of incompleteness relates the logico-semantic status of fictional entities. The absence of a complete referent entails indeterminate areas and an impossibility verify properties of the fictional entity not attributed it by the fictional text itself. This absence of a complete referent at the background of the fictional construct, leaves many propositions ascribable the fictional world indeterminable (How many children did Lady Macbeth have?). In reality, as opposed fiction, gaps are filled by reference a complete, fully detailed and, at least in principle, available object. Incompleteness is thus the reflection of the logical difference between an extraliterary real object and a fictional construct. Incompleteness therefore has do with the essential status of fictional objects and not with the verbal mode of their construction. Although the constituents of fictional worlds are inherently incomplete, they are not necessarily grasped as such. Within the fictional domain objects are constructed as singular, definite and well-individuated. To some extent this is explained by the sufficiency of information we assume in literary texts: what the text chooses present is sufficient for the readers to place themselves properly in regard the unfolding events (Goffman 1974: 149ff.). The principle of sufficiency shows that, in teleological terms, areas of indeterminacy are

Weighing Moral Reasons

Since the publication of Kurt Baier's The Moral Point of View it has been common for philosophers to speak of moral decision-making as a matter of weighing moral reasons. Unfortunately, however, the question of how weights are assigned to reasons is rarely addressed. In particular, there has been little systematic discussion of whether the weight of a moral reason is constant or whether it varies from context to context.1 Some important writers claim that the weights of moral reasons do not vary with the context, while others presuppose this position in discussions of specific moral questions. More precisely, both sets of writers are committed to the view that if a morally relevant consideration makes a difference of a certain magnitude between two otherwise identical cases, it makes a difference of the same magnitude between any two otherwise identical cases. I shall call this the Constancy Assumption, and I shall argue that it is false. I shall maintain instead that the weights of moral reasons (rules or principles) vary from context to context in certain systematic ways, and that the systematic character of these variations must be explained in teleological terms.

Doctor-patient relationships in general practice--a different model.

Philosophical concerns cannot be excluded from even a cursory examination of the physician-patient relationship. Two possible alternatives for determining what this relationship entails are the teleological (outcome) approach vs the deontological (process) one. Traditionally, this relationship has been structured around the 'clinical model' which views the physician-patient relationship in teleological terms. Data on the actual content of general medical practice indicate the advisability of reassessing this relationship, and suggest that the 'clinical model' may be too limiting, and that a more appropriate basis for the physician-patient relationship is one described in this paper as the 'relational model'.

The concepts of olfactory ‘arrestment’ and ‘attraction’

ABSTRACT. The designation of pheromones and other odorous chemicals in terms of their unanalysed behavioural effects is a temporary convenience, but it perpetuates the use of portmanteau teleological terms and it focuses attention on chemical stimuli alone when in reality the observed reactions depend on central nervous integration of multiple inputs and outputs. Illustrative examples are given of ‘arrestment’ or the lack of it resulting from interaction between ortho‐ and klinokinetic reactions to odour; and of attraction resulting from interaction between non‐orienting odour cues and orienting cues from outside or inside the insect (‘allothetic’ or ‘idiothetic’, respectively). Longitudinal (as distinct from transverse) chemoklinotaxis, overlooked in a previous essay, is described; it does not appear to offer an alternative to odour‐modulated, optomotor anemotaxis as a mechanism for long‐distance guidance of flying insects to the source of a wind‐borne odour.

The Politics of Schooling in the Nonliterate Third World: The Case of Highland Peru

EVALUATIONS OF BOTH LITERACY and education have tended to focus on their ostensibly revolutionary consequences. Urbanization, industrial growth, the rise of a middle class and a more democratic society, and a world view attuned to the need for and inevitability of change, are classed among the results. (1) No matter which effect is seen as most critical, education and literacy are interpreted primarily in terms of their impact over the mediumto long-term. There is, however, another crucial dimension to the educational dynamic. As with any social process, when education is imposed upon a population, or appropriated by it, a political exchange involving various actors, with varying interests, must come into play. The nature of this process means that the perceived value of education to a particular group may not correspond to the more general consequences and conceptions to which the theorists address themselves. Precisely because it is essentially political, resistance to schools is not necessarily reactionary. Neither is popular demand for instruction an unequivocal indicator of progressive thought or aspirations, The realities are far more complex. The general socioeconomic context within which specific groups evaluate education as a possible response to change (or its lack) plays a major role in shaping their reactions. While more and more investigators are analyzing education and literacy in the Third World, their studies often only reiterate the traditional emphasis on ultimate ends. Education is defined and analyzed in teleological terms: when expected consequences do not occur, analysts can only ask why the school failed. The explanatory burden tends to fall upon the school, while the recognition of group motivations is limited to the observation that successful instruction would have tapped these impulses. Concern for the political dynamic

A Cybernetic Analysis of Goal-Directedness

The issue of the admissibility into scientific discourse of teleological terms such as ‘function', ‘goal-direction, ‘purpose’ and ‘goal’ has not received widespread attention in recent years. In a provocative book, On Purposeful Systems, Ackoff and Emery claim that “the lack of more recent debate seems…no more than scholarly collusion in agreeing not to raise embarrassing questions” ([11], p. 15). Most of those who have attended to teleological problems have attempted to show that these teleological terms are eliminable in favor of non-teleological terms. ‘Function’ has been analyzed in this manner by Nissen [12], Nagel [11], Canfield [6], Hempel [8] et al. ‘Goal-direction’ and ‘purpose’ have been given similar treatment by Braithwaite [4], Nagel [11], Sommerhoff [21][22], inter alia. Notable exceptions to these reductionist analyses occur in the works of C. Taylor [23] and Wright [27].

Cotton Mather as Plutarchan Biographer

S TUDENTS OF COTTON MATHER have repeatedly emphasized that he was a fervent admirer of Plutarch.' Like his fellow Puritans, Mather venerated Plutarch as pagan moralist whose precepts and reflections were nearly compatible with Christian teaching. Plutarch also appealed to him as a great historian. The Puritans shared Renaissance passion for history; and, though they interpreted first in terms of divine teleology, they had no quarrel with humanist view that was also philosophy teaching by examples.2 Plutarch's Parallel Lives admirably provided both history and philosophy; they satisfied Renaissance intellectuals' boundless curiosity about ancient heroes and taught moral lessons. For Mather, Plutarch held still another attraction: he was, to use Boswell's phrase, the prince of ancient ;3 and he provided seventeenth-century biographers with their most winning ancient model for handling of material.4 Mather's concept of history, as Peter Gay has pointed out, was essentially biographical.5 The Puritan view of human soul as battlefield of Christ against Satan predisposed Mather to regard Weltgeschichte as microcosmic Heilsgeschichte. Though Magnalia Christi Americana contains much material not biographical in nature, its major crises and essential developments are largely dramatized in its forty-odd biographies (varying in length from 2,000 to approximately 40,000 words) and innumerable biographical sketches.6 His concept of biography Mather owed to two great