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Teleology Andrew Woodfield Lecturer in Philosophy, Merton College, Oxford Cambridge University Press CAMBRIDGE LONDON * NEW YORK ‘ MELBOURNE Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 iRP Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London NWi 2DB 32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA 296 Beaconsfield Parade, Middle Park, Melbourne 3206, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1976 Library of Congress catalog card number: 75-44574 ISBN o 521 21102 6 First published 1976 Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd London, Fakenham and Reading Contents Preface vii Part One INTRODUCTION 1 What is teleology ? i 2 The method of analysis 19 Part Two GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOUR 3 Braithwaite’s plasticity theory 39 4 Sommerhoff’s theory of directive correlation 5 5 5 Charles Taylor’s conception of teleology 73 6 General assessment of behaviourist theories 89 Part Three FUNCTIONS 7 Functions and ends 107 8 Ends and functional explanations 124 Part Four GOALS 9 An externalist theory of goals 141 10 Internalist theories 160 11 The cybernetical approach 183 Part Five CONCLUSION 12 Unifying theory of teleological description 201 Select bibliography 224 Index 229 Preface This book is a comprehensive investigation into teleological explana tions, their varieties, their logical structure, and their proper uses. The subject of teleology crops up in many different fields of inquiry, and in various guises. It raises problems not only for philosophers, but also for biologists, psychologists, social scientists, theologians, and even for engineers. Indeed, I hope that the book will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued or puzzled by the concept of purpose. My treatment of the subject does not fall clearly under any single heading in contemporary philosophy. It straddles various branches. If I had to locate it, I should say that it lies roughly at the intersection of philosophy of science, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. When I first started to think about teleology, the ideas I had were terribly jumbled, but I thought there must be a way of fitting them together, like pieces of a jigsaw, to produce a coherent overall picture. Many times a picture seemed to be emerging, only to disintegrate on closer inspection. For long periods I was captivated by models that turned out to be completely wrong. So although the theory presented here seems to me now to provide the best framework for understanding teleology, in fact the only framework that gives due consideration to all factors, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are other, very different, ways of looking at the matter. Teleology, like all important philo sophical issues, can be approached from many angles and on many levels. There exist several good books dealing with selected aspects of teleology, for example, with goal-directed behaviour in animals and men, but as far as I know there is no other work which tries to trace all the ramifications of the subject systematically. Much of the recent work on teleology has appeared in the form of articles in philosophical journals, which are not easily accessible, and which many readers might not know about. I have made a point, therefore, of including references to such work in the text. The bibliography is by no means exhaustive, however. It could have been at least twice as long as it is. viii Preface I should like to thank all the friends and colleagues who have read parts of this book and have discussed the topic with me, in particular, Robert Adams, Joanna Bosanquet, David Bostock, Philippa Foot, Bill Frerking, Patrick Gardiner, Ros Godlovitch, Stan Godlovitch, John Mackie, Robin McCleery, Colin McGinn, Marie McGinn, Alan Montefiore, Denis Noble, David Pears, Trevor Phelps, Archie Smith, and Brandon Taylor. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my thesis supervisors, David Pears and John Mackie, for their help and encouragement. Finally, I should like to thank the Senatus Committee of Edinburgh University whose generosity, in the form of a Postgraduate Student ship which financed my doctoral studies at St John’s College, Oxford, enabled me to write the thesis on which this book is based; and Linacre College, Oxford, which gave me a Junior Research Fellowship in order to complete the book. Los Angeles A.W. January 1936 PART ONE INTRODUCTION I What is teleology? If you ever look closely at an ants’ nest, you will see an intricate net work of pathways and chambers teeming with activity. Ants scurry around like frantic workmen trying to meet a deadline. Some carry twigs, or bits of grass, or white eggs as big as themselves. You will probably see columns of ants marching in single file into or out of the nest, or passing lumps of food back down the line. The impression is inescapable that there is a purpose in what they are doing. People in the desert sometimes experience a feeling of awe when they look at the night sky. The black background is alive with stars. Each one is millions of miles away, and there are uncountably many. When one thinks how minute the earth is compared to the whole galaxy, and how small human beings are compared to the earth, one’s personal concerns begin to seem insignificant. In such a cosmic setting people sometimes find themselves wondering whether the universe as a whole has any overall purpose. Reflections like these are teleological. In the Oxford English Dictionary ‘teleology’ is defined as ‘the doctrine or study of ends or final causes’. This definition contains a technical term, ‘final causes’, not much used nowadays. A more familiar word would be ‘purposes’. Questions about teleology are, broadly, to do with whether a thing has a purpose or is acting for the sake of a purpose, and, if so, what that purpose is. Such questions can be raised with respect to anything'. twigs, people, schools, ants’ nests, ceremonies, stars, the universe as a whole, et cetera. In everyday life, questions about the purposes of people and things crop up all the time. We often need to know why so-and-so did something, or what such-and-such a thing is for. Occasionally, deeper, more general questions are raised about whether a kind of thing, especially a natural thing, has a purpose. These can be extremely difficult to answer, and very often, opinions differ. At times 2 Introduction it may seem that there is no right answer, but that it depends on one’s world-view. Consider two extreme theses about teleology: one says that nothing whatever has a purpose, the other says that everything has. If we take the first at face value, it is false. Chairs, tables, and so on have a purpose; men often do things on purpose. Nevertheless, depressed people can come to think that in a deep sense everything lacks purpose. It isn’t just that they think their own lives are meaningless. From their depressed perspective, the whole world and everything in it appears utterly pointless. Before we can say whether they are right or wrong or neither, we need to know what it means for a thing to lack, or to have, a purpose in this allegedly deeper sense. Many would hold that the second thesis, that everything has a purpose, is equally incorrect. Surely pebbles on a beach, for instance, are not there for a purpose, nor do they act purposively. However, some Christians uphold it because they believe that God does nothing in vain. If God has created a thing, He must have had a reason, and His reason gives the thing a purpose. Nor need the motive for adopting the thesis be a religious one. An atheist could hold that although pebbles have no God-given purpose, they exist for the sake of some future goal. The evolution of the universe, he might say, is a goal-directed process in which even the most insignificant objects have a part to play. Thus there are at least two ways, and possibly more, of construing the thesis. In fact, it would be better to say that there are two quite different theses here, which happen to be expressed in the same words. Further more, it may be that each one is itself open to a variety of interpretations. How are we to take the claim that evolution is a goal-directed process, for example? It might be put forward as a necessary truth, or as a scientific hypothesis, or as the expression of a non-objective teleologi cal attitude to things. Perhaps the speaker is not committing himself to any factual claim, but is saying merely that he views the present in a future-oriented light. If it is intended as a factual claim, however, what sort of evidence would count for or against it? Does it imply that the future influences the present by somehow pulling events towards it? Many people have thought that teleology involves some such assumption of backward causation, or of a vis a fronte. Or does it assert that the universe is trying to reach some ultimate end, such as Teilhard de Chardin’s Point Omega? Clearly, before one can weigh the evidence for or against any hypothesis, or judge of its truth or falsehood, one needs to be clear about what it means. But this is What is teleology? 3 precisely the problem. Getting clear about the meanings of teleologi cal claims is, in fact, the main aim of this book. The subject of teleology has figured prominently in Western philo sophy since Aristotle. To trace its ramifications properly one would have to write a complete history of metaphysics, epistemology, theol ogy, science and ethics. Such a task would be beyond the power of a single author. It goes so far beyond mine that I thought it would be better for me not to try a historical approach at all. But I think it is worth while to look very briefly at one historically important theme. It will help to locate the subject, and also to show why we need an analytical approach if these problems are ever going to be solved. Modern science is on the whole hostile to teleological explanations. That they are obscurantist and unempirical has been the dominant view among scientists ever since the Renaissance. One of the most eloquent advocates of the new inductive method was Francis Bacon, who gave aphoristic expression to this opinion In De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), Book in, ch. 5: ‘nam causarum finalium inquisitio sterilis est, et, tanquam virgo Deo consecrata, nihil park’. (Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.) But Bacon was writing at a time when the prevailing philoso phy of nature was still Aristotelian. Because of the different background, some of his reasons for rejecting final causes were different from ours. The most common criticisms of teleological explanations nowadays are either that they are animistic, i.e. they assume that the thing being explained has a mind, or that they tacitly invoke a supernatural being who directs the course of events. Take ‘The apple fell off the tree in order to reach the ground’ as an example. If this implies that the apple chose to fall, or wanted to reach the ground, it is animistic and invalid. The explanation is wrong in principle, because apples can’t choose or want anything. Of course, if it had been ‘The child (deliberately) fell off the tree in order to reach the ground’, the explanation would, logically speaking, be perfectly all right. If, on the other hand, we take the explanation to mean that the apple fell because God intended it to be on the ground, it explains a natural phenomenon by reference to a supernatural cause. There is nothing wrong with that from a logical or theological point of view, but it is not scientific. There is no way of checking its truth-value experimentally. While Bacon and Galileo would probably have agreed with these criticisms, they had other criticisms as well. The sentence about the 4 Introduction apple need not be interpreted either animistically or supernaturally. It could mean that reaching the ground was an Aristotelian final cause. If so, it could be attacked on the grounds that this very notion is suspect. Renaissance scientists who rejected final causes were reacting against a concept which lay at the heart of Aristotelianism. It is difficult for us, conditioned as we are by their success, to imagine how things looked before the scientific revolution. According to Aristotle, the universe is composed of five elements, and each element has a natural tendency to move in a characteristic way. The stars, made of aether, travel around the earth in perfect circular orbits, and never stop. The four sublunary elements, earth, water, air and fire, move in straight lines and eventually stop at their natural resting places, if they get that far. Earth, being the heavy element, tends to move downwards. Fire goes upwards, and water and air are intermediate, in that water tends to sink relative to air, but to rise relative to earth. These elements combine, through processes like heating, cooling, compacting and rarefying, to form material objects. Objects are either natural or artificial; natural objects are either living or non-living. All objects have both matter and form: their matter is what they are made of, their form is the way the matter is organised, and is what makes them the kinds of things they are. This is a relative distinction which can be applied on different levels of decomposition. A flower, if it has the form of a rose, is a rose for that reason. Thus the form of a thing is intimately bound up with its essential nature, with what the thing really is. It is also connected with the idea of actuality and of being fully developed. Although a rosebud is not actually a rose, but only potentially, in calling it a bud of a rose we identify it in terms of what it is naturally going to become. To that extent the rosebud has potentially the form of a rose. The main thing that a scientist had to explain was movement. Aristotle’s word kinesis actually covers growth and alteration as well as local motion, so perhaps ‘change’ is a better word. To explain why a change occurred is, quite generally, to cite some reason or explanatory factor in a ‘because’ clause. Aristotle thinks there are four main types of ‘because’: material;- formal, efficient and final. In answer to the question ‘Why did this building come to be as it is?’, we can say ‘Because of the bricks and mortar’ (material cause); ‘Because it is a house’ (formal cause); ‘Because the builder made it’ (efficient cause); or ‘Because it is for living in’ (final cause). It is clear from this example that the final cause of an artefact is its intended function. But Aristotle