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Comments on a Mechanistic Conception of Purposefulness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Richard Taylor
Richard Taylor*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

In a highly original and provocative essay entitled “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, published a few years ago, Professors Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow attempt to indicate the scientific importance and usefulness of the concepts of purpose and teleology. Since this essay appeared the suggestions it contains seem to have acquired a significance which was not wholly apparent at that time. This is due primarily to the fact that a somewhat novel and, it appears to some, revolutionary approach to certain problems has arisen in the sciences, an approach which is more or less loosely referred to as “cybernetics,” and among whose outstanding spokesmen are to be found the very authors of this essay—particularly Professor Wiener, whose recently published Cybernetics has been claiming the attention of an increasing number of scientists and non-scientists alike. In his book, it may be noted, Professor Wiener, in tracing the development of cybernetics over the past few years, gives a good indication of the importance he attaches to the earlier essay. He writes, with reference to it: “The three of us [Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow] felt that this new point of view merited a paper, which we wrote up and published. Dr. Rosenblueth and I foresaw that the paper could only be a statement of program for a large body of experimental work, and we decided that if we could ever bring our plan for an interscientific institute to fruition, this topic would furnish an almost ideal center for our activity” (p. 15). It would seem, then, that an examination of the contents of this essay should not be without interest at this time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 1950 , pp. 310 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1950

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References

1 Philosophy of Science, vol. 10, pp. 18–24 (1943).

2 John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1948.

3 On this definition, it may be noted, a perfectly static object surrounded by others in motion exhibits “behavior.”

4 The word “correlation” is not defined by these writers, and in fact they use it only once. I therefore assume it to have no special or technical meaning in their usage. Ordinarily, to say of two objects or events that they are correlated, is simply to say that they stand in some reciprocal or mutual relationship, i.e., that they are co-related. The word is also used more precisely to indicate a constant relationship between kinds of objects or events, or to indicate that one is a universal accompaniment of the other, as when we speak of mental states being correlated with brain processes, or of the hands of a clock being correlated with each other, and so on. The more general meaning is what the authors seem to have in mind in their definition, although the more precise one would not alter their argument.

5 The expression “negative feed-back” is a technical one of physics and engineering. The authors point out that they are using it “to signify that the behavior of an object is controlled by the margin of error at which the object stands at a given time with reference to a relatively specific goal,” (p. 19; cf. p. 24). The same idea could be expressed by saying that an object is controlled by negative feed-back when the effects of its behavior in turn act indirectly upon the object itself to oppose whatever it is doing (cf. Cybernetics, p. 115).

6 Op. Cit.

7 This expression may appear as a redundancy, but the authors qualify as “teleological” only those purposeful objects which are controlled by negative feed-back, (pp. 23–24).