The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005
Robert
B. MacLeod
Teleology and Theory of
Human Behavior
Science, New Series, 125 (3246)
March 15, 1957, 477-480.
Index
Independence of Social Science
In approaching the problem of fundamental concepts and
units of social science, I do so merely as a psychologist. My colleagues in the other social sciences
will have much to add, and they may well see fit to differ. I also limit myself to one topic - namely, the
place of teleological constructs in the theory of human behavior. There is only incidental reference to the
problem of units.
In reviving the old question of teleology, I realize
that I am venturing down a pathway that for some centuries has appeared
forbidding even to the angels, and that in taking a hesitant step in this
direction I am identifying myself with a nonangelic
group. Teleology means the explanation
of natural events in terms of purposive constructs. This is a currently unpopular approach. I submit, however, that we should from time to
time look again at the phenomena that invite a teleological explanation and
make sure that we have done full justice to them.
It is only recently that the students of man and
society have been readmitted into the family of scientists. We appreciate the honor; we like to think of
ourselves as scientists. Twenty-five
hundred years ago, however, there was no question of a division within the
family. Science, or philosophy, was one;
it was man’s quest for an understanding of everything. In Aristotle’s day it included physics,
biology, psychology, epistemology, logic, ethics, politics, and even the theory
of poetry. In Aristotle’s thinking there
was no object or event or relationship that was not intelligible as an expression
of law; and even the summum bonum was the embodiment of a rational principle. The Greek faith in reason was for many
centuries to be smothered by a blanket of Christian theology. When the Greek faith was eventually revived,
its claims were much more modest. The
world of physical nature might be rationally understood, but the laws of human living
were yielded to the theologians. The
hope of modern social science is that the ideal of the ancient Greeks may some
day be realized, that man may be restored to nature or, possibly, that our
conception of nature may be broadened to encompass the laws of human behavior.
The history of science is studded with revolutions. The rationalism of the Greeks was
revolutionary. In the 16th and 17th
centuries we had a revolution of the New Science, as astronomy, physics, and
biology began to throw off the shackles of the Christianized Aristotle. In Newton’s great synthesis we have its finest
expression. Darwin, in the 19th century,
precipitated another revolution, the repercussions of which have not yet died
down; and today we find ourselves in the midst of the greatest scientific revolution
of all. History will in due course
settle on a name for it. These are just
the high points. In between the great
revolutions there have been innumerable rumbles and revolts.
But where among the revolutions do we find the great
revolution of the social sciences? We
look for it in vain because it has not yet taken place. Why? I
suggest that it is because the students of man have cravenly tried to pattern
their fundamental concepts and methods after those of the natural sciences. I do not propose to canonize Aristotle, as the
medieval theologians nearly did; but I do think that, just as the Renaissance
was sparked by the rediscovery of the real Aristotle, so the social sciences of
today can profit from a fresh look at Aristotle’s argument for the unity of man
and nature. The Renaissance scientists
found his physics and his biology faulty, and we too may find weaknesses in his
psychology and his sociology; but we cannot evade his challenge.
Aristotle’s unified conception of the world rested on
a fourfold theory of causality. There
were material causes, efficient causes, formal causes, and final causes. Material and efficient causes had been
recognized long before Aristotle. We
find something like his formal causes in the materialism of Democritus. Final causes had, however, belonged to theology,
and even the rationalist Plato had regarded them as separate from, if superior
to, the laws of nature. The final causes
represented the purposes of the gods, who, according to Greek mythology, could
change the course of natural events at will. In the fourth century B.C. it required genius to incorporate final causes into a single
teleological scheme that could include everything from the motions of matter to
the creation of poetry.
The revolution of the New Science was in large part a revolt against
Aristotle, but it was against an Aristotle who had been posthumously baptized
as a Christian, whose final cause had become a Divine Purpose, the sole
interpreter of which was the Church, and whose every
dictum had become sacrosanct. Copernicus
quailed before Authority, Galileo protested and then yielded, and Descartes
quibbled; most of the scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries, daring as they
were in their thoughts, hastened to make all possible concessions to Authority
in
The author is professor of psychology at
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. This
article is based on the third paper presented at a symposium, “Fundamental units
and concepts of science,” that was held 27-28 Dec. 1956 during the New York meeting of the AAAS.
477
order to retain some measure of freedom. One of the chief concessions they made was
their freedom to consider man as a natural phenomenon. Even Newton, the model of the scientist,
refused to study man in his entirety - and this at a time when the scientist
could still be master of all knowledge.
The revolution of the New Science banished Aristotle’s
final cause, at least so far as physical nature was concerned, and even
Aristotle’s formal causes were laid open to question. The physical world that Newton envisaged was a
world that could be described in terms of material and efficient causes, in
terms of particles of matter that exist in space and time and are moved by
force. Since Newton’s day matter has
lost much of its materiality; space and time have ceased to be absolutes, and
force has been transmuted into a mathematical formula; but for all practical
purposes the Newtonian scheme still works, and deep down we still have the
conviction that Newton had his fingers on the fundamentals. Reality, our tradition tells us, Reality with
a capital R, is tough and resilient stuff. No Science that is worthy of its capital S can
ever really explain any phenomenon of nature without referring it to Something
Real, like molecules or enzymes or genes or reverberating circuits in the cortex.
In the Newtonian scheme we seek in vain for anything
that promises a true science of man. In
the 16th century, the adventurous students of physical nature had rightly
challenged the Christianized version of Aristotle’s theory of the natural
world. After the 16th century, the
natural sciences went forward by leaps and bounds. By the end of the 19th century Science, with a
capital S, promised to replace the gods of traditional theology. In retrospect, we realize that the scientists
of the Renaissance had been faint-hearted when they were confronted with human
problems, and that their successors were diffident about applying the
principles of their new science to man. Galileo
bowed before the Inquisition. Descartes,
the father of mechanistic physiology, refused to extend his mechanical
principles to the operations of the mind. Berkeley, who developed an ingenious (if
incorrect) theory of space perception, took refuge in the mind of God. The philosophers eventually escaped with Kant
into the realm of the transcendental. Early
modern science was brilliant in physics, and only slightly less brilliant in
biology, but in the science of man it was a dismal failure.
We cannot blame this failure on the social scientists of the
Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods, for in those times there were no
social scientists as such. The
disciplines had not yet become specialized. At the end of the 16th century, Bacon could
aspire to a mastery of all knowledge, and 200 years later Goethe could be
active in optics, in botany, and in psychology as well as in the writing of
poetic, dramatic, and philosophic works. If blame is to be assigned, it must be shared
by all those who had the intelligence and the opportunity to look at themselves
as scientific objects and who recoiled before the challenge. Better, however, to blame no one and simply to
realize that societies and individuals must achieve considerable maturity before
they can begin to study themselves scientifically.
Independence
of Social Science
It was not until the latter half of the 19th century
that the sciences of man began to assert their independence, and by that time
the conception of science had become established as essentially that of
Newtonian physics. We can understand how
the students of man, groping for basic concepts and methods, should have
patterned their explanations after Newton. The best example is to be found in the history
of associationist psychology. The British empirical tradition was grounded
in Newtonian physics. John Locke was
living in a Newtonian world when he sought to base the primary qualities of
sense on the properties of matter and to reduce the secondary qualities to
terms of the primary. For Locke, the
element of mental life was the “idea,” the psychological analog of the
Newtonian material particle. Locke was
not completely consistent in his empiricism, for he conceded the existence of
“mental powers.”
During the succeeding century and a half, however, a
completely associationist theory was gradually hammered
into shape. By the mid-l9th century,
James Mill had banished the soul and the mind and had presented the world with
a strictly Newtonian doctrine of man. The
“mind” of man consisted of nothing but its contents, elementary sensations and
ideas, chained together and compounded in accordance with a single law, the law
of association by contiguity. Jeremy Bentham had similarly reduced the problems of individual
and social motivation to a single principle, the principle of utility. Bentham’s elements
are simple pleasures and pains. Every
human act is, and should be, based on a calculation of probable pleasant and
painful outcomes. At the mid-l9th
century, it looked as though all the phenomena of human behavior and experience
might be accounted for in terms of the prevailing concepts of natural science.
Newtonian science rests, essentially, on Aristotle’s
material and efficient causes. Newton
was not an irreligious man, but he refused to admit teleology into the realm of
science, Aristotle’s formal causes may have caused Newton some trouble, but I
have neither the space nor the scholarship to discuss the question. What is clear, however, is that psychological
science in the mid-l9th century was strongly opposed to the formal, as well as
to the final, causes.
Then came Darwin. With Darwin there was a shocking upsurge of
Aristotelian teleology. The historian of
science must be amused by the fact that the most strenuous opposition to Darwin
came not from the Newtonian materialists but from the pious people whose
doctrine he was unwittingly to support. It
is true that Darwinism was a threat to traditional religion, with its belief in
special creation, and that Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, smote the clerics hip and thigh, contending that man should be
regarded not as a child of God but as a natural product of organic evolution.
What is most challenging about Darwin, however, is his
reintroduction of purpose into the natural world. He may not have intended to do this - again,
my scholarship is inadequate - but this was clearly one of the consequences. The Darwinian debate seethed with expressions,
such as “nature red in tooth and claw,” that seemed to suggest a mechanistic
explanation of evolution, but these were accompanied by “the struggle for
survival,” “the progressive adaptation of species to their environments,” and
similar expressions that more than hinted at a final cause. The philosopher Bergson
in his concept of the élan vital postulated something more than a
mechanical principle; the biologist Charles Lloyd Morgan argued for the
principle of emergence in evolution; the biologist Hans Driesch
defended a frankly vitalistic position; the
psychologist William McDougall made the concept of purpose central in his psychological
system; the new science of anthropology took courage from Darwin’s successes
and proceeded to search avidly for evidence that would support an evolutionary
theory of society. The defenders of
religion, instead of yielding to the Darwinian enemy, finally encompassed him. Without much difficulty they recognized in the
evolutionary principle a further indication of God’s eternal purpose. Darwin, the scientist who tried to restore man
to the realm of natural law, became the unintentional herald of a new
teleology.
As I have said, I am not trying to canonize Aristotle, but I believe
that Aristotle’s doctrine of causation may still have some relevance. For almost 2000
478
years after his death the final cause reigned
supreme. This was the period during
which science, such as it was, was dominated by the Church. The revolution of the New Science, symbolized
by Newton, represented an attempt to explain all of nature in terms of material
and efficient causes, but it ran into difficulty when it tried to encompass the
facts of human nature.
The Darwinian revolutionaries, perhaps unwittingly,
reintroduced the final cause, and the stage was set for a debate between those
who would explain nature mechanically and those who would explain it teleologically. Aristotle
would not have been bothered by this difference of opinion, for he believed in
the ultimate rationality of everything; but the post-Darwinian Newtonians,
especially in psychology, have been bursting blood vessels in their attempt to
contain the explanation of human behavior within the dimensions of space, time,
mass, force and motion. Psychologists,
of all people, ought to be keenly aware of the implicit assumptions in their
own thinking. What is appalling is the
evident fact that American psychologists are still trying to fit their
phenomena into a Newtonian framework even after their hero, the physicist, has
long since been toying with non-Newtonian concepts.
What I suggest is that the social scientists take
another look at Aristotle’s formal causes. The natural scientists did pretty well with
the material and efficient causes; the final causes were captured by the
theologians. The formal causes were lost
in the shuffle. The Newtonians tried to
dispose of them; the theologians tried to absorb them. It seems to me that the concept deserves
further scrutiny. Let us glance at just
a few examples.
The principle of homeostasis, originally propounded by
Claude Bernard, was buttressed by experiment and presented as a theory by
Walter B. Cannon. Cannon, in a presidential
address before the AAAS, even dared to extend its application to the body
politic. Physiological homeostasis is
the principle whereby the body reacts to changes in its environment in such a
way as to maintain steady states - steady states of temperature, water content,
salt content, calcium and phosphorus content, and so forth. A physiological need generates a psychological
need, and the appropriate behavior restores the proper balance.
It is important to note, however, that Cannon’s steady
states are not mere statistical averages; they are optima. The temperature at
which the human body functions best, as recorded by a mouth thermometer, is
98.6°F. This is not an average of all
possible temperatures; it is a statement of the optimum. Cannon’s principle suggests that when
organisms are disrupted they will veer toward a norm. Can this be explained in terms of material and
efficient causes? Or does it require
something more?
For the past 100 years, experimental psychologists
have been familiar with the problem of phenomenal constancy. Under conditions of free vision, the object we
see retains its apparent size in spite of changes in distance from the eye and
consequent variations in the size of the retinal image; and its color, shape,
and position are similarly resistant to changes in its illumination,
orientation, and location. Some of the
laws of phenomenal constancy have been worked out empirically and stated
quantitatively. Yet, in advance of
experimentation, we can still predict with a high degree of assurance on the
basis of such a proposition as “The organism will strive, so far as possible,
to preserve a stable world of objects, events and relationships.” Is this a teleological principle?
A scant half-century ago, Sigmund Freud, who had begun
to explore the causes of neurosis, concluded that the individual in his
development achieves an ego that defends its integrity against real or imagined
onslaughts from the world about him. Repression,
rationalization, sublimation, projection, and reaction-formation are familiar
mechanisms of ego defense. None of these
has been adequately quantified, yet the psychological clinician depends on
them. He knows that he can understand
his patient’s symptoms and guess his patient’s future behavior if he assumes
that the patient’s ego will strive, by hook or by crook, to defend itself
against attack. Some day the machinery
of ego defense will be dissected into its nuts, bolts, switches, and
transmission lines. For the present,
what looks like a teleological principle seems to work.
These examples are from physiology, experimental
psychology, and clinical psychology, and they could be extended indefinitely. I feel less confident about examples from
economics, sociology, and anthropology, although I am told that there is still
a law of supply and demand in economics and that the introduction of a new
artifact into a society, such as a steel axe or a hydrogen bomb, will have
predictable social consequences.
What is interesting is that in the sciences of man - and
I include physiology - we can often make our best predictions on the basis of
macroscopic observations and generalizations. The microscopists
may eventually verify, or even correct, our statements, and they are beginning
to do this in the fields of homeostasis and phenomenal constancy; but the fact
remains that the initial hypothesis, the initial hunch, springs from an
intuition as to whither man is going. Are
we to exclude the directedness of human behavior from the realm of science as
the Newtonian physicists did? Should we
try to reduce directedness to terms of material and efficient causes, as the
19th-century psychologists did? Or shall
we accept as facts the phenomena that invite a teleological explanation, and
see what we can do with them? Needless
to say, I favor the last alternative.
I am not arguing that science should suddenly have a
change of heart and reinstate Aristotle’s final causes. The physical sciences have done fairly well
without them. The biological sciences
seem to be admitting formal causes without yielding to final causes, although
some biologists are striving manfully to reduce formal to material and
efficient causes. What I do suggest is
that the social sciences, dealing as they do with the very phenomena that
invite a teleological explanation, should not scurry away from these phenomena
but should look at them fearlessly and be prepared to think in more global
terms. A quarter of a century ago a much
maligned psychologist, William McDougall, analyzed what he called “the marks of
behavior,” the most important of which was purposive striving. I think he was right. Among the many things that are characteristic
of organisms is that they strive toward goals. We may deduce goals from the observed behavior
of simpler organisms or we may observe them directly in our own experience. The fact remains that goal directedness is
something we can observe. If science is
to include the behavior of man, it must include the fact of purposive striving.
Sticks and stones do not strive, but
people do.
The most influential of contemporary psychologists,
the American behaviorists, are still trying to stuff the science of man into a
Newtonian bottle. They would like to see
all of human behavior plotted bidimensionally within
a simple scheme of space-time coordinates. I do not really deplore this. The scheme works well with rats, and with
human beings who have the fortitude to memorize endless chains of nonsense
syllables. It is a healthy and humbling
experience to know that human, as well as animal,
organisms can be made to behave like well-oiled machines.
In a world that cries for a deeper understanding of
man, however, a world in which physical science has granted enormous new powers
to a human agent who has scarcely begun to understand himself, I think it is
high time that the students of man stop pretending to be scientists in the
traditional sense and settle down to the business of looking at
479
man as he really behaves. I have no thought of disparaging Newton or his
conception of the scientific conscience. I am simply suggesting that some of the
phenomena that Newton rejected may now be incorporated within a broadened conception
of science. These are the phenomena of
form and purpose. Let us look at them as
facts.
Some of my physicist friends object to my capping the
history of scientific revolutions with a reference to an Einsteinian
revolution, and they may be right. Einstein
may not have revolutionized our conception of the physical world; but for us,
social scientists, he is sufficient as a symbol. Einstein means to us not only the revolt against
the rigidity of the Newtonian system but also the correction of a superficial
relativism that has lulled too many social scientists into easy generalities. We usually think of Einstein’s challenge as a
challenge to our theory of space. For
the social scientist it is time that is more important, for time is an essential
dimension of purpose. If time runs in a
straight line, then the only things we can consider as the causes of an event
are the antecedent and concomitant conditions. The Newtonian system restricts us to these. If, however, we question the absoluteness of
time and play with the idea that, in different frames of reference, the
relationship between antecedent and consequent may be reversed, we may be left
free to think that something that has not yet happened may be an essential
condition of something that is about to happen. If the temporal relationship is relationally,
rather than absolutely, determined, we might conceivably reincorporate purpose
as a natural fact into the stream of natural causation.
My present feeling is that, if we were to reintroduce
final causes now, we would be moving too fast. Some day we may have a natural science that is
broad enough, both in its concepts and in its methods, to include the facts of
human purpose. For the time being, I
think it is expedient to concentrate on Aristotle’s formal causes, and I
suspect that the solution of formal causality may automatically resolve the
problem of final causality.
One’s thinking is always culture-bound. My own bias is against any sort of teleology. I do not want to admit transcendent, or even
immanent, purposes into the universe. This
may be a relic of my Newtonian upbringing. Nevertheless, the facts of human behavior and
experience reveal purposiveness. Shall we consider these as facts of nature, or
shall we deny them? If we accept them,
shall we reduce them to “purposeless” terms, or shall we try to discover a
unified science that is broad enough to encompass the full richness of
experience?
480
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005