This paper develops and draws the consequences of an etiological analysis of goal-directedness modeled on one that functions centrally in Charles Taylor's work on action. The author first presents, criticizes, and modifies Taylor's formulation, and then shows his modified formulation accounts easily for much of the fine-structure of teleological concepts and conceptualizations. Throughout, the author is at pains to show that teleological explanations are orthodox from an empiricist's point of view: they require nothing novel methodologically.

In order to expound and defend the intentionalist thesis that human actions are intentionally determined by persons, selves, or agents themselves I first argue that teleological explanation, even though it is consistent with physicalism and scientifically respectable in the sense of being an attempt to establish the conditions under which things and events occur and to formulate laws that express such dependencies, is not exactly coordinate with and replaceable by mechanistic explanation. Then, I argue that living human beings must be (...) seen as teleological systems relative to the purposes and goals of intentional activities even though the human body may come as close as possible to being a mechanistic system relative to physical responses and electro-chemical-mechanical movements on the basis of certain insights drawn from Wittgenstein's works. Finally, I expound and defend a very strong version of the intentionalist thesis drawn from C. A. Campbell's 'Is “Freewill”; a Pseudo-Problem?' [5], and criticize an influential argument against this view which is due to C. D. Broad, 'Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism' [3]. (shrink)

If teleological descriptions and explanations are to have a legitimate place in contemporary empirical science, especially as regards biological units in general and even nonbiological ones, then their content must avoid appeal to intentional constituents. Efforts aimed atreducing teleological accounts to nonteleological ones (Braithwaite, Nagel, etc.) have proved unsuccessful (Scheffler). Recently, Larry Wright, building on the work of Charles Taylor, has put together a nonreductive analysis which is free from many of the objections often associated with such a program. I (...) maintain that while Wright and Taylor are on the right track, serious problems still remain for their theories. An analysis is suggested which avoids these difficulties. (shrink)

This paper defends the relevance of Taylor's (1964) critique of S-R behaviorism to Skinner's model of operant conditioning. In particular, it is argued against Ringen (1976) that the model of operant conditioning is a nonteleological variety of explanation. Operant conditioning is shown unable, on this account, to provide a parsimonious and predictive explanation of the behavior of higher level organisms. Finally, it is shown that the principle of operant conditioning implicitly assumes a teleological capacity, the admission of which renders the (...) principle of operant conditioning superfluous. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner's claim that "operant behavior is essentially the field of purpose" is systematically explored. It is argued that Charles Taylor's illuminating analysis of the explanatory significance of common-sense goal-ascriptions (1) lends some (fairly restricted) support to Skinner's claim, (2) considerably clarifies the conceptual significance of differences between operant and respondent behavior and conditioning, and (3) undercuts influential assertions (e.g., Taylor's) that research programs for behavioristic psychology share a "mechanistic" orientation. A strategy is suggested for assessing the plausibility of (...) Skinner's broader claims about the adequacy of the operant behaviorist program for the analysis of purposive behavior. (shrink)

The so-called post-Wittgensteinian Oxford philosophers are often criticized not only for failing to provide for the causal explanation of human behavior and psychological states, but also for failing to recognize that psychological explanations require appeal to sub-personal or molecular processes. Three strategies accommodating this criticism appear in so-called homunculus theories and include: (1) that the sub-systems be assigned intentional or informational content purely heuristically; (2) that the intentional or informational content of molar states be analyzed without remainder in terms of (...) molecular processing; (3) that the entire or salient range of mental or informational molar states be accessible at the molecular level, or vice versa. Option (2) proves to be the most radical and is favored by Dennett. (1) relevantly requires a reduction of the intentional. (3) is illustrated in various ways by the views of Freud, Chomsky, Fodor. (2) is shown to depend on (1) or to be idle; and (3) embraces at least in part an appeal to molar-level explanation. The argument developed attempts to show the sense in which discourse about molar and molecular-level phenomena in the psychological context is fundamentally different from macroscopic and microtheoretical-level discourse about physical phenomena. The conclusion drawn is that neither a molar nor a sub-personal level theory is suitably explanatory in the psychological sense: a psychological theory is committed rather to a set of sub-personal components of such systems, that serve to explain molar phenomena. (shrink)