Abstract Background Teleological reasoning is a cognitive bias purported to disrupt student ability understand natural selection. Few studies have described pedagogical efforts decrease endorsement of teleological and measure the effects this attenuation on understanding acceptance evolution. This exploratory study examined influence explicit instructional activities directly challenging explan...

Abstract International organisations are inherently purposive actors within the international legal system, created and empowered by States to pursue finite common objectives. This teleological dimension has come play a prominent role in way which law rationalises organisations, with their purposes given significant, often determinative, delimiting competences. article argues that this is produ...

The current UK debate on Computing in schools is driven by a specific issue: what should form the basis of a modern Computing education. It’s a perfect storm that has been brewing for some time, but the recent comments1 of Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, have moved it into the political arena. Currently, the mandatory educational component of Computing (from years 11 to 16) is taught as I...

These studies explore the scope of young children’s teleological tendency to view entities as ‘designed for purposes’. One view (‘Selective Teleology’) argues that teleology is an innate, basic mode of thinking that, throughout development, is selectively applied by children and adults to artifacts and biological properties. An alternative proposal (‘Promiscuous Teleology’) argues that teleolog...

Taking a lead from existing typologies of actions in the philosophical and cognitive science literatures, we present a novel taxonomy of actions. To promote a notion of epistemic agency we distinguish theoretical (mental state-directed) from practical (world-directed) actions. Our basic structural unit is that of a teleological frame, which spans one specific goal of an agent. Relative to a giv...