Enactivism has the potential to provide a sense of teleology in purposedirected action, but without violating the principles of efficient causation. Action can be distinguished from mere reaction by virtue of the fact that some systems are self-organizing. Self-organization in the brain is reflected in neural plasticity, and also in the primacy of motivational processes that initiate the releas...

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems?What explains their persistence (returning to past trajectories following errors) and their plasticity (finding the same trajectory from different starting points)? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeki...

THE purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a similarity between an ancient and a modern theory of living nature. There is no need to present the Aristotelian doctrine in full detail. I must rather apologize for repeating much that is well known. My endeavour is to offer it for comparison, and, incidentally, to clear it from misrepresentation. Uexkiill's theory, on the other hand, is litt...

Symbol grounding has originated within the connectionist-symbolic debate so as to gap the bridge between the two approaches. This paper provides an overview about recent results concerning symbol grounding , which is critically reviewed here. A thorough analysis reveals that symbol grounding parallels transcen-dental logic and is best viewed as automated model construction. If this diagnosis is...

This paper focuses on the uneasy alliance of rational choice and evolutionary explanations in modern economics. While direct evolutionary explanations of “optimality” rule out "purposeful" rational choice by assuming zerointelligence and pure rational choice explanations leave no room for "selective" adaptation the indirect evolutionary approach integrates both perspectives. Subsequently we go ...