Peter Vallentyne

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

This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose. Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By outpu...

Teleology comes from the Greek term telos, in English purpose. According to Aristotle, each object has a final purpose for its being. Human knowledge is also associated with such a purpose. The teleological analysis of knowledge management processes and knowledge types is a new approach to mapping organizational knowledge, especially in academic environment. In this paper, we show advantages of...

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organism...

Abstract There are different meanings associated with consequentialism and teleology. This causes confusion, sometimes results in discussions based on misunderstandings rather than substantial disagreements. To clarify this, we created a survey the definitions of ‘consequentialism’ ‘teleology’, which sent to specialists consequentialism. We broke down teleology into four component parts: Outcom...