The design of a long-living software artifact evolves through many versions. Changes in the design requirements from one version to the next typically are incremental and sometimes quite small (deltas). A software engineer (or a team of software engineers) formulates the requirements of a new version, adapts the design of the previous versions to meet the new requirements, implements and evalua...

This paper argues that biological organisation can be legitimately conceived of as an intrinsically teleological causal regime. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between organisation and teleology through the concept of self-determination: biological organisation determines itself in the sense that the effects of its activity contribute to determine its own conditio...

In two studies, 6–12-year-old children (Study 1: N = 58; Study 2: N = 38) and adults (Study 2: N = 22) rank ordered intentional, teleological and essentialist explanations for different behaviours of living-kind groups representing a range of biological kinds from plants to humans. Overall, humans elicited more intentional explanations, insects and plants elicited more essentialist explanations...

Many previous studies have assumed that the domain of the explanandum determines which type of explanation, mechanistic or teleological, people prefer (domain theory). In this study, I proposed that the explanandum’s thematic relation, which is mostly determined by the predicate, i.e., action verb or state verb, is crucial for the explanation type preference (thematic relation theory). To compa...