Substantive and Methodological Teleology in Aristotle and Some Logical Empiricists

SUBSTANTIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL TELEOLOGY IN ARISTOTLE AND SOME LOGICAL EMPIRICISTS "MEN DO NOT THINK they know a thing till they have grasped the 'why' of it," observes Aristotle in the Physics.1 "Why?" however, is not a simple question. According to Aristotle there are four different senses in which the question may be taken, each determined by a different kind of causal condition for being and change. One might, for instance, seek to discover that out of which a thing is composed, or what agent produced it, or what its essential features are, or what its function is. Of the four senses of the question the most important for Aristotle is the last: What is that for the sake of which it is? Or more simply: What is its final cause? In opposition to Aristotle many contemporary philosophers of science, particularly the Logical Empiricists/ contend that teleological categories are eliminable from the substantive analysis of goal-directed systems and that, consequently, the explanatory framework for such systems can-and some say should-avoid a teleological construction. On the contrary, I believe that teleological categories and explanations are logically acceptable and in important ways indispensable not only for goal-directed systems but for all explanatory analyses in science. In order to test these convictions I propose in this study first to investigate Aristotle's doctrine of finality, and 1 194bl9-20. Throughout this study I have used the Hardie and Gaye translation of the Physics as found in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 2 " Logical Empiricists " is not an altogether precise designation. By it I mean especially to refer to those philosophers of science who accept the covering law model of scientific explanation. Thus Braithwaite, Carnap, Feigl, Hempel, Nagel, Oppenheim, Pap, Reichenbach, Rudner, etc. 702 SUBSTANTIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL TELEOLOGY 708 then to measure its suggestive implications against the considerations of Nagel, Braithwaite, and Hempel in their interpretations of and objections to teleological categories and explanations . I. THE .ARISTOTELIAN DocTRINE OF TELEOLOGY A. Explanation according to the conditions of change. Since science for Aristotle is not simply a catalogue of empirical observations of natural phenomena but reasoned demonstrations according to the necessary conditions of things, a methodological requisite is that those conditions be distinguished with respect to their type. There are four kinds of condition which must be determined before we may be said to have full scientific knowledge of any natural object: the material condition, "that out of which a thing comes to be and which persists"; the formal condition, " the statement of the essence, and its genera, . . . and the parts of the definition"; the efficient condition, "the primary source of the change or coming to rest"; and the final condition, " [the] end or ' that for the sake of which ' a thing is done." 3 Of the four kinds of condition the physicist must consider in order to fully explain the changes which natural objects undergo, the formal and telic coincide both in the ontological and logical orders. In the ontological order it is the essential structures of things which dynamically determine them to develop into all that they potentially are. The paradigm example for Aristotle of this kind of form-end identification is the biological development of an individual of a certain species: each member of a given species carries the plan of its own evolvement within itself, and through the course of its transformations it becomes structured according to that plan.4 In the • Phys., 194b24-34. • The notion that species, just as individuals, evolve and assume new genotypic characteristics would be foreign to Aristotle. It was his consistent view that end-directed activity is engaged in only by individuals, not by their substantial forms. However, insofar as teleology is understood in an Aristotelean, non-vitalistic fashion, there seems to be no reason for not analyzing species evolution using 704 ROBERT J. RICHARDS logical order it is the same description of the structure of each object which, according to the use made of it, can be considered now the essential description of the species, now the plan of development for members of the species, that is, the description of the set...