ABSTRACT
Cybernetics, information theory, communications engineering, computer science, general systems theory, systems engineering, operations research, and related scientific and engineering efforts have brought with them a new respectability for such teleological concepts as f u n c t i o n and p u r p o s e . They have shown the fruitfulness of conceiving of at least some phenomena in other than a mechanistic framework such as dominated the scientific thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As noted by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram ( I 960), this development has even had an effect on the traditional mechanistic thinking of the behavioral sciences.
