ABSTRACT
The scientist, presumably, fears that without some such medium to provide for causal explanation of physical events he may be forced back into a teleological, Aristotelian physics, in which bodies move because they have a natural tendency to move in their own characteristic way, and stop when they get to their natural resting places. Self-activation and self-direction would certainly distinguish purposive behaviour from mechanical–causal events, but to list them as evidence for purposiveness is a petitio principi. A hungry organism can be set down at a wide diversity of starting points and in each case will show behaviour that in a physical–geographical sense is different from that which occurred in the others. Woodfield divides teleological theories into ‘externalist’ and ‘internalist’ types, that is into those which hold that goal-directed behaviour can be identified and explained by reference only to its external form, and those which hold that reference to processes internal to the behaving entity is necessary.
