ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the teleological form of explanation implicit in any account in terms of purpose. The belief that there is such a short-cut is, of course, very widespread among students of the sciences of behaviour, and particularly among the school in experimental psychology known as ‘behaviourist’. The attractions of the positivist arguments for thinkers of the cast of thought are evident. There is, moreover, a sense in which the issue the people are concerned with here can never be conclusively decided, or, rather, can only be conclusively decided in one direction. A ‘centralist’ account would thus not involve explanation by purpose or the use of genuinely psychological concepts, but it would resemble explanation by purpose in this, that its first level laws relating the condition of the environment to behaviour would invoke states of the organism analogously characterized.
