ABSTRACT
Dr. E. R. Guthrie considers Purpose and Mechanism as categories of explanation in psychology, his general conclusion being that teleological explanation is not so intrinsically despicable, after all, as it is often thought to be. The present writer is in thorough agreement with that conclusion, but it seems to him that Guthrie's distinction between mechanism and teleology is much too loose to be satisfactory, and that he classes as explanations many things which have no title to that name. Guthrie characterizes explanation as the 'assigning a fact or an event to a category of some sort'. The definition of purposiveness, the acts of entities capable of belief and desire, are capable of being purposive, and the occurrences of 'inanimate nature' cannot be spoken of as purposive without contradiction, unless belief and desire be injected into nature. Peirce very unfortunately called the third sort of inference 'Hypothesis', while hypothesis in fact means the making of any sort of a conjecture.
