Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite, or perhaps because of, its widespread use and contentiousness, there has sometimes been confusion about what exactly constitutes ‘teleology’. This paper provides a classification system of types of teleological phenomena and applies the framework to debates on the suitability of teleology in the life and physical sciences. The first part of the paper draws from accounts of goal-directed behaviour in biology and cosmology to construct the classification. I argue that there are two distinct behaviours that have traditionally been labelled ‘teleological’: (i) end-directedness and (ii) self-determination. I then highlight three other, orthogonal distinctions which further clarify the type of teleology in question, namely internal vs. external, intentional vs. non-intentional, and specific vs. unspecific. The second part of the paper applies this framework to two cases: debates between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology in biology, and anthropic principles and fine-tuning arguments in cosmology. In the first instance, I show how the distinction between the two concerns not just whether the teleology is internal or external, but also the type of teleology (end-directedness or self-determination) posited. In the second instance, I show how anthropic principles posit substantively different kinds of teleological behaviour, some of which, I argue, are usually viewed as unscientific, whereas others are generally considered admissible in science. The final part of the paper sketches some suggestions for how the problems surrounding teleology in science should be reconceptualized and applies the framework to resolve a current debate: between the organizational account and field theory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".