Teleology which focuses instead on goal-contribution. With the objective goals of organisms being survival and inclusive fitness, Piccinini and Maley define teleological functions to be “a stable contribution by a trait (or component, activity, property) of organisms belonging to a biological population to an objective goal of those organisms.” Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding plans of action to achieve their goals, and thus would seem to have a causal insight which transcends mere custom. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature", published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the "Treatise", which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a