Consequentialist Reasons for Some Education Reforms

The reasons for education reforms – as a particular form of social reforms – are either consequentialist or non-consequentialist. However, the reasons for the education reforms that are briefly discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of education in the present paper are above all consequentialist. These are the reasons for proposed education reforms in EU countries whose strategic aim is equated with the enhancement of two values: creativity and innovation. It is supposed that these education reforms will have good effects and not that they are good in and of themselves. Therefore, although creativity and innovation might be seen as having intrinsic value, they are – in these education reforms – treated predominantly as instrumental values. It seems that the introduction of such education reforms can be understood as a decision founded not on causal explanation, but rather on the basis of a special type of teleological explanation, which has the logical form of a “practical syllogism”. In this case, the occurrence of an action is explained in terms of the goals and purposes of the agent; it shows that the agent did what s/he did because s/he tried to achieve a certain goal and believed that certain means were necessary or sufficient for achieving this goal.

Resuming Discussion of the Common Cause of Animal Self-Motion: How Does the Soul Move the Body?

This contribution comments on Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium 6 (MA 6). In this chapter Aristotle resumes the discussion of the common cause of animal self-motion. For this purpose the chapter introduces the technical vocabulary from De Anima III 9–11, e.g. desire, phantasia, nous, perception. The contribution argues, among other things, that MA 6 marks the beginning, not of Aristotle’s teleological explanation of animal motion, but of his common causal explanation of animal self-motion in the sense of the efficient cause common to all sublunary living beings capable of moving themselves locally.

Teleology beyond explanation: What factors influence teleology judgments?

What do we mean when we say something is for a given purpose? Teleology (i.e., something’s purpose) is often associated with teleological explanation (i.e., an explanation referring to that purpose). For instance, a knife may be for cutting things precisely because its existence can be explained by that purpose. But do people ascribe a telos to an object only if they think that object has a teleological explanation? Experiment 1 examined cases where an object was designed for one purpose but is now widely used for a different purpose, and found that teleology judgments and teleological explanation judgments are dissociable: Only an artifact’s original purpose could serve as an explanation, but its new purpose could also be its telos. Experiments 2-3 identified three factors that influence teleology judgments other than intentional design: present use (i.e., how a community is currently using the artifact), collective recognition (i.e., how a community together characterizes the artifact) and success at a function (i.e., how well the artifact can perform its purpose). Finally, Experiment 4 identified one factor that (perhaps unexpectedly) did not affect teleology judgments. In contrast to its role in teleological explanation, structure- function fit did not impact teleology judgments. Implications for work on object teleology and interpretations of teleological reasoning more generally are discussed.

Teleology in the Later Middle Ages

Teleological explanation is one of the legacies of antiquity that received a surprisingly muted response in the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s naturalized approach to teleology met with little enthusiasm, and grave doubts arose in the later Middle Ages over whether final causes are a legitimate kind of cause at all. This was a natural reaction to the distinctive feature of medieval teleology, which is that teleological causes are universal, intelligent, particular, forward-looking, intentional, and (in nonrational cases) extrinsic. When teleology is so understood, its explanatory role becomes limited to certain special cases. Indeed, the one place where reflection on ends plays a truly robust role in later medieval philosophy is in ethics. Even here, however, the consensus of antiquity—that human beings are and ought to be ultimately motivated by their own happiness—meets with growing resistance and eventually outright rejection.

The perceptual relevance of balance, evenness, and entropy in musical rhythms

There is an uncountable number of different ways of characterizing almost any given real-world stimulus. This necessitates finding stimulus features that are perceptually relevant – that is, they have distinct and independent effects on the perception and cognition of the stimulus. Here, we provide a theoretical framework for empirically testing the perceptual relevance of stimulus features through their association with recognition, memory bias, and aesthetic evaluation. We deploy this framework in the auditory domain to explore the perceptual relevance of three recently developed mathematical characterizations of periodic temporal patterns: balance, evenness, and interonset interval entropy. By modelling recognition responses and liking ratings from 177 participants listening to a total of 1,252 different musical rhythms, we obtain very strong evidence that all three features have distinct effects on the memory for, and the liking of, musical rhythms. Interonset interval entropy is a measure of the unpredictability of a rhythm derived from the distribution of its durations. Balance and evenness are both obtained from the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of periodic patterns represented as points on the unit circle, and we introduce a teleological explanation for their perceptual relevance: the DFT coefficients representing balance and evenness are relatively robust to small random temporal perturbations and hence are coherent in noisy environments. This theory suggests further research to explore the meaning and relevance of robust coefficients such as these to the perception of patterns that are periodic in time and, possibly, space.

Students’ “teleological misconceptions” in evolution education: why the underlying design stance, not teleology per se, is the problem

Teleology, explaining the existence of a feature on the basis of what it does, is usually considered as an obstacle or misconception in evolution education. Researchers often use the adjective “teleological” to refer to students’ misconceptions about purpose and design in nature. However, this can be misleading. In this essay, I explain that teleology is an inherent feature of explanations based on natural selection and that, therefore, teleological explanations are not inherently wrong. The problem we might rather address in evolution education is not teleology per se but the underlying “design stance”. With this I do not refer to creationism/intelligent design, and to the inference to a creator from the observation of the apparent design in nature (often described as the argument from design). Rather, the design stance refers to the intuitive perception of design in nature in the first place, which seems to be prevalent and independent from religiosity in young ages. What matters in evolution education is not whether an explanation is teleological but rather the underlying consequence etiology: whether a trait whose presence is explained in teleological terms exists because of its selection for its positive consequences for its bearers, or because it was intentionally designed, or simply needed, for this purpose. In the former case, the respective teleological explanation is scientifically legitimate, whereas in the latter case it is not. What then should be investigated in evolution education is not whether students provide teleological explanations, but which consequence etiologies these explanations rely upon. Addressing the design stance underlying students’ teleological explanations could be a main aim of evolution education.

Conspiratorial Narratives in Violent Political Actors’ Language

This article articulates the concept of “conspiratorial narratives”—defined as stories which integrate a large range of events and archetypal characters from past and present in a single teleological explanation for the alleged suffering of a given social group—and argues that this particular linguistic construct is a key marker of extremist language. Using three different cases to illustrate our theoretical contribution (Nazi propaganda, Rwandan genocidaires’ radio, IS’ messaging), we show that paying attention to conspiratorial narratives leads us to significantly revise classic accounts of violent actors’ language, and provides a better understanding of the link between that language and violence itself—more precisely, why violence happens, how much violence is directed to whom, and when it occurs.