Teleology… don’t confuse that with theology… is a doctrine which deals with the idea that all living and processes in nature follow a certain purpose and are goal orientated. Children are especial receptible for teological explanations. “When asked about properties of natural entities like pointy rocks, children prefer teleological explanations over physical–causal ones, endorsing that rocks are pointy ‘so that animals won’t sit on them’, not because ‘’bits of stuff piled up over time’.” With increasing age this preference to explanations which satisfy the beliefs about intentional causality in nature are replaced by rational explanations. However, people suffering from Alzheimer disease prefer teleological explanations again. So maybe rational explanations don’t replace but cover the teleological explanation. That would mean that teleological explanatory is a sort of explanatory default which can be reactivated when the causal knowledge is damaged. Deborah Kelemen and Evelyn Rossett tested this hypothesis of the co-existence of teleological and rational explanation. They predicted: “Even healthy, schooled adults should display scientifically unwarranted promiscuous teleological intuitions when their capacity to inhibit more primary purpose-based intuitions is impaired by processing demands”. So they designed a test were the participants had to decide if a explanation is good or bad (right or wrong). Indeed they could show that without time limit the participants (university students) prefer rational explanations but “in speeded conditions judged significantly more scientifically unwarranted teleological explanations as correct (e.g., ‘‘the sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life”)”. So maybe the rational thinking is really just covering our default assumption that in nature everything is connected with each other and everything has a certain function in this interplay? No wonder as the “perfect” evolutionary adaptation of organisms to their environments makes it sometimes hard to keep in mind that it is all a result of random mutation and selection. "The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults."
Deborah Kelemen and Evelyn Rossett, 2009 Cognition 111.1 (2009): 138-143.
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
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