Abstract

This essay attempts to resurrect a cybernetic model of goal-directed systems. Since the inception of cybernetic, there has been wide agreement that it holds--in its notions of information and feedback control--the clues to solving the mystery of teleological behavior. Unfortunately, early attempts to piece together the puzzle portrayed goal-direction as a matter of a system's receiving information from a predetermined goal, and then directing itself towards that goal. This version of a cybernetic model faced crippling objections concerning the intentionality of goal-directed behavior, viz. it could not handle non-existent goals, nor could it explain how systems are selectively directed towards only the goal-constituting properties of goal-objects. Subsequent analyses of goal-directed behavior turned toward more mentalistic theories which have primary application to human, intentional goal-directed behavior. ;Our model requires that goal-directed systems contain the following: an internal representation of the goal-state of the system; a feedback loop by which information about the present state of the system can be compared with the goal-state as internally represented and via which an error-correction signal can be sent to minimize any difference; a causal dependency of system output upon the error-correction process . ;The first condition occupies central position, for it provides the model with the account of intentionality that previous cybernetic models lack. Using only the concepts of information and of control, we show how internal structures take on representational content and causally direct the behavior of a system towards a goal-state made determinate by the representational content of the controlling structures. The condition is given a realist interpretation. We also rest no part of the analysis upon a mentalistic interpretation of representation. ;The second condition of the model anchors the concepts of feedback control and information in the formal theory of cybernetics. ;The third condition closes the network of control that is central to teleological behavior. Through it we are able to draw the line of demarcation that divides systems which are genuinely goal-directed from those which exhibit similar but not truly directed behavior