Ernest Nagel's paper on goal-directed processes in biology. The companion cites it, with Rosenblueth et al. and Sommerhoff, for its definition of a goal-directed process: one that steers a variable toward a restricted set of states and holds that direction across perturbations, by feedback, with no backward causation. This definition underlies the teleological fraction and teleological saturation (C2).
- Cited in
- the companion paper
- Used for
- C2
- Strand
- Philosophy of agency, purpose & science
Cite
@article{nagel1977goal,
title = {Goal-Directed Processes in Biology},
author = {Ernest Nagel},
year = {1977},
journal = {The Journal of Philosophy},
doi = {10.2307/2025745},
}