The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
Abstract
This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose. Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is meant any event external to the object that modifies this object in any manner.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Studies in the Logic of Explanation
Hempel, C. G., & Oppenheim, P. (1948) · Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1086/286983 · Cited by 3,174
What is feedback in clinical education?
Van De Ridder, J. M. M., Stokking, K. M., McGaghie, W. C., & Ten Cate, O. T. J. (2008) · Medical Education · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2007.02973.x · Cited by 686
Social Attitudes and Other Acquired Behavioral Dispositions.
Campbell, D. T. (1963) · Psychology: A study of a science. Study II. Empirical substructure and relations with other sciences. Volume 6. Investigations of man as socius: Their place in psychology and the social sciences. · doi:10.1037/10590-003 · Cited by 514
The crucial role of pulsatile activity of the HPA axis for continuous dynamic equilibration
Lightman, S. L., & Conway-Campbell, B. L. (2010) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn2914 · Cited by 390
Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind
Froese, T., & Ziemke, T. (2009) · Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.artint.2008.12.001 · Cited by 317
Metadata
- Authors
- Rosenblueth, A., Wiener, N., & Bigelow, J.
- Venue
- Philosophy of Science
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1943-01
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 18-24
- ISSN
- 0031-8248 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-767X
- OpenAlex
- W2022305914
- Cited by
- 1,565
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 18.04
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/286788
- The paper
- Rosenblueth, A., Wiener, N., & Bigelow, J. (1943). Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/286788
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
