Logical Learning Theory: A Human Teleology and Its Empirical Support. Contributors: Joseph F. Rychlak - author. Publisher: University of Nebraska Press. Place of Publication: Lincoln, NE. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 36.

Behavior as Telosponsive

As a Kantian formulation, LLT takes its stance introspectively, from the point of view of the human organism whose behavior we want to explain. To be a genuine human teleology, LLT must be able to show how it is possible for the person to act for the sake of alternative meanings at any time, regardless of the number of past stimulations or inputs that may be dictating one and only one course of movement. We can achieve this if we take the Kantian spectacles of Figures 10 and 11 (chapter 1) as representing the native (innate, natural, etc.) logical process of cognition (mentation, reason, thought, etc.). We require a technical concept to subsume this introspectively framed schematization. The technical concepts of stimulus-response or input-output are of no help here, because they are extraspective formulations modeled solely on efficient causation. If psychology must rely exclusively on such language, it will never entertain a human teleology. My suggestion is, therefore, to think of human behavior in formal- and final-cause terms as telosponsive ( Rychlak, 1987 ). A telosponse is the affirmation or taking of a position regarding a meaningful content (image[s], word[s], judgmental comparison[s], etc.) relating to a referent acting as a purpose for the sake of which behavior is then intended. Affirmation encompasses predication.

We must understand telosponsivity exclusively from an introspective perspective in which meaning extends as behavior unfolds. We are looking through the "conceptual eyes" of the behaving person at this point. If there is no meaning involved, then there is no telosponsivity involved. The position affirmed by a person in telosponding may be termed a premise when it is the initiating precedent of a line of thought. Such affirmed meanings are then extended sequaciously as thought progresses. Affirmation is therefore the psychic equivalent of drawing a Euler circle within which a narrower range of meaning is targeted for meaning-extension. A familiar example of affirmation is "All human beings are mortal," but affirmations of meaning are not limited to complete verbal expressions like this. An affirmation can involve a single word, as when we target a certain word by its predicating definition in a dictionary. Such meaning can also be assigned to a fragment of a word or to any symbolically captured image. Images in motion can also be affirmed meaningfully, as when we imagine ourselves doing something we have never before attempted. Evaluations that contrast the relative merit of one targeted item over another also reflect the affirmations of telosponsivity.