CHAPTER 4 / CRITICAL READING SKILLS 185
SAT Practice 4:Simplifying the Passage
decision to stay home. You just give a rea-
son why you don’t want to, and your friend
understands.
50 This convenience persuades us that teleo-
logical explanations are the best for analyzing
human behavior. Furthermore, we resist
mechanistic explanations of behavior because
55 they seem to deny another preciously guarded
concept: free will. If our decision to stay home
from a party could be explained in the same
way that the action of an internal combustion
engine can be explained, then doesn’t that
60 reduce us all to mindless machines?
No: the mind’s understanding of the mind
will always leave room for “free will,” what-
ever that really means. Full understanding of
a phenomenon depends on the mind’s ability
65 to detach from and observe it, and the mind
can never fully detach from itself. This com-
plication may imply that a full understanding
of the human mind is impossible, but it does
not imply that we must be satisfied with mere
70 teleology. Perhaps this will require an entirely
new conception of psychology, but if psychol-
ogy is to remain relevant, we have no other
choice.- Which of the following is the best title for this
passage?
(A) Why Mechanism Should Replace Teleology
(B) The Science of the Ancient Greeks
(C) The Psychology of Wants and Needs
(D) The Causes of Scientific Ignorance
(E) Obstacles to a Full Understanding of the
Mind - Which of the following is an example of a “teleo-
logical” explanation?
(A) water evaporates because it absorbs heat
(B) an engine works because it burns fuel
(C) a bird sings because it likes the sound
(D) a dog yelps because it perceives pain
(E) a ball falls because a gravitational field
pulls it
The following passage discusses the philosophi-
cal distinction between two methods of explain-
ing scientific phenomena.As our theories about the world around us have
evolved and have become more useful, they
Linehave become, almost without exception, less
teleological and more mechanistic. A teleolog-
5 ical explanation of a phenomenon describes
causes and effects in terms of desires or pur-
poses: something happens simply because it
serves a certain purpose, because it is “sup-
posed” to happen, or because someone or
10 something “wants” it to happen. A ball falls to
earth because, as it is in the air, it perceives that
its more proper place is on the ground, and not
because anything pushes it. Teleological
explanations never survive as useful theories
15 because they are backward: they place the
cause after the effect.
A mechanistic explanation, on the other
hand, requires that any discussion of causes
and effects be restricted by the known laws of
20 how physical objects and substances interact
as time moves forward.This is the language of
the scientist. No right-minded chemist would
say that trinitrotoluene explodes because it
“wants to.” It does so because the presence of
25 heat and oxygen releases the potential energy
stored in its bonds.
Early scientific theories were almost exclu-
sively teleological. If you could drive Socrates
around in an SUV, he would be far more
30 likely to ask you about your vehicle’s nature, or
its desires, or its soul than about how the engine
worked, how the odometer received its infor-
mation, or how the different buttons on the CD
player produced their effects. It would
35 seem to him that he was in the belly of a metal-
lic animal, or at least a possessed machine.
Teleological explanations are convenient for
explaining what people do, because most of us
understand the concepts of “wants” and
40 “needs” far more deeply than we understand
the mind’s mechanisms for processing infor-
mation. If you only have three minutes to
explain to your friend why you are not going to
a party, you don’t very well have the knowledge,
45 not to mention the time ordesire, to explain
how your cerebral cortex processed the
information and concepts associated with the
© 2004 Christopher Black. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission of the author.