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442 Roman Jakobson
and repulsion between associates and mates, the varying types in the progeny of
dissimilar parents and the presumable influence of these variations upon relations
between parents and offspring. The question whether the heredity of such
physiognomic, virtually aesthetic, components of language may find a widened
phylogenetic application remains open.
It was the physicist Niels Bohr who repeatedly warned biologists against
fear of ‘notions like purposiveness foreign to physics but lending themselves so
readily to the description of organic phenomena’. He diagnosed and prognosticated
that the two attitudes - one mechanistic and the other end-directed - ‘do
not present contradictory views on biological problems but, rather, stress the
mutually exclusive character of observational conditions equally indispensable
in our search for an ever richer description of life’ (14, p. 100). The programmat-
ic paper by Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow on purpose and teleology (I&,
with its scrupulous classification of purposeful behavior, would, as Campbell
acknowledges (27, p. 5), ‘make a useful introduction’ to the latter’s book - and
one could add, to many other cardinal works - on organic, especially human,
evolution.
The discussion of goal-directedness in today’s biology is of vital interest for
all branches of knowledge relating to organismic activities, and the judgments
advanced may serve to corroborate a consistent application of a means-ends
model to the language design, to its self-regulating maintenance of integrity
and dynamic equilibrium (homeostasis), as well as to its mutations (28; 44).
Although the same labels that were used in the prestructural stage of historical
linguistics - ‘blind, haphazard, fortuitous, random changes, accidental slips,
multiplied errors, happenstances’ - are still tenacious in biological creeds and
phraseology, nevertheless such pivotal concepts as ‘purposiveness’, ‘anticipa-
tion’, ‘initiative and foresight’ take ever deeper root (36, p. 239; 172, Ch. I).
Wallace and Srb criticize the traditional avoidance of teleological phraseology
and of references to purpose as outdated, since the problems involved are no
longer related to any belief in an dan vital(r84, p. 109). According to Emerson,
biologists are forced ‘to recognize the existence of direction toward future
functions in pre-mental organisms such as plants and lower animals’. He sees
no necessity ‘to put the word purpose in quotation marks’ (45, p. 207) and
maintains that ‘homeostasis and goal-seeking are the same thing’ (44, p. 162).
For the founders of cybernetics ‘teleology’ was synonymous with ‘purpose
controlled by feed-back’ (r47), and this approach has been widely developed in
Waddington’s (182; r8r) and Smal’gauzen’s (169; 168) biological studies. As
the leading Russian biologist of our time, N.A. BernStejn, recently stated,
‘numerous observations and data in all the areas of biology have shown for a
long time an indisputable purposiveness in the structures and processes peculiar
to living organisms. This purposiveness strikes as a manifest, perhaps even de-
cisive, difference of living systems from any objects of inorganic nature. In
application to biological objects, the questions “how” and “for what reason”
exhaustively sufficient in physics or chemistry, have to be necessarily supple-
mented by a third, equally relevant question “for what purpose’” @, p. 326).
‘Only the two concepts introduced by biocybernetics, the code and the coded