Sensorimotor teleology and goal-directedness. An organismic framework for normative behaviour

Abstract Teleosemantics explains meaning by appealing to the biological norms that make error possible, but most work in the field still anchors those norms in evolutionary “selected-effect” functions. We develop an organismic alternative grounded in the self-maintenance of autonomous systems. Elaborating upon and within sensorimotor theory and enactivism, we reconceptualise goals as higher order constraints (shaping transient attractors in a dynamic sensorimotor field) and show how they are nested into a heterarchy of means–end relations connecting the global self-maintenance of the identity of a sensorimotor organization with the most local sensorimotor coordinations. We then identify the minimal necessary requirements for genuine teleological behaviour: (1) Initiation that individuates an action in relation to a goal, (2) Modulatory execution that adaptively compensates perturbations or deploys alternative strategies in relation to the goal, and (3) Meaningful termination through successful acknowledgment and transition, goal-sensitive persistence, or coherent abandonment. We locate normativity and error in the dynamic presuppositions among sensorimotor schemes and goals: failure manifests as incoordination within, or across, goal branches. We finally illustrate our account with a detailed analysis of the well known A-not-B error in psychology, showing how infants meet our teleological criteria while revealing incoordination as tension breakdowns inside a heterarchy of goals and sensorimotor schemes. Teleological behaviour, therefore, is the management of tensions and dynamic presuppositions within the goal heterarchy, not a chain of mechanical causes, thus delivering a naturalised notion of purposiveness that opens up an alternative route to teleosemantics beyond evolutionary selection.