Teleo-functional reasoning and “intuitive theism”
General questions
The idea that supernatural agents account for design and purpose in the natural world is common
albeit not universal. Do children have a tendency to reason about natural phenomena as
purposeful and intentionally designed? Is some version of ‘creationism’ more intuitive in
cognitive terms than evolutionary accounts of diversity because of its exploitation of
psychological mechanisms such as psychological essentialism and intentionality detection? How
might any such conceptual biases be impacted by formal education?
Theory
Research suggests that young children have a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena
in terms of purpose and an orientation toward intention-based accounts of the origins of natural
entities. Numerous proposals for this tendency have been offered. Piaget (1929) claimed that
children are ‘artificialists’ who reason that both the artificial and natural worlds originate in
human action. As knowledge about human limitations and physical-causal dynamics develops,
children eventually proceed to limit such attributions to humanly created artifacts.
Children’s reasoning about the natural world in teleological/design terms has also been
attributed to their naïve understanding of the functional properties of biological parts. As such,
its application is limited to the domain of living things. This has been dubbed the Selective
teleology proposal. Alternatively, children may exercise Promiscuous teleology, broadly
attributing purpose to non-biological natural processes and objects such as rocks, rivers, and
storms. Deborah Kelemen claims that this broad tendency to reason about artifacts, living and
non-living objects, and their properties as having purpose and intended design and origins is
derived from “a human predilection for intentional explanation” rather than from intuitive
biology (2004: 296).
This Promiscuous teleology account shares certain core features with that of Piaget – it
proposes that children intuitively and spontaneously view the natural physical and biological
world as made by an intentional agent for a purpose. It does not share the assumption, however,
that this view stems from the absence of intuitive physics, nor that the concept of the creating
agent is derived from subjective experience of specifically human agency.
Scholarship in this area is relevant to explaining the transmission of religious and
scientific ideas about the causes and origins of features of the natural world. Some researchers
(see e.g., Evans, 2001, Kelemen and DiYanni, 2005) have suggested that promiscuous teleology
and a ‘design stance’ on the world are closely associated in conceptual reasoning, and that their
intuitive appeal contributes to the relative ease of acquisition of “creationist” ideas over
“spontaneous generation” ideas and evolutionary theory. In addition, it may be that evolutionary
theory contradicts intuitive notions about species as having fixed essences.
An alternative to all the above proposals is that children’s theories about natural and
artificial worlds are largely derived from processes of socialization (e.g. parental instruction,
formal education), and that the form they take is culturally bestowed rather than spontaneously
generated due to conceptual biases.
Evidence
Gelman and Kremer (1991) and Petrovich (1997) have provided evidence that challenges
Piagetian artificialism. Both papers report preschool-aged children successfully recognizing that
artifacts but not natural kinds are made by humans.
Kelemen (1999, 1999) conducted a series of studies that were designed to test between
the Selective teleology and Promiscuous teleology proposals. The evidence suggests that young
children attribute functions to both living and nonliving objects – for example, they endorse the
view that non-biological natural entities, such as clouds, are “for” something, such as raining, or
“to make it storm”, and that this is what they are “made for” rather than just being something that
they do. Kelemen proposes that young children’s Promiscuous teleology is derived from an
intention-based theory of origins.
Evans’ (2001) research on origins beliefs independently offered evidence that children of
fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Christian parents favor “creationist” accounts of how
species originate (i.e. that they were originally, intentionally created by God). It was only among
the 11-13 year old children in the non-fundamentalist sample (and not in the 5-7 and 8-10 age
groups) that reasoning appeared to align more closely with that of their parents, with these older
children more readily endorsing evolutionist explanations than younger children in the same
group.
Bringing these two bodies of evidence together, a study by Kelemen and DiYanni (2005)
investigated whether children’s purpose-based reasoning about nature is systematically related to
their intelligent design reasoning. The study found that children’s endorsement of purpose-based
explanations of nature corresponded with endorsement of the existence of a creator agent.
Further studies by Kelemen have extended and replicated components of previous work.
Research with British children, motivated by the broader population’s lower degree of religiosity
as compared with the United States, suggests that American children’s promiscuous endorsement
of teleological explanations is not culturally specific. Both British and American children tended
to explain the properties of living and non-living natural kinds in terms of a purpose (Kelemen,
2003). Kelemen concludes that “the tendency to attribute purpose to objects is easily established
because its primary source is the cognitive predisposition to attribute purpose to others’ actions”
(p. 215). In the same paper, Kelemen suggests that, during the course of development, the scope
of teleological reasoning is tuned according to cultural norms about the domains and conditions
under which teleological explanations are deemed appropriate. For example, among older
children and adults with a formal scientific education, teleological explanations of nonliving
natural entities appear to be overridden by physical-mechanical explanations. Kelemen further
claims that there are no fundamental conceptual discontinuities between children’s and adults’
capacity for teleological reasoning.
A study with Romanian Roma adults and children (Casler and Kelemen, 2008) sought to
disambiguate the effects of age and education on apparent restrictions in promiscuous teleology.
Results comparing the reasoning of adults who had little or no science training with those who
had received formal schooling showed that compared to their schooled peers and Westerneducated American adults, non-schooled Roma adults were more likely to endorse teleological
explanations for non-living entities. Further, Kelemen and Rosset provide experimental evidence
that when under conditions in which rapid explanatory judgments are required, even scienceeducated adults show signs of scientifically inappropriate teleological reasoning (Kelemen and
Rosset, 2009). These findings raise the question of whether a bias toward purposeful explanation
represents a cognitive tendency that is not only a childhood phenomenon, but a life-long
cognitive default that is overridden at least in part by formal education.
Outstanding issues

In implicit, online reasoning tasks, do people endorse purpose-based explanations for
phenomena for which they would resist in more offline, reflective reasoning conditions?

If such intuitive biases exist, can they be influenced, revised, or over-ridden by scientific
training and expertise (as demonstrated in implicit tasks)?

Is Promiscuous teleology among children or adults recurrent across societies? Particularly, it
is produced or augmented by variable cultural features such as richness in artifacts, animal
husbandry, or presence of creator gods?

Which socio-cultural factors, in addition to religiosity and scientific education, contribute to
the promotion or restriction of purpose-based teleological reasoning?
Casler, K., Kelemen, D., 2008. Developmental continuity in teleo-functional explanation: reasoning about
nature among Romanian Romani adults. Journal of Cognition and Development 9, 340-362.
Evans, E. M., 2001. Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: creation
versus evolution. Cognitive Psychology 42, 217-266.
Gelman, S. A., Kremer, K. E., 1991. Understanding natural cause: children's explanations of how objects
and their properties originate. Child Development 62, 396-414.
Kelemen, D., 1999. The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition 70, 241-272.
Kelemen, D., 1999. Why are rocks pointy? Children's preference for teleological explanations of the
natural world. Developmental Psychology 35, 1440-1452.
Kelemen, D., 2003. British and American children's preferences for teleo-functional explanations of the
natural world. Cognition 88, 201-221.
Kelemen, D., DiYanni, C., 2005. Intuitions about origins: purpose and intelligent design in children's
reasoning about nature. Journal of Cognition and Development 6, 3-31.
Kelemen, D., Rosset, E., 2009. The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. .
Cognition 111, 138-143.
Petrovich, O., 1997. Understanding of non-natural causality in children and adults: a case against
artificialism. Psyche en Geloof 8, 151-165.
Piaget, J., 1929. The child's conception of the world. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.