"Teleological behavior thus becomes synonymous with behavior controlled by negative feedback, and gains therefore in precision by a sufficiently restricted connotation" (p.24)

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        Secondly, they bring up again an engineering reference, the feed-back, to introduce 
        teleology in their behavior classification. As they explain, feed-back has two meanings. 
        In a broad sense, it only means that output energy is returned as input, whereas as in the 
        restricted sense it described an object controled by the margin of error with reference to 
        a specific goal. After commenting on a couple of examples, they conclude "Teleological 
        behavior thus becomes synonymous with behavior controlled by negative feedback, and gains 
        therefore in precision by a sufficiently restricted connotation" (p.24). This was quite a 
        shock for pure behaviorists. The notion of ‘purpose’, usually attributed to human, was 
        already among the banished words in psychology but ‘teleology’ was even graver: it had 
        something to do with metaphysics. Miller, Galanter and Pribram recall in the late 1950s :
      
    <br/>

      
        "In 1943 Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow shocked many psychologists by putting their very 
        tough-minded reputations behind the assertion that machines with negative feed-back were 
        teleological mechanisms. At that time psychologists generally regarded ‘teleological’ and 
        ‘unscientific’ as synonymous, and it was therefore surprising to realize that machine 
        could strive towards goal, could collect information about the difference between their 
        intentions and their performance and then work to reduce that difference."
      
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        Wiener and his colleagues had tried to prevent this shock, announcing that their 
        classification "emphasizes the concepts of purpose and of teleology, concepts which, 
        although rather discredited at the moment, are shown to be important." This emphasis 
        clearly appears in the schema of the classification :
      
    </p>