Preface

p ix-x

Keywords: artificial, contingency, science, prescription, description.

The thesis is that certain phenomena are "artificial" in a very specific sense: they are as they are only because of a system's being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which it lives. If natural phenomena have an air of "necessity" about them in their subservience to natural law, artificial phenomena have an air of "contingency" in their malleability by environment.

The contingency of artificial phenomena has always created doubts as to whether they fall properly within the compass of science. Sometimes these doubts are directed at the teleological character of artificial systems and the consequent difficulty of disentangling prescription from description.