Kathy Wilkes, Teleology, and the Explanation of Behaviour

Kathy Wilkes contributed to two books on Goal-directed Behaviour and Modelling the Mind based on interdisciplinary graduate classes at Oxford during the 1980s. In this article, I assess her contributions to those discussions. She championed the school of philosophers who prefer problem dissolution to problem-solution. She also addressed the problem of realism in psychology. But the contribution that has turned out to be most relevant to subsequent work was her idea that in modelling the mind, we might need to “use as structural elements synthetic cells, or things that behaved very like neurones.” I show how this idea has been developed in my own recent work with zoologist and neuroscientist, Raymond Noble, to become a possible physiological basis for the ability of organisms to choose between alternative actions, and so become active agents. I consider that this insight became her seminal contribution in this field.