In January 1943 the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, the mathematician Norbert Wiener, and the engineer Julian Bigelow published a short paper titled “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” in the journal Philosophy of Science, volume 10, issue 1, pages 18 to 24. The source cited here is a scan of the original article carrying its JSTOR cover page with the full bibliographic record. Though it runs only a few pages, it is usually regarded as the founding document of the cybernetic movement, appearing five years before Wiener’s book that gave the field its name.
The paper’s central move is to rescue the idea of purpose from the suspicion that had long surrounded it in science. The authors define purposeful behavior as behavior controlled by negative feedback, in which a system continually senses the difference between its current state and a target and acts to reduce that difference. A torpedo that steers toward a moving ship and a person reaching for a glass of water are, on this account, doing the same kind of thing: both are guided by signals about the gap between where they are and where they aim to be. Purpose, so defined, is not a mystery but an engineering principle that can be built and measured.
By treating goal-seeking behavior as something a machine can genuinely have, rather than as a property unique to living minds, the paper laid part of the conceptual groundwork for thinking about intelligent systems. It placed animals, people, and servomechanisms under a single explanatory frame, which is the core idea Wiener would expand into the discipline of cybernetics. That framing ran alongside the McCulloch and Pitts model of the neuron from the same year and helped shape the interdisciplinary conversations from which the study of artificial intelligence later grew.
A note on terms: the paper provoked a long debate about whether reducing purpose to feedback really captures what purpose means, and the authors themselves were careful to distinguish degrees of feedback and prediction. The lasting contribution is not the final word on teleology but the demonstration that goal-directed behavior could be analyzed in precise, mechanical terms at all.