Any person must have a goal in the life .A person without any goal merely passes his life may be for making for two ends meet .

Person with a goal as a definitely purpose in his life to contribute not only for himself but to prove his part as member of society .Such person has an ambition ,willpower,& in certain cases if the vision of his goal has high moral value,he can help & guideline for the member of society .

Hello Brandon,

In Aristotle's opinion all that is alive aspires what is good. When it comes to men he writes a human being must aspire good endings further defined as either blessedness or eudaimonia (at least knowledge about how to live). For Aristotle the highest form of blessedness is one involving wisdom.

I know there are several discussions about what exactly wisdom is and how it differs from knowledge. What I think:

Knowledge

- limited knowledge domain

- learned plots

- refers to how ONESELF (in oneselfes domain) got to do something

- Knowledge can be transfered/exchanged. But it does not have to.

Wisdom

- broad knowledge domain

- refers to knowledge about how many OTHERS (from different domains) do something

- Knowledge can be used by oneself. But is does not have to.

So in Aristotle's opinion one reaches a higher state of happiness by acting not for oneself but by teaching, instructing and advising others, devoloping good endings for them and so to say seeing beyond that which is visible and make it visible. And you might say a person maginifies his own happiness + satisfaction for others through giving advises because of his wisdom. Through this 'process' he achieves blessedness which Aristotle (as said) defines as the highest state. However Aristotle sais if you are not  so much a man of wisdom it is better for one to stick around eudaimonia and at least reach a good and secure life.

In a way this view is kinda revoutionary because it reflects the idea that your luck is not only dependend by the community of gods und for this not determined but rather dependent from your own skills and how far one developes them.

The trouble with eudaimonía is that it is not really that clear what Aristotle was referring to which is the reason why some researchers find it hard to translate the word. Originally it is a religious term which meaning is wellbeing by the mercy of gods. The antonym is kakodaimon which means out of luck and haunted by demons. However if you ask me wellbeing is indeed the proper translation if you think about the fact that Aristotle tried to give it another meaning by linking it with the fact of that one's luck is not only dependent on gods or demons but rather on one's own skills. Another really fitting translation would be satisfaction.

Cicero later on sais this: Res ipsa loquitur (the things talk for themselves) in order to achieve a good ending for Milo. What is really fascinating here is the fact that he linked both areas, while Aristotle back than would have defined law only as practical virtue. This might have been the beginning for law as a true science. Here Cicero does not only see himself as a lawyer skilled in speech but he also goes beyond that point seeing that it might be necessary to clarify the case by using wisdom and for this advising court because those in front of him may be 'laymen' (at least he understands they were not present when all that happened and it would not make much sense to speak about Milos character but rather point torwards the facts and let them speak for themselves).

Hi Brandon,

Phew! There are some verbose contributions up here. I'll try keep it brief, informative. and thoughtful.

A psychological scientist can define a 'goal' as a threshold criterion at which point activity can stop, having attained the objective new set of conditions (state of affairs) for which activity was mobilized. That may also sound verbose, but what is intended is: a goal is a success-oriented stopping rule. This can be seen in sports (play stops when a team 'scores'), in cognitive psychology (target searching ends when a target is identified or definitively ruled out), and even in clinical psychology, where a client will set goals and when these are largely met, the course of therapy is typically terminated.

There are other stopping rules (e.g., 'cut your losses'-type rules for prudent economizing of resources), but a 'goal' is a state of affairs that 1) requires effort and concerted action to reach (won't happen by entropy), 2) can be objectively or at least widely observed and verified, and 3) validates the effort put into it (as opposed to stopping without success).

As a Christian psychological scientist, in keeping with the metaphysical tone of other respondents, I also point you to words of Christ in his last moments: "It is finished." (John 19:30, NAB). Other translations say "It is accomplished."  We cannot know the full extent of what Christ was thinking in this moment, but his constant concern had been to fulfill Scripture, and so it is recorded that he stated that he 'reached his goal', such that 1) through effort and action a new state affairs was brought about that wouldn't have happened on its own, 2) this new state can be objectively or at least widely verified (by his stating it publicly, at least, to begin with) and 3) his entire ministry and mission had lead to this moment and he is saying in some way 'the job I came to do is done.'

I hope this reflection helps answer your question, inform your thinking, and reach your goals. Mine is to boost my RG score by diversifying my contributing activity base beyond 'publications' only :-)

Cheers,

Matthew S.

Hi, Brandon:

Perhaps we may as well consider thinking of multiple goals...not just a goal! For example, when we think of Implementation intentions, they are specific plans regarding how, when, and where to pursue a goal (Gollwitzer). As forming implementation intentions for a single goal has been shown to facilitate goal achievement, but do such intentions really benefit multiple goals? If so, people should form implementation intentions for all their goals, from eating healthily to tidying up!

An investigation into this question (Dalton, & Spiller, 2014) suggests that the benefits of implemental planning for attaining a single goal do not typically extend to multiple goals. Instead, implemental planning draws attention to the difficulty of executing multiple goals, which undermines commitment to those goals relative to other desirable activities and thereby undermines goal success. Framing the execution of multiple goals as a manageable endeavor, however, reduces the perceived difficulty of multiple goal pursuit and helps people accomplish the various tasks they planned for!

• DALTON, A. N., & SPILLER, S. A. (2014). Too Much of a Good Thing: The Benefits of Implementation Intentions Depend on the Number of Goals. Journal Of Consumer Research, S97-S111.

Hope this helps!

Nadeem

You are correct that the concept of a goal differs somewhat from one theory to the next.  Goals may or may not be the result of deliberation; may or ma not be conscious; may or may not be final; may be specific to the individual or general to the species.  Also, check out the philosophical discussions of intention or intent.  It would be great scholarship to write a paper exploring the construct of goals; if you do that, I would like to read it.

Thank you all for your thoughtful contributions! Matthew, your goal definition is a very useful and general one. I am certainly having trouble thinking of a goal that wouldn't be captured by this definition. It is also readily operationalized for use in experiments.

However, there remains the issue of how organisms--or as Dr. Reiss points out, even species--set goal criteria in the first place. So I will pose an additional question. Can we tell a scientific story to account for the end-directedness of living things?

Matthew:

I really like and would be entirely comfortable citing your definition, which, to my thinking, seems incontestably valid not only for psychological theorizing but equally so for cybernetic modelling of any kind, equating with the setpoint or reference value of a self-regulating system.

My own usual definition in either context would be "the specified objective (or, as an alternative, the desired consequence) of an agent's action."

Defining "goal" as "the target towards which an action is directed" - which I've come across quite often - is not universally valid, since it is equally pertinent to speak of an agent having the goal of escaping or withdrawing from something.

Brandon:

The issue of how organisms set goal criteria has been extensively studied. Goal criteria are conditions that benefit an organism, and are met by way of responsive processes having behavioural properties that  tend to benefit it.  In species assumed to lack consciousness and ability to learn from experience, such processes become specified by genetic selection alone - chemosensitive processes in an amoeba's cytoplasm cause it to project pseudopodia towards appetitive sources and to retreat from aversive ones, while photosensitive auxins cause plants to orientate leaves and stem towards light sources. The existence of genetically predetermined goals is evident, for example,in the imprinting effect in infant geese and the mating-related behaviour of male sticklebacks, famously studied by Lorenz and by Tinbergen, respectively. Human neonatal research has revealed a rich variety of genetically wired in orienting-behaviours serving the formulating and attaining of goals in newborns, such as ability to selelctively discriminate basic features of human faces and preference for their mother's voice over others' - along with the numerous inborn reflexes that involuntarily orientate limbs and head towards or away from particular stimuli. Indeed, sized up from the biologist's perspective, all of every organism's genotypical and phenotypical characteristics can be said to have been evolutionarily driven by, and so as to serve, the goal to survive. Neural and anatomical processes subserving the "Four Fs" provide uniquivocal deciders of what factors constitute goals and those that do not.

In their simplest and most primitive formulations, learned, cognitively represented goals would appear, in each case,  to be encoded on the basis of  an experienced perceptual phenomenon/ event that is affectively labelled as appetitive (initially as a conjecture that is then confirmed by the rewarding consequences of an action directed at it) and coupled with context-specifying associations that aid in defining the significant implications of the percept's set of detected intrinsic properties.

Richard,

Thank you for your insightful contribution to this post! Tracing goals to genetic pre-programming is certainly a viable explanation for the origins of many goals. After all, the most important goal of all is surviving long enough to reproduce. However, this explanation in some ways sidesteps the question. To what do we owe the origin of evolutionary pressures that underlie genetic predisposition? What were the constraints that afforded living things that "tried" to survive?

I am also unsure of the role of consciousness in the origin of goal-setting. I understand that work by Pavlov and Hull tried and failed to reduce complex behavior to derivatives of primary reinforcers (e.g., food) that seem to obviously stem from evolutionary pressures. This suggests that many of the goals of humans and other "conscious" species might be independent of primary evolutionary pressures. How can we account for these goal criteria? What is a principled and general definition of "benefit" for these complex goals?