Preface

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.