Predictably, I oft run into trouble when called upon to explain my behaviour. Questions along the lines of “Why did/do you …” induce stall. Niko Tinbergen’s (‘On aims and methods of ethology’, 1963) scheme helps me out.
As a littler chap, I was once stalked by a lioness. Seeing those cold yellow eyes bear into me, “why did I freeze?”
(1) The proximate why. Mechanistic.
“I froze because {lioness-poised-to-charge-me sense-data} came to be processed by my brain, which consequently co-ordinated a state approximating physical paralysis. “
(2) The ontogenetic why. Conditioning.
“I froze because repeated childhood experience with being hunted by my sisters in the garden had instilled a more-or-less automated freeze-when-hunted-and-spotted reaction within me.”
(3) The phylogenetic why. Evolutionary history.
“65.9 million years ago, an ancestral proto-mammal who had circumstantially come to be endowed with a mutant primitive freeze mechanism survived a dinosaur tirade that wiped out all his non-freezing relatives. Through continued natural selection my phylogenetic traits incorporate a polished edition of this freeze response.”
(4) The functional why. How does the queried behaviour increase fitness?
“Freezing presented a desperate stab at survival, maximizing {my genes/my/my species/…} chances at procreation.”
I still am not really giving you the kind of adequate response I wanted to, but I mentioned wondering whether there might be some relation to Aristotle’s four causes. These I list below, just for thought for now:
(i) The material cause: “that out of whichâ€, e.g., the bronze of a statue.
(ii) The formal cause: “the formâ€, “the account of what-it-is-to-beâ€, e.g., the shape of a statue.
(iii) The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or restâ€, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
(iv) The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is doneâ€, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Online: Aristotle on Causality: Four Causes