Does the study of feeding behaviour benefit from a teleonomic framework?

In this paper we respond to the criticisms of Provenza er al. (1998) that o ur framework of learning and feeding motivation (Day ct al. 1998) resorts t o higher-order goals, which cannot be falsified by experimentation. We asse rt that in order to be able to predict the feeding behaviour of animals we first need to understand what they are trying to achieve (i.e. invoke teleo nomy). We then detail our framework in such terms that one could envisage e xperiments that could quantitatively test its predictions. We contend that the framework of 'the self-organization of behaviour' proposed by Provenza ct al. (1998) cannot lead to such quantitative predictions, since it is inv oked to describe feeding behaviour of animals a posteriori. It is our own d esire, by contrast, to assess feeding behaviour a priori, which leads us to propose and defend our framework of learning and feeding motivation.