This paper has two interrelated aims. The primary aim is to specify the character of philosophical theories of mental content that are usually classified as ‘Causal Theories of Intentionality’, ‘Causal Theories of Representation’, or ‘Causal Theories of Mental Content’ (CTs). More specifically, the aim is to characterize the role and place of causation in philosophical reflections on the nature of mental content, as suggested by theories of this kind. Elucidation (...) of the role of the concept of causation in CTs requires examining the philosophical background against which versions of CTs are proposed; therefore the second aim of this paper is to clarify the link between CTs and the two philosophical theories that accompany it: the doctrine of philosophical naturalism (PN) and the representational theory of mind (RTM). Clarification of the relationship between the three theories is not only necessary for an adequate specification of the causal component that plays a central role in CTs, and so for a better understanding of CTs themselves; it also shows how the role that causation plays in CTs implies a genuinely relational conception of intentionality. (shrink)

This thesis concerns the content of mental representations. It draws lessons for philosophical theories of content from some empirical findings about brains and behaviour drawn from experimental psychology (cognitive, developmental, comparative), cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science (computational modelling). Chapter 1 motivates a naturalist and realist approach to mental representation. Chapter 2 sets out and defends a theory of content for static feedforward connectionist networks, and explains how the theory can be extended to other supervised (...) networks. The theory takes forward Churchland’s state space semantics by making a new and clearer proposal about the syntax of connectionist networks − one which nicely accounts for representational development. Chapter 3 argues that the same theoretical approach can be extended to unsupervised connectionist networks, and to some of the representational systems found in real brains. The approach can also show why connectionist systems sometimes show typicality effects, explaining them without relying upon prototype structure. That is discussed in chapter 4, which also argues that prototype structure, where it does exist, does not determine content. The thesis goes on to defend some unorthodox features of the foregoing theory: that a role is assigned to external samples in specifying syntax, that both inputs to and outputs from the system have a role in determining content, and that the content of a representation is partly determined by the circumstances in which it developed. Each, it is argued, may also be a fruitful way of thinking about mental content more generally. Reliance on developmental factors prompts a swampman-type objection. This is rebutted by reference to three possible reasons why content is attributed at all. Two of these motivations support the idea that content is partly determined by historical factors, and the third is consistent with it. The result: some empirical lessons for philosophical theories of mental content. (shrink)

With the aim of giving a naturalistic foundation to the notion of mental representation, Fred Dretske (1981;1988) has put forward and developed the idea that the relation between a representation and its intentional content is grounded on an informational relation. In this explanatory model, mental representations are conceived of as states of organisms which a learning process has selected to play a functional role: a necessary condition for fulfilling this role is that the organism or some (...) proper part of it (presumably situated in the brain) is a natural indicator of the occurrence of a determinate type of event in the environment of the organism (or in the organism but outside of the proper part serving as the indicator). A state of the organism is a natural indicator of a type of event if and only if it carries information about the occurrence of that type of event. Jerry Fodor (1987) has devised and followed another strategy which consists in considering the relation between a mental representation and its intentional object as a relation of lawful, or nomic, dependence. A representational state of an organism has an objective content in virtue of the existence of a relation of nomic dependence between this state - presumably a property of the brain of the organism - and some objective property in the world. This dependence also creates a regular correlation between the occurrences of representational states of a certain type and the states of affairs whose type is their representational content. Both approaches encounter indeterminacy problems: for each, there exist situations in which the explanatory model chosen - information flow or nomic dependence - does not succeed in selecting, purely on the basis of the constraints characteristic of that model, one out of several potential contents for a given representational state. In such cases, that state is related to more than one type of events in accordance with the informational or nomic constraints imposed by those theories. In what follows, I examine an attempt by Pierre Jacob (1997) to solve two problems of indeterminacy threatening the informational theory of mental representation. According to Jacob, one of these problems can be solved with the help of the distinction between the source which is the target of the information and the channel over which the information is transmitted, whereas the solution to the other problem requires the introduction of the concept of function. I shall begin with a consideration of the distinction, with respect to a situation of information transmission, between the source and the channel. I argue that both the source and the channel, and thus the information transmitted, depend not only on the external situation which characterises the source, the channel and the receiving organism, but also on the previous knowledge and the informational needs of the receiver. I then try to show that this relativity of information undermines the solution Jacob proposes to one of the problems of indeterminacy of representational content. Finally, I examine the possibility considered by Dretske and Jacob to solve this 'problem of the reference class' due to the mentioned relativity of information, by grounding the flow of information on lawful dependence instead of statistical dependence. I shall propose two arguments showing first that these two groundings are not equivalent and second that nomic dependence is inappropriate as a grounding for information flow. I conclude by suggesting that the problem of the reference class can be solved within the framework of the informational approach, on the condition of enriching it with functional considerations. (shrink)

Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs. These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words, the point of departure for these theories is that thoughts (...) of dogs are about dogs because dogs cause the mental representations of dogs. (shrink)

I argue that a dilemma arises for naturalistic philosophers of mind in the naturalised semantics tradition. Giving a naturalistic account of the mind is a pressing problem. Brentano’s Thesis — that a state is mental if, and only if, that state has underived representational content — provides an attractive route to naturalising the mental. If true, Brentano’s Thesis means that naturalising representation is sufficient for naturalising the mental. But a naturalist who accepts Brentano’s Thesis (...) thus commits to an eliminativism about the category of the mental. This is because naturalistic theories of representation are reductive, and so over-generalise by applying to patently non-mental states. According to these theories, it has been argued, phenomena like tree rings and saliva come out as representational. Only proposing further Naturalistic conditions on representation could avoid the eliminativist conclusion. But this shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress towards naturalising the mental. And if a Naturalist rejects Brentano’s Thesis, then she gives up on a clear link between representation and mentality. Hence, it is incumbent on the Naturalist to propose another, naturalistically acceptable, mark of the mental. This, again, shows that Naturalists have made only limited progress on the issue of naturalising the mental.Keywords: Intentionality, representation, physicalism, eliminativism, Brentano, materialism, naturalism. (shrink)

Causal theories of mental content (CTs) ground certain aspects of a concept's meaning in the causal relations a concept bears to what it represents. Section 1 explains the problems CTs are meant to solve and introduces terminology commonly used to discuss these problems. Section 2 specifies criteria that any acceptable CT must satisfy. Sections 3, 4, and 5 critically survey various CTs, including those proposed by Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, Ruth Garrett Millikan, David Papineau, Dennis Stampe, Dan (...) Ryder, and the author himself. The final section considers general objections to the causal approach. (shrink)

Some mental states are about themselves. Nothing is a cause of itself. So some mental states are not about their causes; they are about things distinct from their causes. If this argument is sound, it spells trouble for causal theories of mental content—the precise sort of trouble depending on the precise sort of causal theory. This paper shows that the argument is sound (§§1-3), and then spells out the trouble (§4).

This paper addresses Prinz's naturalistic theory of conceptual content, which he has defended in several works (Prinz, 2000; 2002; 2006). More precisely, I present in detail and critically assess his account of referential content, which he distinguishes from nominal or cognitive content. The paper argues that Prinz's theory faces four important difficulties, which might have significant consequences for his overall empiricist project.

In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, (...) but the main points of the paper concern not merely how to classify, but how to understand, the theories. Also, though the paper takes theories of mental content as a case study, much of the discussion is applicable to theories of other phenomena. To a first approximation, the difference between the traditional and the proposed taxonomies turns on whether we classify theories of content by, on the one hand, their implications for a non-redundant supervenience base for content facts (i.e., for facts about what contents thoughts have) or, on the other, by their constitutive accounts of content. By a "constitutive account," I mean the kind of elucidation of the nature of a phenomenon that theorists have tried to give for, for example, knowledge, justice, personal identity, consciousness, convention, heat, and limit. The tendency to taxonomize by supervenience base is encouraged, I suggest, by a failure to keep clearly in view a distinction between constitutive and modal determination. Many philosophers would accept that a constitutive account cannot be captured in purely modal terms. Giving a constitutive account is not the same as specifying modally necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, philosophers often try to cash constitutive claims in modal terms. A case in point is that theories of content tend to be conceptualized in terms of the theories' implications for a supervenience base for content facts. My thesis goes beyond the by-now somewhat familiar proposition that not all modal determinants of a phenomenon are constitutive determinants. One who has taken that point on board might nevertheless conceive of a philosophical account as an attempt to specify constitutive determinants of the target phenomenon that make up a non-redundant supervenience base for the phenomenon. Shoehorning a philosophical account into this form leaves out elements that are modally redundant, but may be explanatorily or ontologically significant. For example, when a constitutive account has multiple levels, the different levels will typically be modally redundant. Formulating the account as a specification of a supervenience base of constitutive determinants will therefore flatten the account into a single level. Many of my arguments can be illustrated by considering the place of normativity in the theory of content. The new taxonomy gives a distinct niche to normative theories of content - theories that explain a thought's having a certain content at least in part in terms of the obtaining of normative facts. By contrast, on a traditional map, normative theories are invisible as such because normative facts supervene on non-normative ones. (shrink)

The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle (...) the distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise. (shrink)

The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle (...) the distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the causal theory of mental content (hereafter CT) is incompatible with an elementary fact of perceptual psychology, namely, that the detection of distal properties generally requires the mediation of a “theory.” I shall call this fact the nontransducibility of distal properties (hereafter NTDP). The argument proceeds in two stages. The burden of stage one is that, taken together, CT and the language of thought hypothesis (hereafter LOT) are incompatible with NTDP. The (...) burden of stage two is that acceptance of CT requires acceptance of LOT as well. It follows that CT is incompatible with NTDP. I organize things in this way in part because it makes the argument easier to understand, and in part because the stage-two thesis—that CT entails LOT—has some independent interest and is therefore worth separating from the rest of the argument. (shrink)

Brentano and his students were the first to wrestle an Aristotelian perceptual concept, intentionality, into the modern metaphysics of mind. This dissertation recovers theories of Franz Brentano , Kazimierz Twardowski , and Edmund Husserl by appreciating each as an unique attempt to make a modern home for the ancient doctrine of "aboutness." The dissertation corrects a broad range of contemporary misunderstandings and criticisms of Brentano School philosophy, in particular one advanced by Martin Heidegger . ;Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical (...) Standpoint is marked by deep tensions between the doctrine of intentional inexistence and its Comtean positivism; Brentano treated mental contents as Comtean phenomena. Understanding physical phenomena as facts presented by sensations, and as syntactic building-blocks for higher-order mental phenomena, I reject misinterpretations of Brentano as either anti-reductionist or Immanentist. The unstable Brentanian account of intentionality was inherited by his student Twardowski. On the Content and Object of Presentations hoped to shore up Brentano's position with a crisp distinction of mental contents from worldly objects; Twardowski was among the first to attempt to integrate intentionality with a modern representationalism. The result was subjective mental content through which objects in the extra-conscious world are represented, a watershed in the history of representationalisms. Twardowski treated the representational relation as resemblance and mental contents as " quasi pictures," but Twardowski was among the first distinctly 20th Century representationalists, those who treat mental content as extra-conscious. Husserl's solution to Brentano's problem rejected the positivistic phenomena of his teacher and criticized the quasi-pictures of his classmate. The heart of the Logical Investigations account of consciousness is a distinction between two kinds of mental content. The intentional objects of the world at large are our mental contents , the very things that remain fixed while our mental contents fluctuate. Understanding this dynamic relation between two kinds of mental content, I reject readings of the Investigations which treat ideal content as either Fregean or Aristotelian. The recovery of Husserl's notion of ideality, one strategy amongst several in attempts to integrate intentionality with modern metaphysics, abets a defense of early Husserlian phenomenology from one of its most powerful critics. (shrink)

RESUMEN La teleosemántica es el intento de naturalizar el contenido mental mediante el recurso al concepto de función biológica. En el presente artículo se argumenta que la teleosemántica carece de los recursos necesarios para hacer frente a tres problemas: la indeterminación del contenido, el carácter abstracto de este y la inutilidad biológica de algunas de las representaciones que pueden albergar organismos como los humanos. ABSTRACT Teleosemantics is the attempt to naturalize mental content by resorting to the concept (...) of biological function. The article argues that teleosemantics lacks the necessary resources to solve three problems: the indeterminacy of content, its abstract nature, and the biological uselessness of some of the representations of certain organisms such as human beings. (shrink)

The aim of teleosemantics is to give a scientifically respectable, or ‘naturalistic’ theory of mental content. In the debates surrounding the scope and merits of teleosemantics a lot has been said about the concept of indication (or carrying information). The aim of this paper is to focus on the other key concept of teleosemantics: biological function. It has been universally accepted in the teleosemantics literature that the account of biological function one should use to flesh out teleosemantics (...) is that of etiological function. My claim is that if we replace this concept of function with an alternative one (that we have independent reasons to accept) and if we also restrict the scope of teleosemantics, we can arrive at an account of biologizing mental content that is much less problematic than the previous attempts. (shrink)

Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver (...) a metasemantic theory of representation. Furthermore, we argue that these difficulties derive from their exclusive reliance on the notion of information, so we suggest that pure informational accounts should be complemented with functional approaches. (shrink)

Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi‐pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional” symbolic computational view of mental (...) contents, but is compatible with recentsituated cognition and active visionapproaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non‐discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non‐discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought. (shrink)

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it (...) by restricting “basic desires” to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents. -/- La sémantique du succès soutient, en gros, que ce qu'il faut pour qu'un état d'un agent soit une croyance en P, c'est que cet état soit disposé à se combiner avec ses désirs pour provoquer un comportement qui répondrait à ces désirs si P. J. T. Whyte complète cela par un compte-rendu du contenu des « désirs de base » d'un agent pour fournir une théorie naturaliste attrayante du contenu mental. Nous soutenons que la stratégie de Whyte peut éviter les objections qui lui sont faites en restreignant les « désirs de base » aux inclinations sensorielles qui nous font agir indépendamment de nos croyances sur leur contenu. (shrink)

A naturalistic theory of intentionality is proposed that differs from previous evolutionary and tracking theories. Full-blown intentionality is constructed through a series of evolvable refinements. A first, minimal version of intentionality originates from a conjectured internal process that estimates an organism’s own fitness and that continually modifies the organism. This process produces the directedness of intentionality. The internal estimator can be parsed into intentional components that point to components of the process that produces fitness. It is argued that (...) such intentional components can point to mistaken or non-existing entities. Different Fregian senses of the same reference correspond to different components that have different roles in the estimator. Intentional components that point to intentional components in other organisms produce directedness towards semi-abstract entities. Finally, adding a general, population-wide means of communication enables intentional components that point to fully abstract entities. Intentionality thus naturalized has all of its expected properties: being directed; potentially making errors; possibly pointing to non-existent, abstract, or rigid entities; capable of pointing many-to-one and one-to-many; distinguishing sense and reference; having perspective and grain; and having determinate content. Several examples, such as ‘swampman’ and ‘brain-in-a-vat’, illustrate how the theory can be applied. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of new and previously published essays focusing on one of the most exciting and actively discussed topics in contemporary philosophy: naturalistic theories of mental content. The volume brings together important papers written by some of the most distinguished theorists working in the field today. Authors contributing to the volume include Jerry Fodor, Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske, Ned Block, Robert Cummins, and Daniel Dennett.

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation. In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind. The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery (...) is how neurobiological states can have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual representations. Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics, causal theories of reference, and teleosemantic theories. She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics. (shrink)

This book is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist (...) proposal holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The book is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the book in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

In Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Fred Dretske explains representational content by appealing to natural indication: a mental representation has its content in virtue of being a reliable natural indicator of a particular type of state of the world. His account fails for several reasons, not the least of which is that it cannot account for misrepresentation. Recognizing this, Dretske adds a twist in his more recent work on representational content (sketched in 'Misrepresentation' and elaborated (...) in Explaining Behavior): a mental representation acquires its semantic content when the fact that it naturally indicates some type of state of the world acquires explanatory relevance. This shift in emphasis from natural indication to function (and, so, to behaviour) is intended to address the disjunction problem. Whether or not it succeeds (I argue that it does not), new problems emerge as a direct result of the shift to emphasis on behaviour. First, although Dretske appeals to appropriate response behaviours for particular types of representations, it is not at all clear that such behaviours exist. Second, Dretske's theory cannot account for representations that never figure in the behaviour of the organism of which they are a part. In response to these problems, I suggest two possible routes to recovery: one, an appeal to implicit beliefs (or dispositions); and, two, an appeal to compositionality. Although it seems clear that Dretske must enlist one of these options if he is to formulate a successful causal naturalist theory of representational content, given his theoretical commitments, neither option is readily available to him. (shrink)

This thesis is about experiential content: what it is; what kind of account can be given of it. I am concerned with identifying and attacking one main view - I call it the inferentialist proposal. This account is central to the philosophy of mind, epistemology and philosophy of science and perception. I claim, however, that it needs to be recast into something far more subtle and enriched, and I attempt to provide a better alternative in these pages. The inferentialist (...) proposal holds that experiential content is necessarily under¬pinned by sophisticated cognitive influences. My alternative, the continuum theory, holds that these influences are relevant to experience only at certain levels of organisation and that at other levels there are contents which such features do not capture at all. Central to my account is that there are degrees to which cognitive influences affect experiential content; indeed, for the most part, experience is an amalgam of both inferential and non-inferential features. I claim that the inferentialist proposal is fundamentally flawed and deserves replacement, and I argue that my alternative fills the hollow that remains. The thesis is divided into four sections. In Part I, Chapter 1, I introduce two traditionally rival views of experiential content. In Chapter 2, I develop my continuum alternative. Chapter 3 assesses the relationship between experience and language, while Chapter 4 explores the relationship between beliefs and experience. The overall argument is that it has been a mistake to understand experience simply in inferential or non-inferential terms. In Part II, I examine the structure of mental content. Chapter 5 is concerned with the kinds of experiences which escape the inferentialist analysis. Chapter 6 considers Kant’s metaphysic of experience counterpointed to Lorenz’s reading of his work in the light of evolutionary biology. Chapter 7 treats animal experience in relation to the continuum view I am developing, while Chapter 8 reviews Fodor’s contribution to perceptual psychology. It is argued that the view of experiential content being developed is both consistent with empirical data on informationally local perceptual sub-systems, but also accords well with evolutionary theory and a naturalist interpretation of Kant’s taxonomy. Part III deals with inferentialism in the philosophy of science. In Chapter 9, I assess the theory dependence of observation thesis as it is advanced by Paul Feyerabend. I bring out of his account a subtle confusion concerning the importance of inference in the context of scientific inquiry. Part IV deals with the issue of experience in the philosophy of mind. In Chapter 10, I look at Wilfred Sellars’s attack on sense data theories. Chapter 11 confronts Paul Churchland’s treatment of ‘folk psychology’ while Chapter 12 isolates the issue of experiential qualia and the position of property dualism. I offer a critical review of Thomas Nagel’s work in this chapter and claim that his position can be read in a way which is consistent with the continuum account I am developing. I conclude the thesis in the usual fashion with a summary of the central claims. (shrink)

In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...) for one thing in nature, a bee dance (43), for example, to be about another, in this case, the location of a nectar source. My concern in this paper is to understand whether Millikan’s account of intentionality adequately explains how humans achieve reference, in language or thought, to individuals and groups in their environment. In bringing her theory of intentional content to bear on human activities, Millikan focuses largely on natural language. Thus, in what follows, I begin by laying out the biology-based principles that underlie Millikan’s theory of content, then proceed with an explanation of how the theory is to apply to natural language. As it appears, Millikan’s account of how content is determined for natural language terms and sentences rests on the determinacy of intentional content at the psychological level. This leads me to take a careful look at what Millikan says about the content of mental representations, in hopes of finding a sufficient basis there for the application of Millikan’s theory of content to natural language. Ultimately, I conclude that Millikan’s theory faces a problem of vacuity. If we approach the theory as a theory of intentional content, intended to explain the nature of reference, the theory is lacking in an extremely important respect: Millikan explains how it could be one of the biological functions of a mental or natural language term to refer, without telling us precisely what in the natural order constitutes the reference relation.. (shrink)

Hume is a naturalist in many different respects and about many different topics; this paper argues that he is also a naturalist about intentionality and representation. It does so in the course of answering four questions about his theory of mental representation: (1) Which perceptions represent? (2) What can perceptions represent? (3) Why do perceptions represent at all? (4) Howdo perceptions represent what they do? It appears that, for Hume, all perceptions except passions can represent; and they can represent (...) bodies, minds, and persons, with their various qualities. In addition, ideas can represent impressions and other ideas. However, he explicitly rejects the view that ideas are inherently representational, and he implicitly adopts a view according to which things (whether mental or non-mental) represent in virtue of playing, through the production of mental effects and dispositions, a significant part of the causal and/or functional role of what they represent. It is in virtue of their particular functional roles that qualitatively identical ideas are capable of representing particulars or general kinds; substances or modes; relations; past, present, or future; and individuals or compounds. (shrink)

This essay some first steps toward the naturalization of what I call rational intentionality or alternatively type II intentionality. By rational or type II intentionality, I mean that full combination of rational powers and content-bearing states that is paradigmatically enjoyed by mature intact human beings. The problem I set myself is to determine the extent to which the only currently extant approach to the naturalization of the intentional that has the singular virtue of not being a non-starter can be (...) aggregated up into an account of rational intentionality. I have in mind a broadly defined family of accounts whose main members are the indicator/information-theoretic approach of Dretske (1988), the asymmetric dependence theory of Jerry Fodor (1987, 1990, 1994) and the teleo-semantics of Ruth Millikan (1984, 1993). Somewhat inaccurately, I will call this family of approaches the information-theoretic family. To be sure, there is only a rough family resemblance among the members of the information-theoretic family. Indeed, several intense quarrels divide the members of that family one from another, but the precise outcome of those internecine struggles is not directly relevant to the aims of this essay. ² Taken collectively, the information-theoretic family yields a compelling picture of the place of at least a crude form of intentionality -- what I call frog-like or type I intentionality -- in the natural order. Though frog-like or type I intentionality is, I think, a genuine species of intentionality, it may subsist in the absence of rational powers. It is that species of intentionality enjoyed by irritable creatures who, following Brandom (1994). (shrink)

This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of (...) class='Hi'>mental representations in contemporary cognitive scientific modeling. (shrink)

My interactivism holds that content emerges from interactivity of agents and world, that agents entertain contents in virtue of their embodiment of skills which, when embedded in the right context, robustly tie them to objects of their attitudes. This rebels against entrenched Cartesian solipsism about the mental, and, particularly, a vestige of internalism: that there exist naturalistic counterparts of Fregean modes of presentation --reifiable, internalistically constituted entities which account for the ways contents seem . They ought not (...) be coarse-grained , nor fine-grained . But we cannot have it both ways. ;In their place, cognitive significance is explained by context-sensitive ways skills tie agents to objects; and intentional generalizations quantify over skills. Skills are roughly dispositions with intentional identities conferred by function-bestowing causal reasons for their continued presence . Unlike MOPs, skills are world-directed--specified by reference to worldly things--and multiply realizable, since what it takes to be so directed is not fixed. There is no reificational account of what it takes to have skills. ;I apply this interactivist picture to: attitude attributions, arguing that, contrary to many philosophers, ascriptions do not refer to MOPs under which agents entertain contents; and attention to pragmatics explains intuitions upon which contrary views rest; demonstratives, arguing that Kaplan's semantics of character cannot invoke MOPs qualia, arguing that qualitative content is intentional--generated by the perceptual system's retuning of itself to the world, making contents of color experience only specifiable by reference to colors-in-the-world; the worry that intentional properties aren't what drive behavior, arguing that the facts in virtue of which intentional taxonomy applies screen off the efficacy of neurologically or even computationally specified properties; and theories of rationality, arguing that internalism about rationality is wrong; being or failing to be rational depends on factors outside agents' heads. (shrink)

Hume's arguments in the Treatise require him to employ not only the copy principle, which explains the intrinsic properties of perceptions, but also a thesis that explains the representational content of a perception. I propose that Hume holds the semantic copy principle, which states that a perception represents that of which it is a copy. Hume employs this thesis in a number of his most important arguments, and his doing so enables him to answer an important objection concerning the (...) status of the copy principle. I further argue that the semantic copy principle is necessary, a priori, and discovered through an analysis of our general idea of representational content. (shrink)

The paper discusses the criticism of externalist theories of content which, on the basis of "Twin Earth" considerations, claims that such theories cannot make intentional properties supervenient on basic, intrinsic properties of the organism -- while supervenience is a necessary condition for the causal efficacy of any macro-property. The paper accepts the supervenience requirement, understood as arising from a requirement that macro- properties should be explained by micro- properties. It points out, however, that as a consequence of (...) this, the modality in the concept of supervenience should be understood as "nomic", not conceptual. Then the paper attempts to show that the usual thought- experiments do not establish that such variety of supervenience does not hold for psychological properties -- at least with regard to a particular, teleo- functional way of interpreting them. (shrink)

This study focuses on concepts and, ultimately, their possible implementation in brains. Especially salient is analysis of Jerry Fodor's work. The view of concepts found therein is one where many of both are "simple": to be ascribed or to token most concepts doesn't require being ascribed or tokening any other concepts, and most symbols lack "parts" which are themselves symbols. This is, I think, a very popular, and mistaken, view. ;In chapter 1, I argue that Fodor's theory of content (...) is, contra its goals, neither naturalistic nor atomistic. A deep mistake undermines both, viz. that there's no way to individuate a mental symbol non-semantically. This leads to chapter 2, where I explore the much neglected notion of Mentalese syntax. I argue that there are three possible principles of syntactic type individuation, and that these turn out not only to be incompatible but also inadequate for a "language of thought." I conclude that the idea of simple mental symbols is in trouble. ;This then allows me to argue in chapter 3 that we don't have to fear intentional holism , which sanctions the prevalence of complex concepts. I next sketch, in chapter 4, the sort of complex symbols needed to implement complex concepts. The chapter's bulk consists in an empirical argument for the complexity view via seven domains of current cognitive science, including concept context dependency, typicality effects, association, and reasoning. ;Chapter 5 concludes by exploring connectionism. I argue that, despite problems, connectionism seems on the right track in a way that Fodor's computationalism isn't. For example, it's more explicitly brain-like; in dropping the idea of mental computation over symbols it's free from the syntax problems of chapter 2; and, most important, it's highly compatible with the complexity view, which best characterized the cognitive processes of chapter 4. (shrink)

Teleological Theories of mental representation are probably the most promising naturalistic accounts of intentionality. However, it is widely known that these theories suffer from a major objection: the Indeterminacy Problem. The most common reply to this problem employs the Target of Selection Argument, which is based on Sober’s distinction between selection for and selection of . Unfortunately, some years ago the Target of Selection Argument came into serious attack in a famous paper by Goode and Griffiths. (...) Since then, the question of the validity of the Target of Selection Argument in the context of the Indeterminacy Problem has remained largely untouched. In this essay, I argue that both the Target of Selection Argument and Goode and Griffiths’ criticisms to it misuse Sober’s analysis in important respects. (shrink)

In his, ‘Descartes' Ontology of Thought’, Alan Nelson presents, on Descartes' behalf, a compositional theory of mental representation according to which the content of any mental representation is either simple or is entirely constituted by a combination of innate simples. Here the simples are our ideas of God, thought, extension, and union. My objection will be that it is simply ludicrous to think that any four simples are adequate to the task of combining to constitute all of (...) human thought, and that the simples God, thought, extension, and union are particularly ill suited to it. (shrink)

This innovative book proposes a unique and original perspective on the nature of the mind and how phenomenal consciousness may arise in a physical world. From simple sentient organisms to complex self-reflective systems, Faye argues for a naturalistic-evolutionary approach to philosophy of mind and consciousness. Drawing on substantial literature in evolutionary biology and cognitive science, this book offers a promising alternative to the major theories of the mind-body problem: the quality of our experiences should not, as some philosophers (...) have claimed, be associated with subjectivity that is not open for scientific explanation, nor should it be associated with intrinsic properties of the brain. Instead, Faye argues that mental properties are extrinsic properties of the brain caused by the organism’s interaction with its environment. Taking on the explanatory gap, and rejecting the ontological pluralism of present naturalist theories of the mind, Faye thus proposes a unified view of reality in which it is possible to explain qualitative mental presentations as part of the physical world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 312-314 [Access article in PDF] Shook, John R. Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality.The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 316. Cloth, $46.00; Paper, $22.95. The current renaissance of American pragmatism, and John Dewey's philosophy in particular, began two decades ago with Richard Rorty's refashioning of Dewey as a postmodernist who renounces (...) the "professional philosophy" of metaphysics and epistemology for the fluidity of conversation in the life and growth of a community. This depiction, though praised for rekindling Dewey's star, has been widely challenged by subsequent commentators. Ralph Sleeper's 1986 The Necessity of Pragmatism persuasively argues that Dewey reconfigures, rather than renounces, the logical and metaphysical grounds of knowledge. Despite an archaic Hegelian vocabulary that misleadingly suggests idealism and antirealism, Sleeper finds Dewey advancing a genuine metaphysics of existence, not merely a conversation about experience: a naturalistic realism of independent existences that enter into and are transformed by human interactions with them.This perspective is shared by most Dewey scholars, including Sandra Rosenthal, Raymond Boisvert, and J. E. Tiles. At least until now. In a profound and provocative exploration of his early philosophy, John R. Shook, presents a compelling case that Dewey's reconstruction of metaphysics and epistemology is deeper than even Sleeper imagined. Dewey did not merely abandon idealism under the influence of William James, as most assume; he transformed it in a original way that, while wholly naturalistic, [End Page 312] is a fusion of idealism and realism that overcomes both the former's "mind-stuff" and the latter's "in-itself reality."Dewey began his philosophical odyssey with the searing desire to eradicate the dualisms of mind versus world, phenomenal versus noumenal, perceptual versus conceptual. Post-Hegelian idealists agreed that this division is ultimately reconciled in the "absolute," though they disagreed about whether the absolute is psychological or cosmological, social or supernatural, knowable or unknowable. From the very beginning, Shook argues, Dewey accepted the psychological path as sketched by James Ward, and also Edward Caird's claim that the absolute must be knowable in some sense. Intriguingly, the missing link between perception and conceptual awareness is Wilhelm Wundt's notion of volition: percepts are neither mechanically attached to concepts nor are they overlaid by Kantian "faculties of mind." Instead, a disruption of perceptual or noncognitive experience generates a desire for reconciliation that calls forth ideas that diagnose the problem and suggest ways to resolve it. Achieved solutions, in turn, forge a background of habitual dispositions that shape interpretations within the noncognitive realm.While still an idealist, then, Shook finds the essential elements of the "method of inquiry" that later anchored Dewey's instrumentalism and pragmatism. Prior to 1890, however, he still construed this as individual "mental activity," and the problem of its relation to God's Absolute Mind remained. Upon relinquishing the supernatural for the social, however, this final obstacle was eliminated. The dispositional background extends beyond the individual to the customs, traditions, and values of a culture—indeed, even the barest notions of "self" and "reality" are inconceivable without reference to such a background. This is Dewey's broad conception of "experience"—a humanistic naturalism with no trace of mind-stuff or subjectivism. In this sense Dewey is a realist, though his affirmation of things-themselves (including things we have not or may never actually discover) avoids the things-in-themselves that is the bane of metaphysical realism. To claim that things exist without an experiential background of how we may find them to exist is at best empty verbiage, and at worst hypnosis by the dervishes of dualism.Scrupulous in research, penetrating in detail, Shook's presentation is so faithful to Dewey that it will undoubtedly draw many of the same criticisms once hurled at the master. Though careful readers will be able to identify "experience" in its broadly social and functional sense, others will be confused by applications as diverse as "mental activity," "soul," "reality," "the history of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion by Gabriel LevyKevin SchilbrackBeyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Gabriel Levy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. 249 pp. $45.00 paperback; open access.The interdisciplinary field of religious studies includes both the humanities and social sciences in a tricky detente. Some religion scholars focus on interpreting texts, teachings, and rituals in an effort to grasp what (...) religious practitioners understand themselves to be doing. Other scholars want to move beyond the the practitioners’ views to create explanatory accounts of religion in terms of social power, psychological benefits, and modules in the evolved brain—causal accounts of which the practitioners might not be aware or that they might deny. Gabriel Levy argues that to develop consilience between the divergent efforts of the humanities and the sciences, the academic study of religion would be well served by developing a more adequate metaphysics that can do justice simultaneously to human behavior as moved both by subjective reasons and by material forces. Specifically, he recommends the “anomalous monism” of Donald Davidson. [End Page 98]According to this view, there is only one kind of reality, and this is a monist metaphysics that includes no nonmaterial or supernatural entities. However, this one kind of reality is “anomalous” in that the world we experience together permits two irreducible vocabularies, one that is physical and deterministic and another that is mental and includes free will. Davidson considered this two-sided approach Spinozistic (169), and Levy notes its similarities to Thomas Nagel’s “neutral monism” (8, 35, 50–51). In short, then, Levy is proposing to scholars of religion a non-reductive but science-friendly “pragmatist monism” (8) that would be congenial to many readers of this journal. Such a metaphysics would also be in line with the methodological naturalism that, for many, defines the legitimate scope of the academy. We might therefore consider this book an example of a philosophy of religious studies, or even a metaphysics for religious studies.An important feature of Davidson’s approach is that, on his account, semantic content is necessarily intersubjective and therefore non-nomological and irreducible to the physical. Imagine a parent offering their prelinguistic child a doll while asking, “Do you want your doll?” or pulling the child away from a neighbor’s dog while telling them, “You have to be careful around dogs.” Davidson argues that human beings learn the meaning of words and sentences in social exchanges like these as the listener makes an educated guess about the entities to which the other person is referring, a process that Davidson calls “triangulation.” The generation of meaning on this model depends on the human capacity for shared intentionality about things in the world. Davidson argues that having meaningful thoughts, even when alone, then requires that one has had intersubjective, “triangulated” experiences like these. As Levy says, “semantic content arises in immanent, contextual, enacted dialogue and conversation with other agents” (182). It follows that this Davidsonian approach insists on irreducible, non-eliminable mental categories such as meaning, belief, and reasons, now recast in terms of practical engagement with things rather than inner representations of them. Many in religious studies are critical of the field’s focus on subjective categories like these, but, as Levy points out, the meaning-generating and reason-giving subject on a Davidsonian model is necessarily a socially embedded self and not the free-floating, disembodied, or ahistorical self that is critiqued by post-structuralists like Michel Foucault (169–70).Levy introduces this model (ch. 1) and then explores several topics in its light. He proposes that beliefs about religious entities are a subset of imagining fictional entities, so that Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, and Zeus are in the same cognitive category (ch. 2). He argues that there is a continuum between the human ability to interpret language and the ability of human beings and [End Page 99] other animals to interpret information in their natural environments (ch. 3). In the last three chapters, he connects his discussion to the Sefer Yitzirah, a medieval Jewish mystical “book of creation” that describes the cosmos as structured by language (ch. 4), to... (shrink)

Hutto and Satne, Philosophia propose to redefine the problem of naturalizing semantic content as searching for the origin of content instead of attempting to reduce it to some natural phenomenon. The search is to proceed within the framework of Relaxed Naturalism and under the banner of teleosemiotics which places Ur-intentionality at the source of content. We support the proposed redefinition of the problem but object to the proposed solution. In particular, we call for adherence to Strict Naturalism (...) and replace teleosemiotics with autopoietic theory of living beings. Our argument for these adjustments stems from our analysis of the flagship properties of Ur-intentionality: specificity and directedness. We attempt to show that the first property is not unique to living systems and therefore poses a problem of where to place a demarcation line for the origin of content. We then argue that the second property is a feature ascribed to living systems, not their intrinsic part and therefore does not form a good foundation for the game of naturalizing content. In conclusion we suggest that autopoietic theory can not only provide a competitive explanation of the basic responding of pre-contentful organisms but also clarify why Ur-intentionality is attributed to them in such an intuitive manner. (shrink)

In this paper I will present three reservations about the claims made by Hutto and Satnet. First of all, though TNOC is presented as drawing on teleological theories of mental content for a conception of Ur-Intentionaltiy, what is separated out after objectionable claims are removed from teleological accounts may not retain enough to give us directed intelligence. This problem raises a question about what we need in a naturalistic basis for an account of the mental. (...) Secondly, I think that the authors’ objections to cognitive science’s supposed notion of a mental representation in fact attack a philosophers’ invention, one that sprung into vibrant being in the mid-1970’s. It is not employed in cognitive neuroscience to any significant extent and it isn’t needed by other disciplines involved in cognitive science. Finally, I worry that the account of the origin of content – namely, explanatory narrative - presents us with a too limited view of human discourse, particularly as it is needed for a social theory of mind. (shrink)

For the past 40 years, philosophers have generally assumed that a key to understanding mental representation is to develop a naturalistic theory of representational content. This has led to an outlook where the importance of content has been heavily inflated, while the significance of the representational vehicles has been somewhat downplayed. However, the success of this enterprise has been thwarted by a number of mysterious and allegedly non-naturalizable, irreducible dimensions of representational content. The challenge of (...) addressing these difficulties has come to be known as the “hard problem of content” (Hutto & Myin, 2012), and many think it makes an account of representation in the brain impossible. In this essay, I argue that much of this is misguided and based upon the wrong set of priorities. If we focus on the functionality of representational vehicles (as recommended by teleosemanticists) and remind ourselves of the quirks associated with many functional entities, we can see that the allegedly mysterious and intractable aspects of content are really just mundane features associated with many everyday functional kinds. We can also see they have little to do with content and more to do with representation function. Moreover, we can begin to see that our explanatory priorities are backwards: instead of expecting a theory of content to be the key to understanding how a brain state can function as a representation, we should instead expect a theory of neural representation function to serve as the key to understanding how content occurs naturally. (shrink)

While there is controversy over which of several naturalistic theories of the mental is most plausible, there is consensus regarding the desideratum of a naturalistically respectable theory. A naturalistic theory of the mental, it is agreed, must explicate representation in nonintentional terms. I argue that this constraint does not get at the heart of what it is to be natural. On the one hand, it fails to provide us with a meaningful distinction between the natural (...) and the unnatural. On the other hand, it unfairly suggests that we withhold judgment on those successes our sciences of the mind have already achieved until a convincing decomposition of the mental is available. I urge a new conception of naturalism that focuses less upon ontological considerations and more upon methodological ones. (shrink)

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction PART I Intentionality Chapter 1 Fodor’ Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum Chapter 2 Semantics, Wisconsin Style Chapter 3 A Theory of Content, I: The Problem Chapter 4 A Theory of Content, II: The Theory Chapter 5 Making Mind Matter More Chapter 6 Substitution Arguments and the Individuation of Beliefs Chapter 7 Stephen Schiffer’s Dark Night of The Soul: A Review of Remnants of Meaning PART II Modularity Chapter 8 Précis of (...) The Modularity of Mind Chapter 9 Why Should the Mind Be Modular? Chapter 10 Observation Reconsidered Appendix: A Reply to Churchland’s ‘Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality" References Index of Names. (shrink)

In this adventurous contribution to the project of combining philosophy and biology to understand the mind, Carolyn Price investigates what it means to say that mental states--like thoughts, wishes, and perceptual experiences--are about things in the natural world. Her insight into this deep philosophical problem offers a novel teleological account of intentional content, grounded in and shaped by a carefully constructed theory of functions. Along the way she defends her view from recent objections to teleological theories and (...) indicates how it might be applied to notable problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Belief and Meaning is a philosophical treatment of intentionality. It offers an original, logical and convincing account of intentional content which is local and contextual and which takes issues with standard theories of meaning.

This paper presents a naturalist skill-based alternative to traditional function-based naturalist theories of mental health and disorder. According to the novel skill view outlined here, mental health is a skilled action of individuals, rather than a question of the functioning of mental mechanisms. Mental disorder is the failure or breakdown of this skill. This skill view of mental health is motivated by focusing on the process of mental healing. This paper argues that, when (...) we start with a focus on how and why individuals heal from mental disorders, we gain a better understanding of what mental health is: the exercise of self-regulatory metacognitive skill. (shrink)

An account of the contents of the propositional attitudes is fundamental to the success of the cognitive sciences if, as seems correct, the cognitive sciences do presuppose propositional attitudes. Fodor has recently pointed the way towards a naturalistic explication of mental content in his Psychosemantics (1987). Fodor's theory is a version of the causal theory of meaning and thus inherits many of its virtues, including its intrinsic plausibility. Nevertheless, the proposal may suffer from two deficiencies: (1) It (...) seems not to provide an adequate explanation of misrepresentation. (2) It may also fail, as a species of empiricism, to provide a correct explication of the content of observational concepts and those non-observational concepts whose meaning is to be traced to their causal connections with observational concepts. (shrink)