“Teleosemantic” or “biosemantic” theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of “proper functions” as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms. This essay critically explores (...) various interpretations of this analogy. It suggests that these interpretations can be explicated by contrasting adaptationist with pluralist readings of the evolutionary concept of adaptation. Among the possible interpretations of the relations between biological adaptations and their analogues in language and culture, the two most relevant are a linear, hierarchical, signalling-based model that takes its cues from the evolution of co-operation and joint intentionality and a mutualistic, pluralist model that takes its cues from mimesis and symbolism in the evolution of human communication. Arguing for the merits of the mutualistic model, the present analysis indicates a path towards an evolutionary pluralist version of biosemantics that will align with theories of cognition as being environmentally “scaffolded”. Language and other cultural forms are partly independent reproducible structures that acquire proper functions of their own while being integrated with organism-based cognitive traits in co-evolutionary fashion. (shrink)

Neander presents a causal version of informational teleosemantics, where a non-conceptual state R has the content F if and only if R has the function of being caused by F. In contrast, probabilistic versions of informational teleosemantics claim that R has the content F if and only if R has the function of covarying with F. These two theories ascribe different contents to representational states since PT allows R to have the content F when R non-causally covaries with F. First, (...) I argue that CT is incapable of serving one of the main explanatory aims of a theory of content, which is to fully explain behavior. Second, I defend PT against the charge of indeterminacy, arguing that when PT ascribes multiple contents, these contents serve distinct explanatory aims. (shrink)

Representationalism maintains that the phenomenal character of an experience is fully determined by its intentional content. Representationalism is a very attractive theory in the project of naturalizing consciousness, on the assumption that the relation of representation can itself be naturalized. For this purpose, representationalists with naturalistic inclinations typically appeal to teleological theories of mental content. Not much attention has been paid, however, to the interaction between representationalism and teleological theories of content. This paper will provide reasons to think that such (...) an interaction is not felicitous. In particular, I will argue that those who endorse the conjunction of these two theories are committed to the existence of impossible experiences. (shrink)

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...) that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves. Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject. (shrink)

Tradition compels me to write dissertation acknowledgements that are long, effusive, and unprofessional. Fortunately for me, I heartily endorse that tradition.

Teresa believes in God. Maggie’s wife believes that the Earth is flat, and also that Maggie should be home from work by now. Anouk—a cat—believes it is dinner time. This dissertation is about what believing is: it concerns what, exactly, ordinary people are attributing to Teresa, Maggie’s wife, and Anouk when affirming that they are believers. Part I distinguishes the attitudes of belief that people attribute to each other (and other animals) in ordinary life from the cognitive states of belief (...) theoretically posited by (some) cognitive scientists. Part II defends the view that to have an attitude of belief is to live—to be disposed to act, react, think, and feel—in a pattern that an actual belief attributor identifies with taking the world to be some way. Drawing on scientific, scholarly, and literary sources of evidence, How Beliefs are like Colors provides a framework for research on belief across the humanities and sciences of the mind. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that mental representation is identical to phenomenal consciousness, and everything else that appears to be both mental and a matter of representation is not genuine mental representation, but either in some way derived from mental representation, or a case of non-mental representation.

Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...) The stark differences between their accounts of these fundamental concepts stem from radically different conceptions of the world, the natural and life. I argue that Millikan’s teleosemantic approach relies on a teleology of determination by means of the lawfulness of nature that leaves no room for the freedom of self-determination, for reason, or for experience—for the reality of lived human life. In contrast to Millikan’s account, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology situates teleology as a function of reason and first-personal experience, part of an extended account of intentionality and meaning according to which the full range of our making sense of the world is conceived as a rational activity that is itself a part of that world, and not an unnatural activity to be separated from it. While Husserl’s account of these issues is indeed symptomatic of what Millikan calls “meaning rationalism,” I argue that it is immune to the sorts of problems she claims will plague any such account, since these problems arise only against the background of a set of presuppositions about intentionality that Husserl does not share. Husserl’s position can itself be understood to be within the bounds of a suitably liberal conception of naturalism, and interpreting him in this way it has the added benefit—contra Millikan—of not divorcing teleology from reason, the latter construed as our first-personal striving to make sense of the world as we experience it—of life. (shrink)

The empirical study of consciousness is a young field still in its pre paradigmatic stage and so in need of a unifying framework. This comparative literature review examines two theories of consciousness, Thomas Metzinger’s the self-model theory of subjectivity and Antti Revonsuo’s Biological realism, theories which both try to provide such a framework for the science of consciousness. This paper gives an overview of some of the more central parts of each theory, along with criticism directed towards them. The paper (...) show that these theories, although on the surface very similar, disagree on some fundamental philosophical questions due to differences in their underlying background assumptions. The theories also slightly differ in their view on some methodological questions, as well as in their view of certain aspects on consciousness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The Reflexive Theory of Perception (RTP) claims that perception of an object or property X by an organism Z consists in Z being caused by X to acquire some disposition D toward X itself. This broadly behavioral perceptual theory explains perceptual intentionality and correct versus incorrect, plus successful versus unsuccessful, perception in a plausible evolutionary framework. The theory also undermines cognitive and perceptual modularity assumptions, including informational or purely epistemic views of perception in that, according to the RTP, any (...) X-caused and X-directed dispositions are genuinely perceptual—including affective, attitudinal, and immediately activated purely action-directed behavioral dispositions. Thus the RTP has the potential to provide the foundations for a broadly behavioral counter-revolution in cognitive science. (shrink)

Many of us consider it uncontroversial that information processing is a natural function of the brain. Since functions in biology are only won through empirical investigation, there should be a significant body of unambiguous evidence that supports this functional claim. Before we can interpret the evidence, however, we must ask what it means for a biological system to process information. Although a concept of information is generally accepted in the neurosciences without critique, in other biological sciences applications of information, despite (...) careful analysis, remain controversial. In this work I will review classical stimulus-response studies in neuroscience and use Claude Shannon’s mathematical information theory as a starting point to interpret information processing as a function of the brain. I will illustrate a disanalogy between Shannon’s communication model (source, encode, channel, receiver, decode) and neural systems, and will argue that the neural code is not very code-like in comparison to genetic and engineered codes. I suggest that we have conflated the act of representing neuroscientific facts—which we do to summarize and communicate our findings with others—with taking experimental facts to be representations. (shrink)

There seems to be a large gulf between percepts and concepts. In particular, con- cepts seem to be capable of representing things that percepts cannot. We can conceive of things that would be impossible to perceive. (The converse may also seem true, but I will leave that to one side.) In one respect, this is trivially right. We can conceive of things that we cannot encounter, such as unicorns. We cannot literally perceive unicorns, even if we occasionally.

El representacionismo defiende que el carácter fenoménico de la experiencia queda completamente determinado por su contenido intencional. El representacionismo es una teoría muy atractiva dentro del proyecto de naturalizar la consciencia según la hipótesis de que la relación de representación puede a su vez ser naturalizada. Para este propósito, los representacionistas con inquietudes naturalistas acuden normalmente a teorías teleosemánticas del contenido mental. No se ha prestado, sin embargo, demasiada atención a la interacción entre el representacionismo y las teorías teleosemánticas del (...) contenido mental. Este artículo da razones para pensar que tal interacción no es venturosa. En particular, argumentaré que aquellos que abrazan la conjunción de ambas teorías están comprometidos con la existencia de experiencias imposibles. (shrink)

Der Kern des Leib-Seele-Problems besteht darin, dass mentale Phänomene (Ereignisse, Eigenschaften, Zustände) Merkmale zu haben scheinen, die es auf den ersten Blick unmöglich machen, diese Phänomene in ein naturalisti- sches Weltbild zu integrieren – sie mit physikalischen Phänomenen zu identifizieren oder auf physikalische Phänomene zu reduzieren.2 Heute stehen hauptsächlich zwei von in diesem Sinne kritischen Merkmalen im Mit- telpunkt des Interesses.3 Das erste ist das Merkmal intentionaler Zustände, einen repräsentationalen oder semantischen Inhalt zu besitzen. Das Problem der Naturalisierung dieser Zustände (...) möchte ich das ‘Problem der Intentiona- lität’ nennen. Das zweite kritische Merkmal ist die Eigenschaft von Wahr- nehmungseindrücken und körperlichen Empfindungen, einen qualitativen Aspekt zu besitzen. Dieses Merkmal beruht auf der Tatsache, dass es auf eine bestimmte Weise ist oder sich auf eine bestimmte Weise anfühlt, in diesen Zuständen zu sein. Das Problem der Naturalisierung dieser Zustände wird gewöhnlich das ‘Qualia-Problem’ genannt. (shrink)

The notion of representation has become ubiquitous throughout cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and the cognitive sciences generally. This paper addresses the status of mental representations as entities that have been posited to explain cognition. I do so by examining similarities between mental representations and sense-data in both their characteristics and key arguments offered for each. I hope to show that more caution in the adoption and use of representations in explaining cognition is warranted. Moreover, by paying attention to problematic notions (...) of representations, a less problematic sense of representation might emerge. (shrink)

The present article is a critical assessment of the “Connection Principle” – the principle according to which the two key properties of mental states, intentionality and phenomenality , are necessarily co-instantiated. A theory of mind endorsing some version of this principle assumes that all intentional states are either conscious or otherwise potentially conscious. The Connection Principle, being a subject of much controversy in the past 15 years, has divided the community of philosophers of mind in two, as it were, irreconcilable (...) camps. What poses a special challenge to both friends and foes of the Connection Principle – albeit for different reasons – is a plausible explanation of intentional character of unconscious mental states. We want to point to and comment on certain weaknesses of Searle’s attempt to solve this problem – an attempt drawing on the idea that unconsciousmental states “retain” its “aspectual shape” while unconscious. Eventually, we will venture to show why the notion of aspectual shape cannot play the explanatory role assigned to it by Searle, and why a more restrictive and a more consistent criterion for ascribing intentionality to unconscious states is needed. This new criterion should be sensible to our folk-psychological intuition suggesting that there are dispositional states that play an indispensable causal role inour mental economy and, as such, build a genuine subset of all nconscious, i.e., purely neurophysiological states of our mind/brain.U tekstu se želimo kritički osvrnuti na Searleovo “načelovezanosti” – načelo prema kojemu su svojstvo intencionalnosti i svojstvo fenomenalnosti nužno koinstancirana. Svaka teorija uma koja uključuje neku varijantu tog načela polazi od pretpostavke da su sva intencionalna stanja ili svjesna ili potencijalno svjesna. Riječ je o stajalištu koje je polariziralo filozofe uma i u posljednjih petnaestak godina bilo predmetom zanimljivih rasprava. Moglo bi se reći da se prema stavu – bilo eksplicitnom bilo implicitnom – koji neki filozof uma zauzima prema načelu vezanosti može prepoznati opći istraživački program kojemu pripada. I za zagovornike i za protivnike načela vezanosti – doduše iz različitih razloga – osobiti izazov predstavlja objašnjenje intencionalnosti nesvjesnih mentalnih stanja. Cilj nam je ukazati na neke nedostatke Searleova pokušaja da riješi taj problem – pokušaja kojemu u osnovi leži zamisao da nesvjesna mentalna stanja zadržavaju svoju aspektualnost dok su nesvjesna. Konkretno, pokazat ćemo zašto pojam aspektualnosti ne može igrati eksplanatornu ulogu koju mu je Searle namijenio te zašto bi trebalo pronaći neki drugi, restriktivniji i konzistentniji kriterij pripisivanja intencionalnosti potencijalno svjesnim stanjima. Taj bi kriterij, prema našem shvaćanju, trebao biti kompatibilan s pučkopsihološkom intuicijom o postojanju dispozicijskih stanja koja igraju neizostavnu kauzalnu ulogu u našemmentalnom funkcioniranju i koja, kao takva, čine autentičan podskup svih nesvjesnih stanja našeg mozga/uma. (shrink)

We present an information theoretic account of models as scientific representations, where scientific models are understood as information carrying artifacts. We propose that the semantics of models should be based on this information coupling of the model to the world. The information theoretic account presents a way of avoiding the need to refer to agents' intentions as constitutive of the semantics of scientific representations, and it provides a naturalistic account of model semantics, which can deal with the problems of asymmetry, (...) relevance and circularity that afflict other currently popular naturalistic proposals. (shrink)

Does synesthesia undermine representationalism? Gregg Rosenberg (2004) argues that it does. On his view, synesthesia illustrates how phenomenal properties can vary independently of representational properties. So, for example, he argues that sound/color synesthetic experiences show that visual experiences do not always represent spatial properties. I will argue that the representationalist can plausibly answer Rosenberg.

A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...) I believe some exposure to environmental ethics can help focus their interests and goals. I identify three primary areas in which environmental ethics can con- tribute to their education. The first is an examination of who (or what) should be considered to be part of our moral community (i.e., the community to whom we owe direct duties). Is it humans only? Or does it include all sentient life? Or all life? Or ecosystems considered holistically? Often, readings implicitly assume one or more of these answers; the goal is to make the student more sensitive to these implicit claims and to get them to think about the different reasons that support them. The second area, related to the first, is the application of the different answers concerning the extent of the ethical community to real environmental issues and problems. Students need to be aware of how the different answers concerning the moral community can imply conflicting answers for how we should act in certain cases and to think about ways to move toward conflict resolution. The third area in which environmental ethics can contribute is a more conceptual one, focusing on central concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, species, and ecosystems. Exploring and evaluating various meanings of these terms will make students more reflective and thoughtful citizens and biologists, sensitive to the implications that different conceptual choices make. (shrink)

The principal aim of my thesis is to provide a unified theory of imagining, that is, a theory which aspires to capture the common nature of all central forms of imagining and to distinguish them from all paradigm instances of non-imaginative phenomena. The theory which I intend to put forward is a version of what I call the Agency Account of imagining and, accordingly, treats imaginings as mental actions of a certain kind. More precisely, it maintains that imaginings are mental (...) actions that aim at the formation of episodic representations, the content of which is directly determined by what we want them to represent. My defence of this version of the Agency Account happens in two stages. On the one hand, I try to show that it is both extensionally adequate and explanatorily illuminating with respect to those mental states or projects which are clear instances of either imaginative or non- imaginative phenomena. And on the other hand, I seek to demonstrate that the most plausible alternative to the Agency Account - namely the Cognitive Account according to which it is distinctive of imaginings that they are non-cognitive phenomena and thus to be contrasted with perceptions, judgements, and so on - is bound to fail as a unified theory of imagining. The dissertation contains five main parts. In the first, I specify in more detail what a unified account of imagining has to achieve and, in particular, which phenomena it is supposed to capture. The second part presents the Cognitive Account, thereby focussing on Brian O'Shaughnessy's sophisticated version of it while the third part is reserved for the evaluation and rejection of the Cognitive Account. In the fourth part, I develop my version of the Agency Account of imagining. And the fifth and last part is concerned with the accommodation of potential counterexamples to it. (shrink)

The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational mental states, people have routinely denied that they have any (...) intentional/representational states. I want to focus on a particular brand of causal theory that is not historical, the so-called pure informational or nomic covariance theories, and examine how they propose to handle twin cases and replicas like Swampman. In particular, I will take up Fodor. (shrink)