Abstract
ABSTRACT Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue that teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails.
Highlights
The objection allows that teleosemantics can capture the kind of relation char acterized by the terms “intentional”, “sensory registration”, “biological”, “information-carrying”, “covariation” and “functioning isomorphism”, but claims that it is insufficient to account for the kind characterized by the terms “representational”, “objective correctness”, “psychological”, “accu racy”, “truth-conditional”, “propositional” and “contentful”
Hutto and Myin argue that a failure to solve the Hard Problem of Content presents us with a dilemma: either abandon explanatory naturalism or accept that basic minds lack content
We have argued that teleosemantics can address the Hard Problem of Content, and so avoids their dilemma
Summary
In the philosophy of cognitive science, there is a popular distinction between two kinds of relation a cognitive state can bear to the world:. The second is that states bearing the richer relation are capable of representing the same object under different guises, or in differ ent ways. We will call this the intensionality criterion. Contentful (non-basic) minds, they argue, are dependent on the existence of social practices To accept this conclusion we must first accept that teleosemantics is required to meet, and subsequently fails to meet, both the truth-evaluable criterion and the intensionality criterion. Representations with intensionality represent objects under different modes of presentation This second aspect of content is typically invoked to solve so-called Frege puzzles.
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