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Thesis Teleosemantics is the best naturalistic theory of content we have

Where it stands

I dive in kelp forests on the Chilean coast, and I came to philosophy through biology, so I will defend the view that feels most like home.

The puzzle: a frog's tongue fires at small dark moving dots. Usually they are flies, sometimes they are not. Is the frog's state about flies or about small dark moving things? If content is fixed by whatever reliably causes the state, it is about dots, and the frog never makes a mistake. But a creature that cannot be wrong cannot be right either.

Teleosemantics, developed most fully by Ruth Millikan, answers that a state's content is fixed by its biological function: what the mechanism was selected to do. Frog ancestors whose tongues snapped at dots survived because the dots were, often enough, flies. So the state's function is to indicate flies, and firing at a pellet is a malfunction, which is to say a misrepresentation. Error is built in from the start, which is exactly what a theory of content needs.

Its rivals look worse to me. Pure causal theories cannot get error. Fodor's asymmetric dependence is clever but is a condition with no story about why it holds. Interpretivism makes content depend on an interpreter, which seems backwards for a frog.

I know the objections: Swampman, and the charge that selection cannot tell "fly" from "frog food" or "small dark moving thing". Bring them.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Mona Fathy

    For Fellow

    I'd defend Ignacio by pairing him with Dretske. Dretske's informational semantics says a state carries information about what it reliably covaries with, and then fixes content during a learning period, when the state is recruited to do a job. That gives you some of the same benefits without leaning only on deep evolutionary history, which helps with learned representations in organisms like us.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Priya Raghavan

    For Fellow

    Partly for. Predictive processing people tend to like teleosemantics because it gives prediction errors a meaning: an error is a prediction that failed at what it was for. But Pieter's point is real. In practice, the papers I read just say the neuron "codes for" whatever stimulus description gives the best model, and that is interpretivism wearing a lab coat.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Derek Hollis

    Against Fellow

    Swampman, then. Davidson imagined lightning striking a swamp and producing a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of himself, with no history at all. Swampman walks home, talks to Davidson's friends, seems to recognise them. On teleosemantics he has no functions, because he has no selection history, so none of his states are about anything. Most people find that absurd. A theory that says a perfect duplicate of you has no thoughts has a problem.

    1. Ignacio Cárcamo

      Fellow

      Derek, Millikan bit that bullet and I'll bite it too. Swampman is a philosopher's fiction; content is a historical kind, like "fossil" or "Roman coin". A perfect copy of a Roman coin made yesterday is not a Roman coin. That sounds harsh about Swampman, but my theory is about real creatures, and real creatures all have histories.

      Helpful · 1
  2. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Against Fellow

    I find the indeterminacy objection harder than Swampman. Selection only "sees" what made a difference to survival. If every small dark moving thing the ancestors met was a fly, then "fly", "small dark moving thing" and "nutritious lump" were all selected for equally. Nothing in the history picks one. Fodor pressed this hard and I don't think it's been answered.

    Helpful · 2

Other replies

  1. Ignacio Cárcamo

    Fellow

    Fair summary: I'll keep the claim that teleosemantics is the best naturalistic option, and concede it doesn't yet have a clean answer to Pieter's indeterminacy point. My instinct, from biology, is that the answer will come from what the consumer system does with the signal, which is Millikan's emphasis too. The frog's stomach, so to speak, decides what the eye means.

    Helpful · 1