Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):404-435 (2007)
| Abstract | The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesNicholas Shea (2007). Representation in the Genome and in Other Inheritance Systems. Biology and Philosophy 22 (3):313-331.
James Blackmon, David Byrd, Robert C. Cummins, Alexa Lee & Martin Roth (2006). Representation and Unexploited Content. In Graham F. Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics. Oxford University Press.
Ruth G. Millikan (2007). An Input Condition for Teleosemantics? Reply to Shea (and Godfrey-Smith). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):436-455.
Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.) (2006). Teleosemantics: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ulrich E. Stegmann (2005). John Maynard Smith's Notion of Animal Signals. Biology and Philosophy 20 (5):1011-1025.
Peter Godfrey-Smith (2004). Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics. In David Papineau & Graham MacDonald (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press.
Ulrich E. Stegmann (2009). A Consumer‐Based Teleosemantics for Animal Signals. Philosophy of Science 76 (5).
Peter Schulte (2012). How Frogs See the World: Putting Millikan's Teleosemantics to the Test. Philosophia 40 (3):483-496.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads22 ( #56,280 of 550,854 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,425 of 550,854 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
