The Excesses of Teleosemantics

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1):117-137 (2001)
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Abstract

Teleosemantics asserts that mental content is determined by natural selection. The thesis is that content is fixed by the historical conditions under which certain cognitive mechanisms—those that produce and those that interpret representational states—were selectively successful. Content is fixed by conditions of selective success. The thesis of this paper is that teleosemantics is mistaken, that content cannot be fixed by conditions of selective success, because those conditions typically outnumber the intentional objects within a given representational state. To defend against this excess, advocates of teleosemantics must attempt to privilege some conditions of success while ignoring others. This results in selective explanations that are ad hoc, thereby depriving teleosemantics of the virtues it hoped to inherit from the theory of evolution by natural selection, including its alleged naturalistic credentials.

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Author's Profile

Paul Davies
College of William and Mary

Citations of this work

Teleosemantics and the Epiphenomenality of Content.Eric Saidel - 2001 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1):139-166.
Still Unsuccessful: The Unsolved Problems of Success Semantics.Javier González de Prado - 2018 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 33 (1).

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References found in this work

Biosemantics.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1989 - Journal of Philosophy 86 (July):281-97.
Philosophical Naturalism.David Papineau - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4):1070-1077.
The Representational Theory of Mind: An Introduction.Kim Sterelny - 1994 - Philosophical Quarterly 44 (175):252-254.

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