In ‘‘The Myth of Original Intentionality,’’ Daniel Dennett appears to want to argue for four claims involving the familiar distinction between original (or underived) and derived intentionality.

What we do, intentionally, depends upon the intentional contents of our thoughts. For about ten years Fodor has argued that intentional behavior causally depends upon the narrow intentional content of thoughts (not broad). His main reason is a causal powers argument—brains of individuals A and B may differ in broad content, but, if A and B are neurophysically identical, their thoughts cannot differ in causal power, despite differences in broad content. Recently Fodor (Fodor, 1991) presents a new 'modal' version of (...) this causal powers argument. I argue that Fodor's argument (in old or new dress) is a non sequitur. It neither establishes the existence of narrow content nor the need for a content other than broad content to explain intentional behavior. (shrink)

There are both externalist and internalist theories of the phenomenal content of conscious experiences. Externalists like Dretske and Tye treat the phenomenal content of conscious states as representations of external properties. Internalists think that phenomenal conscious states are reducible to electrochemical states of the brain in the style of the type-type identity theory. In this paper, we side with the representationalists and visit a dispute between them over the test case of Swampman. Does Swampman have conscious phenomenal states or not? (...) Dretske and Tye disagree on this issue. We try to settle the dispute in favor of Dretske's theory. (shrink)

The current orthodoxy on mental representation can be characterized in terms of three central ideas. The -rst is ontological, the second semantic, and the third methodological. The ontological tenet is that mental representation is a two-place relation holding between a representing state and a represented entity (object, event, state of a.airs). The semantic tenet is that the relation in question is probably information-theoretic at heart, perhaps augmented teleologically, functionally, or teleo-functionally to cope with di/cult cases. The methodological tenet is that (...) mental representations are posited solely on third-person explanatory grounds. In this paper, I argue that this picture of mental representation is satisfactory only as an account of mental representation at the sub-personal level. It is unsatisfactory, in a principled way, as an account of mental representation at the personal level. (shrink)

In an earlier paper, we argued that Fodorian Semantics has serious difficulties. However, we suggested possible ways that one might attempt to fix this. Ted Warfield suggests that our arguments can be deflected and he does this by making the very moves that we suggested. In our current paper, we respond to Warfield's attempts to revise and defend Fodorian Semantics against our arguments that such a semantic theory is both too strong and too weak. To get around our objections, Warfield (...) proposes a modified reading of one of Fodor's conditions and proposes adding a new condition to the theory. We show that neither the modified reading nor the additional condition saves the asymmetric causal dependency approach to naturalized semantics. (shrink)

We examine two approaches to functions: etiological and forward-looking. In the context of functions, we raise the question, familiar to philosophers of mind, about the explanatory role of properties that are not supervenient on the mere dispositional features of a system. We first argue that the question has no easy answer in either of the two approaches. We then draw a parallel between functions and goal directedness. We conclude by proposing an answer to the question: The explanatory importance of nonsupervenient (...) properties (like having the function of doing something, or like being goal-directed) does not lie in any special causal mechanism through which these properties bring about their effects; it lies rather in the different classification of the explananda types that these properties generate. (shrink)