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Biosemantics

Journal of Philosophy 86 (6):281--297 (1989)

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  1. Metaethics, teleosemantics and the function of moral judgements.Neil Sinclair - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):639-662.
    This paper applies the theory of teleosemantics to the issue of moral content. Two versions of teleosemantics are distinguished: input-based and output-based. It is argued that applying either to the case of moral judgements generates the conclusion that such judgements have both descriptive (belief-like) and directive (desire-like) content, intimately entwined. This conclusion directly validates neither descriptivism nor expressivism, but the application of teleosemantics to moral content does leave the descriptivist with explanatory challenges which the expressivist does not face. Since teleosemantics (...)
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  • Mental Representation and Closely Conflated Topics.Angela Mendelovici - 2010 - Dissertation, Princeton University
    This dissertation argues that mental representation is identical to phenomenal consciousness, and everything else that appears to be both mental and a matter of representation is not genuine mental representation, but either in some way derived from mental representation, or a case of non-mental representation.
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  • Mechanism and purpose: A case for natural teleology.Denis Walsh - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):173-181.
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  • Information and the function of neurons.Marc Burock - 2011
    Many of us consider it uncontroversial that information processing is a natural function of the brain. Since functions in biology are only won through empirical investigation, there should be a significant body of unambiguous evidence that supports this functional claim. Before we can interpret the evidence, however, we must ask what it means for a biological system to process information. Although a concept of information is generally accepted in the neurosciences without critique, in other biological sciences applications of information, despite (...)
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  • Affordances and Phenomenal Character in Spatial Perception.Simon Prosser - 2011 - Philosophical Review 120 (4):475-513.
    Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is wholly determined by, or even reducible to, its representational content. In this essay I put forward a version of intentionalism that allows (though does not require) the reduction of phenomenal character to representational content. Unlike other reductionist theories, however, it does not require the acceptance of phenomenal externalism (the view that phenomenal character does not supervene on the internal state of the subject). According the view offered here, (...)
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  • Biological Species Are Natural Kinds.Crawford L. Elder - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):339-362.
    This paper argues that typical biological species are natural kinds, on a familiar realist understanding of natural kinds—classes of individuals across which certain properties cluster together, in virtue of the causal workings of the world. But the clustering is far from exceptionless. Virtually no properties, or property-combinations, characterize every last member of a typical species—unless they can also appear outside the species. This motivates some to hold that what ties together the members of a species is the ability to interbreed, (...)
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  • Functional explanations and natural norms.Carolyn Price - 1995 - Ratio 8 (2):143-160.
    In this paper, I try to develop an account of functions which might be of use to a biologist engaged in classifying and explaining natural phenomena. The most pressing difficulty facing such an account is the need to reconcile the normativity of function statements with their explanatory force. I consider two familiar accounts of function statements, offered by Andrew Woodfield and Larry Wright . I examine both accounts in search of the strongest possible formulation of each type of theory. I (...)
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  • Apertures, Draw, and Syntax: Remodeling Attention.Brian Bruya - 2010 - In Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action. MIT Press. pp. 219.
    Because psychological studies of attention and cognition are most commonly performed within the strict confines of the laboratory or take cognitively impaired patients as subjects, it is difficult to be sure that resultant models of attention adequately account for the phenomenon of effortless attention. The problem is not only that effortless attention is resistant to laboratory study. A further issue is that because the laboratory is the most common way to approach attention, models resulting from such studies are naturally the (...)
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  • (1 other version)A representational account of olfactory experience.Clare Batty - 2010 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (4):511-538.
    Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...)
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  • Tye-dyed teleology and the inverted spectrum.Jason Ford - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (2):267-281.
    Michael Tye’s considered position on visual experience combines representationalism with externalism about color, so when considering spectrum inversion, he needs a principled reason to claim that a person with inverted color vision is seeing things incorrectly. Tye’s responses to the problem of the inverted spectrum ( 2000 , in: Consciousness, color, and content, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and 2002a , in: Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford) rely on a teleological approach to (...)
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  • Philosophy of mind: critical concepts in philosophy.Sean Crawford (ed.) - 2011 - New York: Routledge.
    v. 1. Foundations -- v. 2. The mind-body problem -- v. 3. Intentionality -- v. 4. Consciousness.
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  • (1 other version)Information and knowledge à la Floridi.Fred Adams - 2010 - Metaphilosophy 41 (3):331-344.
    Abstract: Luciano Floridi has impressively applied the concept of information to problems in semantics and epistemology, among other areas. In this essay, I briefly review two areas where I think one may usefully raise questions about some of Floridi's conclusions. One area is in the project to naturalize semantics and Floridi's use of the derived versus nonderived notion of semantic content. The other area is in the logic of information and knowledge and whether knowledge based on information necessarily supports closure, (...)
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  • Causal theories of mental content.Fred Adams & Ken Aizawa - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs. These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words, the point of departure for these theories is that thoughts of dogs are about dogs because dogs (...)
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  • Passage and Perception.Simon Prosser - 2011 - Noûs 47 (1):69-84.
    The nature of experience has been held to be a major reason for accepting the A-theory of time. I argue, however, that experience does not favour the A-theory over the B-theory; and that even if the A-theory were true it would not be possible to perceive the passage of time. The main argument for this draws on the constraint that a satisfactory theory of perception must explain why phenomenal characters map uniquely onto perceived worldly features. Thus, if passage is perceived, (...)
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  • Why Does Time Seem to Pass?Simon Prosser - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1):92-116.
    According to the B-theory, the passage of time is an illusion. The B-theory therefore requires an explanation of this illusion before it can be regarded as fullysatisfactory; yet very few B-theorists have taken up the challenge of trying to provide one. In this paper I take some first steps toward such an explanation by first making a methodological proposal, then a hypothesis about a key element in the phenomenology of temporal passage. The methodological proposal focuses onthe representational content of the (...)
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  • The representational theory of consciousness.David Bourget - 2010 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    A satisfactory solution to the problem of consciousness would take the form of a simple yet fully general model that specifies the precise conditions under which any given state of consciousness occurs. Science has uncovered numerous correlations between consciousness and neural activity, but it has not yet come anywhere close to this. We are still looking for the Newtonian laws of consciousness. -/- One of the main difficulties with consciousness is that we lack a language in which to formulate illuminating (...)
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  • Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):404-435.
    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 (...)
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  • (1 other version)The scrambler: An argument against representationalism.Stephen Biggs - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2):pp. 215-236.
    Brentano famously claimed that two features demarcate the mental: consciousness and intentionality. Although he claimed that these features are intimately related, subsequent generations of philosophers rarely treated them together. Recently, however, the tide has turned. Many philosophers now accept that consciousness is intentional, where to be intentional is to have representational content, is to represent ‘things as being thus and so — where, for all that, things need not be that way’. In fact, weak representationalism, which holds that perceptual experiences (...)
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  • Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori.Lydia Patton - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (3):281-289.
    The Marburg neo-Kantians argue that Hermann von Helmholtz's empiricist account of the a priori does not account for certain knowledge, since it is based on a psychological phenomenon, trust in the regularities of nature. They argue that Helmholtz's account raises the 'problem of validity' (Gueltigkeitsproblem): how to establish a warranted claim that observed regularities are based on actual relations. I reconstruct Heinrich Hertz's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Bild theoretic answer to the problem of validity: that scientists and philosophers can depict the (...)
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  • The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program.Uriah Kriegel - 2013 - In Phenomenal Intentionality. , US: Oxford University Press. pp. 1–26.
    We review some of the work already done around the notion of phenomenal intentionality and propose a way of turning this body of work into a self-conscious research program for understanding intentionality.
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  • The Decoupled Representation Theory of the Evolution of Cognition--A Critical Assessment.Dr Wayne Christensen - 2010 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2):361-405.
    Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World ([ 2003 ]) presents a complex, systematically structured theory of the evolution of cognition centered on a concept of decoupled representation. Taking Godfrey-Smith’s ([ 1996 ]) analysis of the evolution of behavioral flexibility as a framework, the theory describes increasingly complex grades of representation beginning with simple detection and culminating with decoupled representation, said to be belief-like, and it characterizes selection forces that drive evolutionary transformations in these forms of representation. Sterelny’s ultimate explanatory target (...)
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  • The Rise and Fall of the Mind-Body Problem.Katalin Balog - forthcoming - In Corine Besson, Anandi Hattiangadi & Romina Padro (eds.), Meaning, Modality and Mind: Essays Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Naming and Necessity. Oxford University Press.
    In this paper, I examine the relationship between physicalism and property dualism in the light of the dialectic between anti-physicalist arguments and physicalist responses. Upon rehearsing the moves of each side, it is hard not to notice that there is a puzzling symmetry between dualist attacks on physicalism and physicalist replies. Each position can be developed in a way to defend itself from attacks from the other position, and it seems that there are neither a priori nor a posteriori grounds (...)
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  • Is knowledge a natural kind?Tuomas K. Pernu - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 142 (3):371 - 386.
    The project of treating knowledge as an empirical object of study has gained popularity in recent naturalistic epistemology. It is argued here that the assumption that such an object of study exists is in tension with other central elements of naturalistic philosophy. Two hypotheses are considered. In the first, “knowledge” is hypothesized to refer to mental states causally responsible for the behaviour of cognitive agents. Here, the relational character of truth creates a problem. In the second hypothesis “knowledge” is hypothesized (...)
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  • Mental representations: The new sense-data?Chuck Stieg - 2004
    The notion of representation has become ubiquitous throughout cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and the cognitive sciences generally. This paper addresses the status of mental representations as entities that have been posited to explain cognition. I do so by examining similarities between mental representations and sense-data in both their characteristics and key arguments offered for each. I hope to show that more caution in the adoption and use of representations in explaining cognition is warranted. Moreover, by paying attention to problematic notions (...)
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  • Color.Barry Maund - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Colors are of philosophical interest for two kinds of reason. One is that colors comprise such a large and important portion of our social, personal and epistemological lives and so a philosophical account of our concepts of color is highly desirable. The second reason is that trying to fit colors into accounts of metaphysics, epistemology and science leads to philosophical problems that are intriguing and hard to resolve. Not surprisingly, these two kinds of reasons are related. The fact that colors (...)
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  • (1 other version)Higher-order theories of consciousness.Peter Carruthers - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Towards a winograd/flores semantics.Peter Mott - 1995 - Minds and Machines 5 (1):69-87.
    A basic theme of Winograd and Flores (1986) is that the principal function of language is to co-ordinate social activity. It is, they claim, from this function that meaning itself arises. They criticise approaches that try to understand meaning through the mechanisms of reference, the Rationalist Tradition as they call it. To seek to ground meaning in social practice is not new, but the approach is presently attractive because of difficulties encountered with the notion of reference. Without taking a view (...)
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  • Reliability and novelty: Information gain in multi-level selection systems. [REVIEW]William Harms - 1997 - Erkenntnis 46 (3):335-363.
    Information about the environment is captured in human biological systems on a variety of interacting levels – in distributions of genes, linguistic particulars, concepts, methods, theories, preferences, and overt behaviors. I investigate some of the basic principles which govern such a hierarchy by constructing a comparatively simple three-level selection model of bee foraging preferences and behaviors. The information-theoretic notion of ''''mutual information'''' is employed as a measure of efficiency in tracking a changing environment, and its appropriateness in epistemological applications is (...)
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  • A complex systems theory of teleology.Wayne Christensen - 1996 - Biology and Philosophy 11 (3):301-320.
    Part I [sections 2–4] draws out the conceptual links between modern conceptions of teleology and their Aristotelian predecessor, briefly outlines the mode of functional analysis employed to explicate teleology, and develops the notion of cybernetic organisation in order to distinguish teleonomic and teleomatic systems. Part II is concerned with arriving at a coherent notion of intentional control. Section 5 argues that intentionality is to be understood in terms of the representational properties of cybernetic systems. Following from this, section 6 argues (...)
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  • Functional analysis and proper functions.Paul E. Griffiths - 1993 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3):409-422.
    The etiological approach to ‘proper functions’ in biology can be strengthened by relating it to Robert Cummins' general treatment of function ascription. The proper functions of a biological trait are the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors. These functions figure in selective explanations of the trait. It is also argued that some recent etiological theories include inaccurate accounts of selective explanation in biology. Finally, a generalization of the notion of selective explanation allows (...)
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  • Representation as epistemic identification.John Dilworth - 2006 - Philo 9 (1):12-31.
    In a previous Philo article, it was shown how properties could be ontologically dispensed with via a representational analysis: to be an X is to comprehensively represent all the properties of an X. The current paper extends that representationalist (RT) theory by explaining representation itself in parallel epistemic rather than ontological terms. On this extended RT (ERT) theory, representations of X, as well as the real X, both may be identified as providing information about X, whether partial or comprehensive. But (...)
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  • The Nature and Implementation of Representation in Biological Systems.Mike Collins - 2009 - Dissertation, City University of New York
    I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...)
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  • A proper understanding of Millikan.Justine Kingsbury - 2006 - Acta Analytica 21 (40):23-40.
    Ruth Millikan’s teleological theory of mental content is complex and often misunderstood. This paper motivates and clarifies some of the complexities of the theory, and shows that paying careful attention to its details yields answers to a number of common objections to teleological theories, in particular, the problem of novel mental states, the problem of functionally false beliefs, and problems about indeterminacy or multiplicity of function.
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  • (1 other version)Suffering without subjectivity.Peter Carruthers - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 121 (2):99-125.
    This paper argues that it is possible for suffering to occur in the absence of phenomenal consciousness – in the absence of a certain sort of experiential subjectivity, that is. (Phenomenal consciousness is the property that some mental states possess, when it is like something to undergo them, or when they have subjective feels, or possess qualia.) So even if theories of phenomenal consciousness that would withhold such consciousness from most species of non-human animal are correct, this neednt mean that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Why the question of animal consciousness might not matter very much.Peter Carruthers - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (1):83-102.
    According to higher-order thought accounts of phenomenal consciousness it is unlikely that many non-human animals undergo phenomenally conscious experiences. Many people believe that this result would have deep and far-reaching consequences. More specifically, they believe that the absence of phenomenal consciousness from the rest of the animal kingdom must mark a radical and theoretically significant divide between ourselves and other animals, with important implications for comparative psychology. I shall argue that this belief is mistaken. Since phenomenal consciousness might be almost (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Philosophy of psychology.Kelby Mason, Chandra Sekhar Sripada & Stephen Stich - 2008 - In Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy. Routledge.
    The 20 sup > th /sup > century has been a tumultuous time in psychology -- a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much (...)
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  • (1 other version)How can a symbol system come into being?David Lumsden - 2005 - Dialogue 44 (1):87-96.
    One holistic thesis about symbols is that a symbol cannot exist singly, but only as apart of a symbol system. There is also the plausible view that symbol systems emerge gradually in an individual, in a group, and in a species. The problem is that symbol holism makes it hard to see how a symbol system can emerge gradually, at least if we are considering the emergence of a first symbol system. The only way it seems possible is if being (...)
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  • (1 other version)Human minds.David Papineau - 2003 - In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons. Cambridge University Press. pp. 159-183.
    Humans are part of the animal kingdom, but their minds differ from those of other animals. They are capable of many things that lie beyond the intellectual powers of the rest of the animal realm. In this paper, I want to ask what makes human minds distinctive. What accounts for the special powers that set humans aside from other animals?
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  • Determination and mental causation.Sara Worley - 1997 - Erkenntnis 46 (3):281-304.
    Yablo suggests that we can understand the possibility of mental causation by supposing that mental properties determine physical properties, in the classic sense of determination according to which red determines scarlet. Determinates and their determinables do not compete for causal relevance, so if mental and physical properties are related as determinable and determinates, they should not compete for causal relevance either. I argue that this solution won''t work. I first construct a more adequate account of determination than that provided by (...)
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  • The Two-Dimensional Content of Consciousness.Simon Prosser - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (3):319 - 349.
    In this paper I put forward a representationalist theory of conscious experience based on Robert Stalnaker's version of two-dimensional modal semantics. According to this theory the phenomenal character of an experience correlates with a content equivalent to what Stalnaker calls the diagonal proposition. I show that the theory is closely related both to functionalist theories of consciousness and to higher-order representational theories. It is also more compatible with an anti-Cartesian view of the mind than standard representationalist theories.
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  • The reflexive theory of perception.John Dilworth - 2005 - Behavior and Philosophy 33 (1):17-40.
    ABSTRACT: The Reflexive Theory of Perception (RTP) claims that perception of an object or property X by an organism Z consists in Z being caused by X to acquire some disposition D toward X itself. This broadly behavioral perceptual theory explains perceptual intentionality and correct versus incorrect, plus successful versus unsuccessful, perception in a plausible evolutionary framework. The theory also undermines cognitive and perceptual modularity assumptions, including informational or purely epistemic views of perception in that, according to the RTP, any (...)
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  • Is there a problem about intentionality?Ansgar Beckermann - 1996 - Erkenntnis 45 (1):1-24.
    The crucial point of the mind-body-problem appears to be that mental phenome- na (events, properties, states) seem to have features which at first sight make it impossible to integrate these phenomena into a naturalistic world view, i.e. to identify them with, or to reduce them to, physical phenomena.1 In the contemp- orary discussion, there are mainly two critical features which are important in this context. The first of these is the feature of intentional states, e.g. beliefs and desires, to have (...)
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  • SINBaD neurosemantics: A theory of mental representation.Dan Ryder - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):211-240.
    I present an account of mental representation based upon the ‘SINBAD’ theory of the cerebral cortex. If the SINBAD theory is correct, then networks of pyramidal cells in the cerebral cortex are appropriately described as representing, or more specifically, as modelling the world. I propose that SINBAD representation reveals the nature of the kind of mental representation found in human and animal minds, since the cortex is heavily implicated in these kinds of minds. Finally, I show how SINBAD neurosemantics can (...)
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  • Comment on Ryder's SINBAD neurosemantics: Is teleofunction isomorphism the way to understand representations?Marius Usher - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):241-248.
    The merit of the SINBAD model is to provide an explicit mechanism showing how the cortex may come to develop detectors responding to correlated properties and therefore corresponding to the sources of these correlations. Here I argue that, contrary to the article, SINBAD neurosemantics does not need to rely on teleofunctions to solve the problem of misrepresentation. A number of difficulties for the teleofunction theories of content are reviewed and an alternative theory based on categorization performance and statistical relations is (...)
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  • General-purpose content.Carolyn Price - 2000 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (2):123-133.
    In this paper, I consider the objection, raised by Radu Bogdan, that a teleological theory of content is unable to ascribe content to a general-purpose, doxastic system. I begin by giving some attention to the notion of general-purpose representation, and suggest that this notion can best be understood as what I term "interest-independent" representation. I then outline Bogdan's objection in what I take to be its simplest form. I attempt to counter the objection by explaining how a teleologist might ascribe (...)
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  • Teleosemantics without natural selection.Marshall Abrams - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):97-116.
    Ruth Millikan and others advocate theories which attempt to naturalize wide mental content (e.g. beliefs.
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  • Pure informational semantics and the narrow/broad dichotomy.Murat Aydede - 1997 - In Dunja Jutronić (ed.), The Maribor papers in naturalized semantics. Maribor: Pedagoška fakulteta Maribor. pp. 157.
    The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational mental states, people have routinely denied that they have any (...)
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  • (1 other version)Acquaintance and the Mind-Body Problem.Katalin Balog - 2012 - In Simone Gozzano & Christopher S. Hill (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 16-43.
    In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about our qualia. In a certain sense my account is neutral between physicalist and dualist accounts of consciousness. As will be clear, a dualist could adopt the account I will offer (...)
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  • Sensory awareness is not a wide physical relation: An empirical argument against externalist intentionalism.Adam Pautz - 2006 - Noûs 40 (2):205-240.
    Phenomenal intentionality is a singular form of intentionality. Science shows it is internally-determined. So standard externalist models for reducing intentionality don't apply to it.
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  • (2 other versions)Phenomenal concepts and higher-order experiences.Peter Carruthers - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2):316-336.
    Relying on a range of now-familiar thought-experiments, it has seemed to many philosophers that phenomenal consciousness is beyond the scope of reductive explanation. (Phenomenal consciousness is a form of state-consciousness, which contrasts with creature-consciousness, or perceptual-consciousness. The different forms of state-consciousness include various kinds of access-consciousness, both first-order and higher-order--see Rosenthal, 1986; Block, 1995; Lycan, 1996; Carruthers, 2000. Phenomenal consciousness is the property that mental states have when it is like something to possess them, or when they have subjectively-accessible feels; (...)
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