The paper proposes an outline of a reconciliatory approach to the perennial controversy between epistemological realism and anti-realism (constructionism). My main conceptual source in explaining this view is the philosophy of pragmatism, more specifically, the epistemological theories of George H. Mead, John Dewey, and also William James’ radical empiricism. First, the paper analyzes the pragmatic treatment of the goal-directedness of action, especially with regard to Mead’s notion of attitudes, and relates it to certain contemporary epistemological theories provided by the cognitive (...) sciences (Maturana, Rizzolatti, Clark). Against this background, the paper presents a philosophical as well as empirical justification of why we should interpret the environment and its objects in terms of possibilities for action. In Mead’s view, the objects and events of our world emerge within stable patterns of organism-environment interactions, which he called “perspectives”. According to pragmatism as well as the aforementioned cognitive scientists, perception and other cognitive processes include not only neural processes in our heads but also the world itself. Elaborating on Mead’s concept of perspectives, the paper argues in favor of the epistemological position called “constructive realism.”. (shrink)

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 (...) content in a particular case - the case of a perceptual judgement whose content is learned. I reject the idea that the teleologist can appeal to the way in which the subject has used the judgement, or its constituent concepts, in the past, on the grounds that it is possible for the subject to produce judgements and concepts that never help her to satisfy any of her interests. Instead, my account depends on the idea that the process of learning is regulated by a mechanism whose function is to produce a harmony between the information carried by perceptual judgements and the way in which they are used in inference. (shrink)