The phenomenon of digital computation is explained (often differently) in computer science, computer engineering and more broadly in cognitive science. Although the semantics and implications of malfunctions have received attention in the philosophy of biology and philosophy of technology, errors in computational systems remain of interest only to computer science. Miscomputation has not gotten the philosophical attention it deserves. Our paper fills this gap by offering a taxonomy of miscomputations. This taxonomy is underpinned by a conceptual analysis of the design (...) and implementation of conventional computational systems at various levels of abstraction. It shows that ‘malfunction’ as it is typically used in the philosophy of artefacts only represents one type of miscomputation. (shrink)

This paper overviews the current status of debates on tracking representationalism, the view that phenomenal consciousness is a matter of tracking features of one's environment in a certain way. We overview the main arguments for the view and the main objections and challenges it faces. We close with a discussion of alternative versions of representationalism that might overcome the shortcomings of tracking representationalism.

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.

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 (...) ties content to function, the paper also offers an account of the evolutionary function of moral judgements. (shrink)

Teleological Theories of mental representation are probably the most promising naturalistic accounts of intentionality. However, it is widely known that these theories suffer from a major objection: the Indeterminacy Problem. The most common reply to this problem employs the Target of Selection Argument, which is based on Sober’s distinction between selection for and selection of . Unfortunately, some years ago the Target of Selection Argument came into serious attack in a famous paper by Goode and Griffiths. Since then, the question (...) of the validity of the Target of Selection Argument in the context of the Indeterminacy Problem has remained largely untouched. In this essay, I argue that both the Target of Selection Argument and Goode and Griffiths’ criticisms to it misuse Sober’s analysis in important respects. (shrink)

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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 (...) cause the mental representations of dogs. (shrink)

A persistent boast of the historical approach to functions is that functional properties are normative. The claim is that a token trait retains its functional status even when it is defective, diseased, or damaged and consequently unable to perform the relevant task. This is because historical functional categories are defined in terms of some sort of historical success -- success in natural selection, typically -- which imposes a norm upon the performance of descendent tokens. Descendents thus are supposed to perform (...) the associated task even when they cannot. The conceit, then, is that malfunctions are explicable in terms of historical success. The aim of this paper is to challenge this conceit. My thesis is that the historical approach to functions lacks the resources with which to account for the possibility of malfunctions. If functional types are defined in terms of historical success, then tokens that lack the defining property due to defect, and tokens that have lost the defining property due to disease or damage, are excluded from the functional category. Historically based malfunctions, in consequence, are impossible. The historical approach is no better than its non-historical competitors in accounting for the presumed normativity of functional properties. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement (...) in philosophy of science drew attention to the fact that many experimental phenomena have a ‘life of their own’: the conviction that they are real is not dependent on the theories used to characterise and explain them. I suggest that something similar can be true of descriptive phenomena, and that many homologies are phenomena of this kind. As a result the descriptive biology of form and function has a life of its own—a degree of epistemological independence from the theories that explain form and function. I also suggest that the two major ‘homology concepts’ in contemporary biology, usually seen as two competing definitions, are in reality complementary elements of the biological explanation of homology. (shrink)

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 (...) argued to provide a better account and to come closer to the practice in neuroscience and to powerful intuitions on swampkinds and on broad/narrow content. (shrink)

"According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys." (Jerry Fodor, The Elm and the Expert, p.32).

Representations seem to play a major role in many neuroscientific explanations. Philosophers have long attempted to properly define what it means for a neural state to be a representation of a specific content. Teleosemantic theories of content which characterize representations, in part, by appealing to a historical notion of function, are often regarded as our best path towards an account of neural representations. This paper points to the anti-representationalist consequences of these accounts. I argue that assuming such teleosemantic views will (...) deprive representations of their explanatory role in computational explanations. My argument rests on the claim that many explanations in cognitive neuroscience are entirely independent of any historical considerations. In making this claim, I will also offer an adapted version of the famous Swampperson thought experiment, which is better suited to discussions of subpersonal neural representations. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Cummins Functions Approach to neural representations, which aims to capture the notion of representation that is relevant to contemporary neuroscientific practice. CFA shares the common view that “to be a representation of X” amounts to “having the function of tracking X,” but maintains that the relevant notion of function is defined by Robert Cummins’s account. Thus, CFA offers a notion of neural representation that is dependent on explanatory context. I argue that CFA can account for the (...) normativity of neural representations, and defend its dependence on explanations. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and even the lay public commonly accept that schizophrenia stems from a biological or internal ‘dysfunction.’ However, this assessment is typically accompanied neither by well-defined criteria for determining that something is dysfunctional nor empirical evidence that schizophrenia satisfies those criteria. In the following, a concept of biological function is developed and applied to a neurobiological model of schizophrenia. It concludes that current evidence does not warrant the claim that schizophrenia stems from a biological dysfunction, and, in fact, that (...) unusual neural structures associated with schizophrenia may have functional or adaptive significance. The fact that current evidence is ambivalent between these two possibilities (dysfunction versus adaptive function) implies that schizophrenia researchers should be much more cautious in using the ‘dysfunction’ label than they currently are. This has implications for both psychiatric treatment as well as public perception of mental disorders. (shrink)

Peter Godfrey-Smith and Nicholas Shea have argued that standard versions of teleosemantics render explanations of successful behavior by appealing to true beliefs circular and, consequently, non-explanatory. As an alternative, Shea has recently suggested an original teleosemantic account (that he calls ?Infotel-semantics?), which is supposed to be immune to the problem of circularity. The paper argues that the standard version of teleosemantics has a satisfactory reply to the circularity objection and that, in any case, Infotel-semantics is not better off than standard (...) teleosemantics. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...) which makes progress in the treatment of this family of problems. I describe a procedure to derive a (unique) homeostatic property cluster [HPC] from facts having to do with the properties that a certain indicator relied on, in the events leading to its fixation in a certain population. This HPC is the one that should figure in the content attribution to the indicator in question. (shrink)

Teleosemantics is a naturalistic research programme in the philosophy of mind and language. Its ambition is to achieve a reduction, first, of mental content to teleological function; second, of teleological function to non-teleological notions. This article explores the second step, particularly as envisaged by Millikan’s etiological theory of function.

How do frogs represent their prey? This question has been the focus of many debates among proponents of naturalistic theories of content, especially among proponents of teleosemantics. This is because alternative versions of the teleosemantic approach have different implications for the content of frog representations, and it is still controversial which of these content ascriptions (if any) is the most adequate. Theorists often appeal to intuitions here, but this is a dubious strategy. In this paper, I suggest an alternative, empirical (...) test for theories of content. I propose that we should examine whether a theory generates content ascriptions that fit with our best scientific explanations of animal behavior. I then focus on the most prominent version of teleosemantics, Ruth Millikan’s consumer-oriented approach, and argue that it fails the empirical test in the frog case, since it yields a content ascription that (i) does not include properties that should be included (namely, being small, dark and moving ) and (ii) includes a property that should not be included (namely, being frog food ). This is an important result in itself, but it also demonstrates by way of example how progress can be made in the complex debate about theories of content. (shrink)

Mechanisms are a way of explaining how biological phenomena work rather than why single elements of biological systems are there. However, mechanisms are usually described as physiological entities, and little or no attention is paid to malfunction as an independent theoretical concept. On the other hand, malfunction is the main focus of interest of applied sciences such as medicine. In this paper I argue that malfunctions are parts of pathological mechanisms, which should be considered separate theoretical entities, conceptually having a (...) priority over physiological sequences. While pathological mechanisms can be described in terms of a Cummins-like mechanistic explanation, they show some unnoticed peculiarities when compared to physiological ones. Some features of pathological mechanisms are considered, such as outcome variability, ambivalence and dependence on a range. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, but the main points of the paper concern not (...) merely how to classify, but how to understand, the theories. Also, though the paper takes theories of mental content as a case study, much of the discussion is applicable to theories of other phenomena. To a first approximation, the difference between the traditional and the proposed taxonomies turns on whether we classify theories of content by, on the one hand, their implications for a non-redundant supervenience base for content facts (i.e., for facts about what contents thoughts have) or, on the other, by their constitutive accounts of content. By a "constitutive account," I mean the kind of elucidation of the nature of a phenomenon that theorists have tried to give for, for example, knowledge, justice, personal identity, consciousness, convention, heat, and limit. The tendency to taxonomize by supervenience base is encouraged, I suggest, by a failure to keep clearly in view a distinction between constitutive and modal determination. Many philosophers would accept that a constitutive account cannot be captured in purely modal terms. Giving a constitutive account is not the same as specifying modally necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, philosophers often try to cash constitutive claims in modal terms. A case in point is that theories of content tend to be conceptualized in terms of the theories' implications for a supervenience base for content facts. My thesis goes beyond the by-now somewhat familiar proposition that not all modal determinants of a phenomenon are constitutive determinants. One who has taken that point on board might nevertheless conceive of a philosophical account as an attempt to specify constitutive determinants of the target phenomenon that make up a non-redundant supervenience base for the phenomenon. Shoehorning a philosophical account into this form leaves out elements that are modally redundant, but may be explanatorily or ontologically significant. For example, when a constitutive account has multiple levels, the different levels will typically be modally redundant. Formulating the account as a specification of a supervenience base of constitutive determinants will therefore flatten the account into a single level. Many of my arguments can be illustrated by considering the place of normativity in the theory of content. The new taxonomy gives a distinct niche to normative theories of content - theories that explain a thought's having a certain content at least in part in terms of the obtaining of normative facts. By contrast, on a traditional map, normative theories are invisible as such because normative facts supervene on non-normative ones. (shrink)

In reworking a variety of biological concepts, Developmental Systems Theory (DST) has made frequent use of parity of reasoning. We have done this to show, for instance, that factors that have similar sorts of impact on a developing organism tend nevertheless to be invested with quite different causal importance. We have made similar arguments about evolutionary processes. Together, these analyses have allowed DST not only to cut through some age-old muddles about the nature of development, but also to effect a (...) long-delayed reintegration of development into evolutionary theory. Our penchant for causal symmetry, however (or 'causal democracy', as it has recently been termed), has sometimes been misunderstood. This paper shows that causal symmetry is neither a platitude about multiple influences nor a denial of useful distinctions, but a powerful way of exposing hidden assumptions and opening up traditional formulations to fruitful change. (shrink)

Looking for an adequate explication of the concept of a biological function, several authors have proposed to link function to design. Unfortunately, known explications of biological design in turn refer to functions. The concept of general design I will introduce here breaks up this circle. I specify design with respect to its ontogenetic role. This allows function to be based on design without making reference to the history of the design, or to the phylogeny of an organism, while retaining the (...) normative aspect of function ascriptions. The concept is applicable to the function and design of technical artifacts as well. Several problems well known with other definitions can be overcome by this approach. (shrink)

Causal theories of mental content (CTs) ground certain aspects of a concept's meaning in the causal relations a concept bears to what it represents. Section 1 explains the problems CTs are meant to solve and introduces terminology commonly used to discuss these problems. Section 2 specifies criteria that any acceptable CT must satisfy. Sections 3, 4, and 5 critically survey various CTs, including those proposed by Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, Ruth Garrett Millikan, David Papineau, Dennis Stampe, Dan Ryder, and the (...) author himself. The final section considers general objections to the causal approach. (shrink)

One powerful and influential approach to mental representation analyses representation in terms of biological functions, and biological functions in terms of histories of natural selection. This “teleosemantic” package, however, faces a familiar challenge. Surely representation depends only on the present-day structures of cognitive systems, and not on their historical provenance. “Swampman” drives the point home. Suppose a bolt of lightning creates an intrinsic duplicate of a human being in a steamy tropic swamp; will not this creature be representing its surroundings, (...) despite its lack of any selectional history? In this paper I shall answer this challenge by showing how a proper appreciation of the structure of natural kinds in general, and of mental representation in particular, implies that selectional histories are indeed built into the nature of mental representation. In particular, I shall address a recent argument by Peter Schulte against this general line of argument. (shrink)

Teleosemantics is the view that mental content depends on etiological function. Moral adaptationism is the view that human morality is an evolved adaptation. Jointly, these two views offer new venues for naturalist metaethics. Several authors have seen, in the conjunction of these views, the promise of assigning naturalistically respectable descriptive content to moral judgments. One such author is Neil Sinclair, who has offered a blueprint for how to conduct teleosemantic metaethics with the help of moral adaptationism. In this paper, I (...) argue that the prospects for assigning descriptive content to moral judgments on the basis of teleosemantics are bad. I develop my argument in dialogue with Sinclair’s paper and argue that, although Sinclair’s account of the evolution of morality is plausible, the teleosemantic account of the descriptive content of moral judgments which he bases thereon suffers from crucial shortcomings. I argue further that, given some minimal plausible assumptions about the evolution of morality made by Sinclair, no assignment of descriptive content is possible. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the combination of moral adaptationism and teleosemantics suggests that moral judgments lack descriptive content. (shrink)

Nicholas Shea offers Varitel Semantics as a naturalistic account of mental content. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea’s own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic functions.

Teleology is the study of ends and goals, things whose existence or occurrence is purposive. Aristotle’s views on teleology are of seminal importance, particularly his views regarding biological functions or purposes. This article surveys core examples of Aristotle’s invocations of teleology; explores philosophically puzzling aspects of teleology (including their normativity and the fact that ends can, apparently, act as causes despite never coming to exist); articulates two of Aristotle’s arguments defending commitment to teleology against critics who attempt to explain nature (...) solely through appeal to nonteleological efficient and material causes; and argues that Aristotle was an ontological realist when it came to teleology: he conceived of ends as an irreducible and ineliminable aspect of the causal structure of reality. Other interpretive controversies are addressed more briefly. (shrink)

Naturalistic theories of representation seek to specify the conditions that must be met for an entity to represent another entity. Although these approaches have been relatively successful in certain areas, such as communication theory or genetics, many doubt that they can be employed to naturalize complex cognitive representations. In this essay I identify some of the difficulties for developing a teleosemantic theory of cognitive representations and provide a strategy for accommodating them: to look into models of signaling in evolutionary game (...) theory. I show how these models can be used to formulate teleosemantics and expand it in new directions. (shrink)

This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, (...) despite a lack of relevant causal efficacy on the part of such functions. (shrink)

Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is clearly distinguished from being false or being irrational. Anna might falsely believe that his husband is having an affair but it might just be a simple mistake. Again, Sam might irrationally believe, without good evidence, that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the other hand, when a patient with brain damage caused by a car accident believes that his father was replaced by (...) an imposter or another patient with schizophrenia believes that “The Organization” painted the shops on a street in red and green to convey a message, these beliefs are not merely false or irrational. They are pathological. What makes delusions pathological? This paper explores the negative features because of which delusional beliefs are pathological. First, I critically examine the proposals according to which delusional beliefs are pathological because of (1) their strangeness, (2) their extreme irrationality, (3) their resistance to folk psychological explanations or (4) impaired responsibility-grounding capacities of people with them. I present some counterexamples as well as theoretical problems for these proposals. Then, I argue, following Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder, that delusional beliefs are pathological because they involve some sorts of harmful malfunctions. In other words, they have a significant negative impact on wellbeing (=harmful) and, in addition, some psychological mechanisms, directly or indirectly related to them, fail to perform the jobs for which they were selected in the past (=malfunctioning). An objection to the proposal is that delusional beliefs might not involve any malfunctions. For example, they might be playing psychological defence functions properly. Another objection is that a harmful malfunction is not sufficient for something to be pathological. For example, false beliefs might involve some malfunctions according to teleosemantics, a popular naturalist account of mental content, but harmful false beliefs do not have to be pathological. I examine those objections in detail and show that they should be rejected after all. (shrink)

It is a plain fact that biology makes use of terms and expressions commonly spoken of as teleological. Biologists frequently speak of the function of biological items. They may also say that traits are 'supposed to' perform some of their effects, claim that traits are 'for' specific effects, or that organisms have particular traits 'in order to' engage in specific interactions. There is general agreement that there must be something useful about this linguistic practice but it is controversial whether it (...) is entirely appropriate, and if so why it is.Many theorists have defended the use of seemingly teleological terms by appeal to an etiological notion of function (Wright, 1973; Millikan, 1984, 2002; Neander, 1991; .. (shrink)

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (...) (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic. (shrink)

Ruth Millikan and others advocate theories which attempt to naturalize wide mental content (e.g. beliefs.

Many people think the mind evolved. Some of them think it had to evolve. They think the mind not only has a history, but a history essential to its very existence.

With the aim of giving a naturalistic foundation to the notion of mental representation, Fred Dretske (1981;1988) has put forward and developed the idea that the relation between a representation and its intentional content is grounded on an informational relation. In this explanatory model, mental representations are conceived of as states of organisms which a learning process has selected to play a functional role: a necessary condition for fulfilling this role is that the organism or some proper part of it (...) (presumably situated in the brain) is a natural indicator of the occurrence of a determinate type of event in the environment of the organism (or in the organism but outside of the proper part serving as the indicator). A state of the organism is a natural indicator of a type of event if and only if it carries information about the occurrence of that type of event. Jerry Fodor (1987) has devised and followed another strategy which consists in considering the relation between a mental representation and its intentional object as a relation of lawful, or nomic, dependence. A representational state of an organism has an objective content in virtue of the existence of a relation of nomic dependence between this state - presumably a property of the brain of the organism - and some objective property in the world. This dependence also creates a regular correlation between the occurrences of representational states of a certain type and the states of affairs whose type is their representational content. Both approaches encounter indeterminacy problems: for each, there exist situations in which the explanatory model chosen - information flow or nomic dependence - does not succeed in selecting, purely on the basis of the constraints characteristic of that model, one out of several potential contents for a given representational state. In such cases, that state is related to more than one type of events in accordance with the informational or nomic constraints imposed by those theories. In what follows, I examine an attempt by Pierre Jacob (1997) to solve two problems of indeterminacy threatening the informational theory of mental representation. According to Jacob, one of these problems can be solved with the help of the distinction between the source which is the target of the information and the channel over which the information is transmitted, whereas the solution to the other problem requires the introduction of the concept of function. I shall begin with a consideration of the distinction, with respect to a situation of information transmission, between the source and the channel. I argue that both the source and the channel, and thus the information transmitted, depend not only on the external situation which characterises the source, the channel and the receiving organism, but also on the previous knowledge and the informational needs of the receiver. I then try to show that this relativity of information undermines the solution Jacob proposes to one of the problems of indeterminacy of representational content. Finally, I examine the possibility considered by Dretske and Jacob to solve this 'problem of the reference class' due to the mentioned relativity of information, by grounding the flow of information on lawful dependence instead of statistical dependence. I shall propose two arguments showing first that these two groundings are not equivalent and second that nomic dependence is inappropriate as a grounding for information flow. I conclude by suggesting that the problem of the reference class can be solved within the framework of the informational approach, on the condition of enriching it with functional considerations. (shrink)

I defend and revise the systematic account of normative functions (teleofunctions), as recently developed by Gerhard Schlosser and by W. D. Christensen and M. H. Bickhard. This account proposes that teleofunctions are had by structures that play certain kinds of roles in complex systems. This theory is an alternative to the historical etiological account of teleofunctions, developed by Ruth Millikan and others. The historical etiological account is susceptible to a general ontological problem that has been under-appreciated, and that offers important (...) reasons to adopt the systematic account. However, the systematic account must be revised to allow for two distinct kinds of teleofunctions in order to avoid another ontological problem. (shrink)

During the 1990s, many philosophers wrestled with the problem of function indeterminacy. Although interest in the problem has waned, I argue that solving the problem is of value for biomedical research and practice. This is because a solution to the problem is required in order to specify rigorously the conditions under which a given item is “dysfunctional.” In the following I revisit a solution developed originally by Neander, which uses functional analysis to solve the problem. I situate her solution in (...) the framework of mechanistic explanation and suggest two improvements. (shrink)

Mnoge biološke funkcije dopuštaju stupnjevanje. Na primjer, lučenje određenog hormona u organizmu može biti na višoj ili nižoj razini, u usporedbi s istim organizmom drugom prilikom ili u usporedbi s drugim organizmima. Koje razine funkcioniranja predstavljaju slučajeve disfunkcije; gdje da povučemo crtu? To je kvantitativni problem za teorije disfunkcije i bolesti. Cilj mi je braniti verziju bioloških teorija disfunkcije kako bih se uhvatio u koštac s ovim problemom. Međutim, također ću dopustiti da evaluativna razmatranja uđu u teoriju bolesti. Moj argument (...) se temelji na razlikovanju između biološke i kliničke perspektive. Prema mom mišljenju, bolest je ograničena na slučajeve koji spadaju u granice bioloških disfunkcija. Odgovor na kvantitativni problem ne zahtijeva proizvoljne odluke ili društveno vrijednosne sudove. Stoga se zalažem za nearbitrarnu metodu koja se temelji na činjenicama kako bi se riješio kvantitativni problem. Ipak, nisu sve biološke disfunkcije instance bolesti. Dodavanje kliničke perspektive omogućuje nam da spriječimo potencijalnu preveliku uključenost biološke perspektive, zato što postavlja dodatna ograničenja za određivanje granica bolesti. (shrink)

The Developmental Systems approach to evolution is defended against the alternative extended replicator approach of Sterelny, Smith and Dickison (1996). A precise definition is provided of the spatial and temporal boundaries of the life-cycle that DST claims is the unit of evolution. Pacé Sterelny et al., the extended replicator theory is not a bulwark against excessive holism. Everything which DST claims is replicated in evolution can be shown to be an extended replicator on Sterelny et al.s definition. Reasons are given (...) for scepticism about the heuristic value claimed for the extended replicator concept. For every competitive, individualistic insight the replicator theorist has a cooperative, systematic blindspot. (shrink)

To ascribe a telos is to ascribe a norm or standard of performance. That fact underwrites the plausibility of, say, teleological theories of mind. Teleosemantics, for example, relies on the normative character of teleology to solve the problem of “intentional inexistence”: a misrepresentation is just a malfunction. If the teleological ascriptions of such theories to natural systems, e.g., the neurological structures of the brain, are to be literally true, then it must be literally true that norms can exist independent of (...) intentional and psychological agency. Davies, for one, has argued that such norms are impossible within a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, teleological theories of mind, for example, cannot be literally true. I will show, however, that the truth conditions on normative statements do not presuppose intentional and psychological agency and, further, that a selectional regime is one naturalistic mechanism that satisfies those truth conditions. Norms, then, exist in the world independent of intentional and psychological agency. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend the teleological theory of representation against an objection by Jerry Fodor. I shall argue that previous attempts to answer this objection fail to recognize the importance of belief-desire structure for the teleological theory of representation.

On receiver-based teleosemantic theories of representation, the chemical states of the circadian clocks in animal, plant and cyanobacterial cells constitute signals of future states of affairs, often the rising and setting of the sun. This signalling is much more rigid than sophisticated representational systems like human language, but it is not simple on all dimensions. In most organisms the clock regulates many different circadian rhythms. The process of entrainment ensures that the mapping between chemical states of the clock and the (...) daily light-dark cycle is adjusted to deal with seasonal changes. In regulating anticipatory behaviour, the states of the clock look forward both to the time the behaviour is supposed to happen and the later time when the anticipated circumstances are supposed to arise. The case of the circadian clock shows that purely indicative signals can arise in very basic biological systems and brings into sharp relief the trade-offs involved in characterizing representational systems. On receiver-based teleosemantic theories, future-directed signals are not restricted to complex multicellular organisms but are ubiquitous in the biological world. (shrink)