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  1. Origins of Objectivity.Tyler Burge - 2010 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Tyler Burge presents an original study of the most primitive ways in which individuals represent the physical world. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind.
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  • Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.Ruth Millikan - 1984 - Behaviorism 14 (1):51-56.
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  • Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 2004 - MIT Press.
    How the various things that are said to have meaning—purpose, natural signs, linguistic signs, perceptions, and thoughts—are related to one another.
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  • In defense of proper functions.Ruth Millikan - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (June):288-302.
    I defend the historical definition of "function" originally given in my Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984a). The definition was not offered in the spirit of conceptual analysis but is more akin to a theoretical definition of "function". A major theme is that nonhistorical analyses of "function" fail to deal adequately with items that are not capable of performing their functions.
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  • The Study of Instinct.N. Tinbergen - 1954 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 5 (17):72-76.
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  • Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense.Karen Neander - 1991 - Philosophy of Science 58 (2):168-184.
    In this paper I defend an etiological theory of biological functions (according to which the proper function of a trait is the effect for which it was selected by natural selection) against three objections which have been influential. I argue, contrary to Millikan, that it is wrong to base our defense of the theory on a rejection of conceptual analysis, for conceptual analysis does have an important role in philosophy of science. I also argue that biology requires a normative notion (...)
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  • Misrepresentation.Fred Dretske - 1986 - In Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Belief: Form, Content, and Function. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 17--36.
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  • Program explanation: A general perspective.Frank Jackson & Philip Pettit - 1990 - Analysis 50 (2):107-17.
    Some properties are causally relevant for a certain effect, others are not. In this paper we describe a problem for our understanding of this notion and then offer a solution in terms of the notion of a program explanation.
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  • (1 other version)Mechanism, purpose, and explanatory exclusion.Jaegwon Kim - 1989 - Philosophical Perspectives 3:77-108.
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  • (7 other versions)Philosophical Naturalism.David Papineau - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4):1070-1077.
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  • (1 other version)Special sciences: Still autonomous after all these years.Jerry Fodor - 1997 - Philosophical Perspectives 11:149-63.
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  • (1 other version)Anti-Reductionism Slaps Back.Ned Block - 1997 - Noûs 31 (s11):107-132.
    For nearly thirty years, there has been a consensus (at least in English-speaking countries) that reductionism is a mistake and that there are autonomous special sciences. This consensus has been based on an argument from multiple realizability. But Jaegwon Kim has argued persuasively that the multiple realizability argument is flawed.1 I will sketch the recent history of the debate, arguing that much --but not all--of the anti-reductionist consensus survives Kim's critique. This paper was originally titled "Anti-Reductionism Strikes Back", but in (...)
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  • (1 other version)The concept of information in biology.John Maynard Smith - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):177-194.
    The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined, by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response (...)
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  • A Statistical Referential Theory of Content: Using Information Theory to Account for Misrepresentation.Marius Usher - 2001 - Mind and Language 16 (3):311-334.
    A naturalistic scheme of primitive conceptual representations is proposed using the statistical measure of mutual information. It is argued that a concept represents, not the class of objects that caused its tokening, but the class of objects that is most likely to have caused it (had it been tokened), as specified by the statistical measure of mutual information. This solves the problem of misrepresentation which plagues causal accounts, by taking the representation relation to be determined via ordinal relationships between conditional (...)
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  • Program explanation: a general perspective.Frank Jackson & Alonso Church - 1990 - Analysis 50 (2):107.
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  • Naturalising Representational Content.Nicholas Shea - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (5):496-509.
    This paper sets out a view about the explanatory role of representational content and advocates one approach to naturalising content – to giving a naturalistic account of what makes an entity a representation and in virtue of what it has the content it does. It argues for pluralism about the metaphysics of content and suggests that a good strategy is to ask the content question with respect to a variety of predictively successful information processing models in experimental psychology and cognitive (...)
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  • A teleosemantic approach to information in the brain.Rosa Cao - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (1):49-71.
    The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...)
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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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  • Having Thought.John Haugeland - 1999 - Philosophy 74 (290):606-609.
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  • Mental Causation.Karen Bennett - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (2):316-337.
    Concerns about ‘mental causation’ are concerns about how it is possible for mental states to cause anything to happen. How does what we believe, want, see, feel, hope, or dread manage to cause us to act? Certain positions on the mind-body problem—including some forms of physicalism—make such causation look highly problematic. This entry sketches several of the main reasons to worry, and raises some questions for further investigation.
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  • Teleosemantics and Indeterminacy.Manolo Martínez - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (4):427-453.
    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 (...)
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  • Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2006 - In Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays. New York: Oxford: Clarendon Press.
    The "teleosemantic" program is part of the attempt to give a naturalistic explanation of the semantic properties of mental representations. The aim is to show how the internal states of a wholly physical agent could, as a matter of objective fact, represent the world beyond them. The most popular approach to solving this problem has been to use concepts of physical correlation with some kinship to those employed in information theory (Dretske 1981, 1988; Fodor 1987, 1990). Teleosemantics, which tries to (...)
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  • On the theoretical role of "genetic coding".Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (1):26-44.
    The role played by the concept of genetic coding in biology is discussed. I argue that this concept makes a real contribution to solving a specific problem in cell biology. But attempts to make the idea of genetic coding do theoretical work elsewhere in biology, and in philosophy of biology, are probably mistaken. In particular, the concept of genetic coding should not be used (as it often is) to express a distinction between the traits of whole organisms that are coded (...)
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  • Toward an Informational Teleosemantics.Karen Neander - 2012 - In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 21--40.
    This chapter contains section titles: Introduction Response Functions Information and Singular Causation The Functions of Sensory Representations The Contents of Sensory Representations: The Problem of Error The Contents of Sensory Representation: The Distality Problem.
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  • Why paramecia don't have mental representations.Jerry A. Fodor - 1986 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1):3-23.
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  • Anti-representationalism and the dynamical stance.Anthony Chemero - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (4):625-647.
    Arguments in favor of anti-representationalism in cognitive science often suffer from a lack of attention to detail. The purpose of this paper is to fill in the gaps in these arguments, and in so doing show that at least one form of anti- representationalism is potentially viable. After giving a teleological definition of representation and applying it to a few models that have inspired anti- representationalist claims, I argue that anti-representationalism must be divided into two distinct theses, one ontological, one (...)
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  • Animal minds and the possession of concepts.Albert Newen & Andreas Bartels - 2007 - Philosophical Psychology 20 (3):283 – 308.
    In the recent literature on concepts, two extreme positions concerning animal minds are predominant: the one that animals possess neither concepts nor beliefs, and the one that some animals possess concepts as well as beliefs. A characteristic feature of this controversy is the lack of consensus on the criteria for possessing a concept or having a belief. Addressing this deficit, we propose a new theory of concepts which takes recent case studies of complex animal behavior into account. The main aim (...)
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  • Perceptual representations: a teleosemantic answer to the breadth-of-application problem.Peter Https://Orcidorg288X Schulte - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (1):119-136.
    Teleosemantic theories of representation are often criticized as being “too liberal”, i.e. as categorizing states as representations which are not representational at all. Recently, a powerful version of this objection has been put forth by Tyler Burge. Focusing on perception, Burge defends the claim that all teleosemantic theories apply too broadly, thereby missing what is distinctive about representation. Contra Burge, I will argue in this paper that there is a teleosemantic account of perceptual states that does not fall prey to (...)
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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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  • Information in genetics and developmental biology: Comments on Maynard Smith.Sahotra Sarkar - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):208-213.
    Maynard Smith notes that he provides a natural history and not a philosophical analysis of the use of concepts of information in contemporary biology. Just a natural history, however rich, would do little to resolve the ongoing controversy about the role of these concepts in biology. None of the disputants deny that the biological use of these concepts is pervasive. The dispute is about whether these concepts—and the framework in which they are embedded—continue to be of explanatory value in contemporary (...)
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  • Moving Beyond Metaphors.Chris Eliasmith - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (10):493-520.
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  • A consumer‐based teleosemantics for animal signals.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):864-875.
    Ethological theory standardly attributes representational content to animal signals. In this article I first assess whether Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantic theory accounts for the content of animal signals. I conclude that it does not, because many signals do not exhibit the required sort of cooperation between signal‐producing and signal‐consuming devices. It is then argued that Kim Sterelny’s proposal, while not requiring cooperation, sometimes yields the wrong content. Finally, I outline an alternative view, according to which consumers alone are responsible for conferring (...)
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  • Basic minds.Kim Sterelny - 1995 - Philosophical Perspectives 9 (AI, Connectionism and Philosophi):251-70.
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  • Meaning and Mental Representation.Ruth Garrett Millikan - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (2):422.
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  • The "genetic program" program: A commentary on Maynard Smith on information in biology.Kim Sterelny - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):195-201.
    In many texts on evolution the reader will find a characteristic depiction of inheritance and evolution, one showing the generations of an evolving population linked only by a causal flow from genotype to genotype. On this view, the genotype of each organism in this population plays a dual role as both the motor of individual development and as the sole causal channel across the generations. This picture is known to be literally false. In many species, parents exert direct causal influence (...)
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  • Signaling without cooperation.Marc Artiga - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):357-378.
    Ethological theories usually attribute semantic content to animal signals. To account for this fact, many biologists and philosophers appeal to some version of teleosemantics. However, this picture has recently came under attack: while mainstream teleosemantics assumes that representational systems must cooperate, some biologists and philosophers argue that in certain cases signaling can evolve within systems lacking common interest. In this paper I defend the standard view from this objection.
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  • Are experiences conscious?Fred Dretske - 1995 - In Naturalizing the Mind. MIT Press.
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  • Millikan on Honeybee Navigation and Communication.Michael Rescorla - 2012 - In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 87–106.
    This chapter contains section titles: Insect Cognition The Science of Honeybee Navigation and Communication Representation and Truth‐Conditions Psychological Structure Pushmi‐Pullyu Representations Folk Psychology as an Explanatory Paradigm.
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  • The arbitrariness of the genetic code.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (2):205-222.
    The genetic code has been regarded as arbitrary in the sense that the codon-amino acid assignments could be different than they actually are. This general idea has been spelled out differently by previous, often rather implicit accounts of arbitrariness. They have drawn on the frozen accident theory, on evolutionary contingency, on alternative causal pathways, and on the absence of direct stereochemical interactions between codons and amino acids. It has also been suggested that the arbitrariness of the genetic code justifies attributing (...)
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  • (1 other version)The limits of thinking without words.Jose Luis Bermudez - 2003 - In Jose Luis Bermudez (ed.), Thinking Without Words. New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    Forms of thinking that involve thinking about thought are only available to creatures participating in a public language. Thoughts can only be the objects of further thoughts if they have suitable vehicle and the only suitable vehicle is public language sentences. These language-dependent cognitive abilities range from second-order reflection on one's own beliefs and desires and the capacity to attribute thoughts to others to the ability to entertain tensed thoughts and to deploy logical concepts. Many of these language-dependent cognitive abilities, (...)
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  • The duality of content.Jesse J. Prinz - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 100 (1):1-34.
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  • Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content.Kim Sterelny - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (3):549-564.
    Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage and (...)
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  • Rethinking Functional Reference.Andrea Scarantino - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):1006-1018.
    The theoretical construct of functional reference is the main tool used by animal communication researchers to explore how animals refer to the world in the absence of a language. Functionally referential signals are commonly defined as signals elicited by a specific class of stimuli and capable of causing behaviors adaptive to such stimuli in the absence of contextual cues. I will argue that this definition is conceptually flawed and propose an alternative definition according to which signals can functionally refer to (...)
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  • A theory of content II: The theory.Jerrold A. Fodor - 1990 - In Jerry A. Fodor (ed.), A Theory of Content and Other Essays. MIT Press.
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  • Do infants possess an evolved spider-detection mechanism?David H. Rakison & Jaime Derringer - 2008 - Cognition 107 (1):381-393.
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  • Representation and indication.Robert C. Cummins & Pierre Poirier - 2004 - In Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Elsevier. pp. 21--40.
    This paper is about two kinds of mental content and how they are related. We are going to call them representation and indication. We will begin with a rough characterization of each. The differences, and why they matter, will, hopefully, become clearer as the paper proceeds.
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  • White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. [REVIEW]Ralph Wedgwood - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):156.
    This is a review of Ruth Garrett Millikan's 1993 book, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.
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  • Introduction.Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford - 2012 - In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 1–20.
    This chapter contains section titles: Proper Functions Representations: The Basic Teleosemantic Framework Concepts Externalism, Language, and Meaning Rationalism.
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