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This chapter considers more sophisticated reductionist responses to the sceptical argument — that is those which seek to find the fact that constitutes someone's meaning something by a word among the causal, physical, or functional facts. It considers a wide variety of the most compelling reductive theories that have been presented in response to Kripke's scepticism, and argues that each of these fails.

This chapter discusses externalist theories of mental content that do not involve the mediation of thought by language but in which history is crucial. It argues that the etiological teleosemantics of Millikan, Dretske, and Papineau is false, and that other etiological accounts proposed by Prinz and Dretske are false. Facts about the color blindness play a key role in these arguments.

This chapter examines the role and character of sensory experience. Sensory classification can lead to action by means of direct manipulation of the effector system; when this is so, the output of the sensory system must be causally apt to coerce the effector system. However, either when a sensory system feeds into many effector systems, or when many sensory systems feed into a single effector, it is simpler for the sensory systems to be non-coercive. Their output will simply signal that a particular situation obtains, leaving the effector system to do whatever it determines to be appropriate. In order to issue such signals, non-coercive systems need as many signs as there are response-demanding situations. In conscious systems, sensory qualia play this role. In the sense developed by David Lewis, it is a matter of convention which quale attaches to which state of affairs. The conventionality of sensory content is overlooked by philosophers who allege an Aexplanatory gap@ with regard to sensory qualia.

Teleosemantic theories are diverse, but they all endorse the claim that semantic norms, to do with correct and incorrect representation, derive in part at least from functional norms, to do with normal or proper functioning. Informational teleosemantics adds that semantic norms also derive from natural-factiveinformation. In this chapter, The author starts with the premise defended in chapter 3–– in explaining how bodies and brains operate, biologists use a notion of normal-proper function. To this the author adds that the same notion of function is used in explaining cognitive (including perceptual) capacities, and then argue that, given an information-processing approach, the norms of proper functioning are thus wedded to the aboutness of natural-factive information, so that a basic form of normative aboutness is posited. This elucidates the explanatory role of positing nonconceptual representations, establishes the scientific credentials of informational teleosemantics, and gives us good reason to try to solve its alleged problems. In the last few sections, the author argues that the main naturalistic “alternatives” to teleosemantics also have apparently ineliminableteleosemantic commitments.

In this chapter, the author begins developing the details of the causal-informational version of teleosemantics (CT) for (nonconceptual) sensory-perceptual representation. She also lists six content-determinacy challenges, and explain how CT handles the first three (leaving the others to be treated in chapters 8 and 9). Content determinacy challenges ask why a representation (R), which has the content C, has the content C (and not, say, Q). The first three challenges ask why R has the content there’s C and not there’s Q (given that C is not Q) and, (i) C and Q were co-instantiated where and when selection for the R-producing and R-using systems took place, (ii) C and Q were both causally implicated in past selection for the R-producing and R-using systems, and (iii) C and Q have necessarily been co-instantiated, even though “C” and “Q” do not co-refer. In relation to (iii) the author discusses the case of seeing green rather than grue, and the case of seeing a shape as a diamond rather than as a regular square. In effect, the author defendsStampe’s early idea, that taking the teleosemantic turn is a good way to improve upon a causal theory of reference.

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibit a kind of basic intentionality. It does so by situating REC’s notion of Ur-intentionality within the larger history of attempts to explicate the notion of intentionality simpliciter, showing that there is conceptual space for and reason to believe in a nonrepresentational form of intentionality. The second part of the chapter provides a fresh analysis of how and why this most basic kind of intentionality can be best accounted for in naturalistic terms by means of a RECtified teleosemantics—one stripped of problematic semantic ambitions and put to different theoretical use, namely, that of explicating the most basic, nonsemantic forms of world-involving cognition.

What is the representational format for metacognition? This chapter first provides an overview of the philosophical approaches to the notion of representation. A propositional system of representation, its objectivity and generality, is contrasted with a featural system, where these properties are lacking. A feature-placing system represents an environmental affordance as being incidental ‘here’ and ‘now’. A feature-based system represents a knowledge affordance as being incidental ‘now’ in connection to a current task. Both are shown to involve nonconceptual in full autonomy towards conceptual contents. Fluency is shown to be regulating epistemic evaluations in perceptual and memorial tasks in non-humans. The fact that humans are also sensitive to fluency—specifically when the stakes associated with a judgement are not too high—is an important argument in favor of FBS influencing epistemic decision in a ‘System 1’ type of metacognition.

The morally wrong actions, it seems, are the actions that are worthy of moral disapproval. Hence, one way to approach normative ethics is to ask the following question: Toward what kinds of action is moral disapproval fitting or correct? Chapter 13 argues that we can answer this question by adopting a teleosemantic framework. The chapter proceeds in three stages. It begins by proposing and defending a teleological theory of the contents of attitudes in general. The account proposed implies that the content of an attitude depends on its functional role. Accordingly, the second part of the paper defends an account of the functional role of moral disapproval. Then the third part combines the results of the first two parts in order to determine the content, and hence the correctness conditions, of moral disapproval. The chapter concludes with some remarks about the normative implications of the resulting view. In particular, it argues for a form of moral relativism.

This chapter provides an account of the basic emotions and their expression. Emotions are experiences that have the function of indicating how we are faring in our environment. Emotions are also objects of experience: our perceptual systems are sensitive to the expression of emotion in our environment by features that have the function of indicating emotions. Thus, we come to have to knowledge of emotions by perceptually representing properties that function to indicate them. The chapter applies this account to expression in art. What does it mean to say that an artwork expresses sadness? Is perceiving joy in an artwork the same kind of experience as perceiving joy in a friend’s face? How may artworks express emotions without having emotions? The chapter offers a representationalist account of the basic emotions on which exteroceptive and interoceptive systems combine to constitute a system whose states—emotions—indicate how we are faring. Building on the work of Dominic Lopes (2005) and Mitchell Green (2007), the chapter offers a teleosemantic account of emotional expression in art that is impersonal and continuous with a representationalist account of the basic emotions. Features in the environment express emotions even in conditions in which there is no person to whom the emotion is attributable. We experience emotions in two ways: we may have emotions, and we experience emotions as represented properties of the environment. In both cases, experiencing emotions is a matter of experiencing how things are in the world and thus provides perceptual knowledge.

In the introduction we overview the main debates about mental representations. In the first part we focus on three questions. First, what explanatory role do mental representations play in different paradigms of cognitive science, such as classicism, connectionism, dynamical theories, and predictive processing? Second, what criteria do we need to introduce mental representations, and how can we distinguish between non-representational and representational cognitive states? And finally, how can intentionality be naturalized and what are the main challenges for naturalistic theories of intentionality? In the second part of the introduction, we present the individual chapters in the volume, and situate them within the context of broader debates.

Scientism is expounded. Then its two major challenges are stated and responses to them sketched. The first challenge is to its epistemology of mathematics-how we know the necessary truths of mathematics. The second challenge is to the very coherence of its eliminativist account of cognition. The first of these problems is likely to be taken more seriously by philosophers than by other advocates of scientism. It is a problem that has absorbed philosophers since Plato and on which little progress has been made. The second is often unnoticed, even among those who endorse scientism, since they don’t recognize their own commitment to eliminativism and so do not appreciate the threat of incoherence it poses. It is important for scientism to acknowledge these challenges.

This chapter distinguishes between two types of representation, natural and nonnatural. It argues that nonnatural representation is necessary to explain intentionality. It also argues that traditional accounts of the semantic content of mental representations are insufficient to explain nonnatural representation and, therefore, intentionality. To remedy this, the chapter sketches an account of nonnatural representation in terms of natural representation plus offline simulation of nonactual environments plus tracking the ways in which a simulation departs from the actual environment. To represent nonnaturally, a system must be able to decouple internal simulations from sensory information by activating representational resources offline. The system must be able to represent things that are not in the actual environment and to track that it’s doing so; i.e., there must be an internal signal or state that can indicate whether what is represented departs from the actual environment. In addition, the system must be able to manipulate a representation independently of what happens in the actual environment and keep track that it’s doing so. In short, nonnatural representations are offline simulations whose departure from the actual environment the system has the function to keep track of. This is a step toward a naturalistic, mechanistic, neurocomputational account of intentionality.

This chapter defends a mechanistic and teleosemantic view of naturalized intentionality that underlies the role of error detection via coherence checking. Representational mechanisms serve the biological functions of representing, which are related to the semantic value of representation: its truth or falsity, its being vacuous or satisfied, or its accuracy. If representational mechanisms contain (or interact with) error-detection mechanisms, the semantic value of representation is causally relevant. As long as semantic value is causally relevant in cognitive explanations, the content of representation is arguably causally relevant, which vindicates the notion of mental representation in contemporary scientific research. Error detection is understood mechanistically in terms of coherence checking, which is purely computational and does not presuppose any semantic function. This chapter analyzes this conceptually and demonstrates that this account is descriptively adequate by citing a recent experiment on zebra finches, even though discrepancy detection is not always related to intentionality.

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? gbut viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in moving from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs, including, especially, language.