A Mark of the Mental

In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics

Karen Neander, Kim Sterelny, Robert A. Wilson

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262339872
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the "second hardest puzzle" of philosophy of mind (the first being consciousness). The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called "the problem of mental content," "Brentano's problem," or "the problem of intentionality." Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual (nonconceptual) representations.

Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics (which appeals to relations of second-order similarity between representing and represented domains), causal theories of reference (which claim the reference relation is a causal one), and teleosemantic theories (which claim that semantic norms, at their simplest, depend on functional norms). She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Thinking about Thought
• 2 Positing Nonconceptual Representations
• 3 Functional Analysis and the Species Design
• 4 The Methodological Argument for Informational Teleosemantics
• 5 Simple Minds
• 6 Response Functions
• 7 The Content-Determinacy Challenges
• 8 Causally Driven Analogs
• 9 Distal and Distant Red Squares
• References
• Index