Etiological teleosemantics and theories of nonconceptual content
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Within the philosophy of mind, discourse regarding the relation between human thought and its objects refers to ‘intentional content’, the information conveyed by mental states to a subject. A broad and intuitive distinction has standardly been made between two kinds of intentional content; ‘conceptual content’ is that conveyed by states of rational reflection (such as beliefs), whereas ‘nonconceptual content’ is that conveyed by states of perceptual awareness (such as visual experience.) An ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception is whether this intuitive distinction reflects merely a difference in the theoretical terminology applied to two contexts of representation, or rather points to a metaphysically significant difference in kind between the information conveyed by each representational system. In ‘Etiological Teleosemantics and Theories of Nonconceptual Mental Content’, I apply the teleosemantic theory pioneered by Ruth Garrett Millikan to the conceptualist/nonconceptualist debate, arguing that teleosemantics provides an independently plausible account of mental representation which also undermines any motivation for strong nonconceptualism.
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M.A.
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