Consumers Need Information: Supplementing Teleosemantics with an Input Condition

TY - JOUR

T1 - Consumers Need Information

T2 - Supplementing Teleosemantics with an Input Condition

AU - Shea, N

PY - 2007/9

Y1 - 2007/9

N2 - 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 representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition.

AB - 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 representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition.

U2 - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00082.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00082.x

M3 - Article

SN - 0031-8205

VL - 75

SP - 404

EP - 435

JO - PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

JF - PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

IS - 2

ER -