Content and its problems: A critique of contemporary naturalistic semantics.

摘要

Philosophers frequently maintain that the problem of content or mental representation (often also known as the problem of intentionality) constitutes one of the two "big" questions in the philosophy of mind, the other being the question of consciousness (Dennett 1995, Fodor 1990, McGinn 1991). The theories on which I focus here are all, in one way or another, cognitivist, namely, they all fall within the conceptual matrix of the computational, or functionalist, theory of the mind. Therefore, to a large extent, this work is a critique of some of the underlying assumptions of the cognitivist view.; Chapter one concentrates on the problem of misrepresentation , considered by many to be the most pressing challenge for contemporary attempts to naturalize content. The challenge is to explain representation as a natural phenomenon without failing to account for its normative character. I argue that none of the criteria for content individuation currently in vogue succeeds in doing so.; In chapter two, I develop the claim that the failure to keep indeterminacy at bay and to provide an adequate solution to the problem of misrepresentation stems from a more fundamental problem, namely, from the fact that none of the theories discussed in chapter one manage to develop a notion of mental content that is truly system-intrinsic.; Chapter 3 addresses (some aspects of) the problem of content epiphenomenalism. If content is system-intrinsic it must be intrinsically causally efficacious. Yet, I argue that much as the theories criticized in previous chapters breed observer-dependent semantics, they also breed epiphenomenalism.; Chapter 4 is an investigation of Quine's indeterminacy thesis in the context of contemporary theories of mental content. I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, the origin of Quine's puzzle lies not in his behaviorism but, rather, in his commitment to semantic extensionalism . I argue that representational content is irreducibly intensional, and, consequently, that the covert extensionalism of contemporary naturalism is yet another source of methodological inadequacy.