Tartaglia, James Philip Frank; (1998) Understanding intentionality in terms of natural selection: A defence of teleosemantics. Masters thesis (M.Phil), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Rather than simply posit intentionality as a sui generis feature of the world, some philosophers attempted to analyse it. Chisholm appealed to logical features of the language used to describe mental states, to reformulate Brentano's thesis. Showing that intensional language is needed to describe mental states in order to preserve fine-grained meaning distinctions influenced the approach of trying to find a reduction of representational content. The approach of trying to reduce content seems to run counter to Brentano's contention that all mental phenomena are intentional, but teleosemantics does not rule out this possibility. And the contention that only mental phenomena are intentional is defensible. Simple covariation cannot account for misrepresentation or robustness. Asymmetric dependence theory relieves these difficulties, but Fodor's conditions are not sufficient for representation, and without normativity in the account, the direction of the dependency relations has no explanation. Dretske introduces normativity via evolutionary, teleological considerations. But some misrepresentations have been selected for. Millikan's teleosemantics focuses on the evolutionary significance of representation consumption. defining mental representations in terms of their historically determined proper functions as consumed. The theory can be seen as an extension of traditional functionalism. Various objections that teleosemantics cannot make accurate content ascriptions, can all be answered satisfactorily from the resources of the theory. However, the theory has the counterintuitive consequence that a randomly generated physical duplicate of a thinker could not have intentional states. Upon closer inspection, this example turns out to be a vivid illustration of the thoroughly naturalistic conception of mind which the theory presents us with. Jackson claims that teleosemantics has the wrong theoretical status to answer important philosophical questions about content, but the theory has the right status to explain intentionality. Considerations about natural selection offer genuine insight into intentionality, showing how it fits into the natural world.

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