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Teleosemantics without Etiology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Bence Nanay
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Abstract

The aim of teleosemantics is to give a scientifically respectable or ‘naturalistic’ theory of mental content. This paper focuses on one of the key concepts of teleosemantics: biological function. It has been universally accepted in the teleosemantics literature that the account of biological function one should use to flesh out teleosemantics is that of etiological function. My claim is that if we replace this concept of function with an alternative one and if we also restrict the scope of teleosemantics, we can arrive at an account of biologizing mental content that is much less problematic than the previous attempts.

Type
Biological Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , December 2014 , pp. 798 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This work was supported by the EU FP7 CIG grant PCIG09-GA-2011-293818 and the FWO Odysseus grant G.0020.12N. I presented this paper at the 2012 PSA Annual Meeting in San Diego and at the University of Bielefeld. I am grateful for the comments I received after these talks.

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