Teleosemantics and Productivity--论文代写范文精选

51Due论文代写网精选paper代写范文：“Teleosemantics and Productivity  ”  关于teleosemantic归化的方法，有很多讨论的内容。这样的讨论,一直局限于简单的、天生的心理状态。这篇paper代写范文提出了一个基本的担忧问题，从自然主义的角度使用其理论来看是不可接受的。精神状态的内容取决于其生物功能或适当的相关状态。适应的可能性被认为是一个重要里程碑,以及提供了一种直接的方式,teleosemantic方法被广泛认为是最有前景的方法之一。不幸的是,它也存在它的问题。许多广泛讨论的问题已经出现在先天的归因,简单的心理状态等。

Abstract There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalisation of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as There is a fly here. Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan’s biosemantics, offers an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view.

Introduction 

Teleosemantic accounts of mental content – e. g. (Millikan, 1984), (Papineau, 1998), (Ryder, 2004) – propose that the content of mental states depends on their biological function or on that of appropriately related states. Accommodating the possibility of misrepresentation is considered as a major milestone in the project of naturalising mental content, and the appeal to functions provides a straightforward way of unpacking the normativity implicit in the idea of misrepresentation: misrepresentation is, simply, malfunctioning. To complete the naturalisation of content, a satisfactory naturalistic account of the relevant kind of functions is also needed. The etiological theory of functions – e. g. (Ayala, 1970), (Wright, 1973/1994), (Millikan, 1984, chapter 2f), (Price, 1998), (Millikan, 2002) – according to most proponents of teleosemantics, is able to deliver it. The teleosemantic approach is widely regarded as one of the most promising approaches in the project of naturalising content. Unfortunately, it is not without its problems. Many widely discussed issues already crop up in the attribution to innate, simple mental states of contents such as There is a fly here; cf., for example, the discussion of indeterminacy problems in (Fodor, 1990), (Agar, 1993), (Rowlands, 1997), (Papineau, 1998). It is fair to say that many of these problems are still open.

 Maybe the fact that there are open problems in the foundations of the theory has deterred philosophers from discussing other important aspects of teleosemantics. In any event, crucially, there has been hardly any discussion of teleosemantic accounts of productivity, the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. But, of course, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity. In this paper I criticise the best worked-out teleosemantic approach to this problem: Millikan’s appeal to mapping functions. I will proceed as follows: first, in section 2, I will explain why it is sensible to design your theory of content such that the most basic contentful states are propositional (akin to, say, There is a fly around) and not subpropositional (such as, say, fly). Millikan’s theory is one in which the bearer of content is always the fully propositional thought, and in which concepts have meaning in a derivative sense. While, as I say, it is sensible to proceed in this way when laying the foundations of the theory, the exclusive reliance on propositional thoughts puts pressure on a non-negotiable desideratum of a theory of content: that it provides an account of productivity. At any rate, the best explanation of productivity we have is compositionality, and compositionality (at least for our current purposes) involves having thoughts whose content is determined by their structure and by the content of their constituents. Millikan has been proposing (since the seminal (Millikan, 1984), but most clearly in her (Millikan, 2004)) an alternative to compositionality: the appeal to what she calls mapping functions. It is this approach, which I introduce in section 3, that I will be criticising in the remainder of the paper. I will first raise a worry about the naturalistic1 credentials of Millikan’s reliance on mapping function in explaining indexicality in non-human thought (section 4): the theory offers no principled procedure to choose one from among many such functions the way Millikan needs. Some unspecified mechanism must make the final choice of the relevant mapping function, and in the absence of specification, for all we know, the final choice may be guided by the (fully intentional) semantic intuitions of the theorist. 

This problem can be bypassed at the cost of deeming many purported thoughts meaningless, and this may not be completely implausible if we are talking about the mental states of simple cognitive systems such as those of, say, bees. Unfortunately, in section 5, I will show that the problem recurs when we turn to compositionality and content determination in human thought: there is no clear, non post-hoc way to establish which is the mapping function linking thoughts with their meaning, and in this context deeming certain thoughts meaningless is simply not an option. Before wrapping up, at the end of the section I will take up a rejoinder on behalf of the Millikanian: even if the theory is unable to single out the relevant mapping function to endow new human thoughts with meaning, maybe other, naturalistically acceptable mechanisms (say, appeals to the simplicity or elegance of the resulting theory) can supply the missing ingredient. I will show that no unobjectionable appeal to these theoretical virtues can be made in the context of Millikan's project. The conclusion will be that mapping functions do not suffice to account for productivity in naturalistically acceptable terms. This suggests that this project will have to progress the hard way: providing bottom-up content determination, through a compositional semantics for the language of thought.

Propositions First

According to Millikan’s biosemantics – and many other teleosemantic accounts of content – the most basic bearers of content are thought-like, as opposed to concept-like. That is, the most basic contents are like There is a fly here, and unlike fly. Placing propositions first in this way is a sensible theoretical move, at least because it is notoriously difficult to provide an interesting set of naturalistically-acceptable sufficient conditions for some mental structure M to be the concept of, say, fly.

 In any event I believe that there is a correct formulation, maybe along the lines suggested in (Pineda 2006). So, how should we reformulate our optimal-conditions causal theory to filter out not just cases of misrepresentations (black pellets and mosquitoes) but also cases of the concept being caused to token by the tokening of other concepts in a train of thought? Obviously, the quick fix won’t do: Concept*: M is the concept fly iff, in optimal conditions, only flies, or appropriately related thoughts, cause it to token. Leaving aside the extreme vagueness of the condition proposed, thoughts are appropriately related to other thoughts in virtue of their content. 

If so, we need an independent account of the content of thoughts to feed into Concept*. But that was what Concept* was supposed to provide. Luckily, this train of thought difficulty does not appear with propositional contents such as There is a fly here. Take the following toy account of the content of beliefs: Proposition: M is the belief There is a fly here iff, in optimal conditions, only the fact that a fly is there causes M to token. It is not the case that, in optimal conditions, it is permissible for other thoughts, in the absence of flies, to cause beliefs or judgements with such a content. Otherwise put, a perfect thinker would never judge that There is a fly here in the absence of a fly being there. If other thoughts cause me to believe that there is a fly there and there is not, it is reasonable to claim that I am not in optimal conditions. 

This line of argument provides a powerful reason to put propositional contents in the foundation of the right naturalistic account of content; even if the theory behind Concept (and Proposition) is naive, it is unlikely that any other broadly teleosemantic theory of content will be able to solve this difficulty, if it chooses to base its theoretical building upon concept-contents such as fly. But eventually we will need to move on to provide concept contents, if we wish (and we certainly do) to accommodate the possibility of productivity in thought. A theory, however sophisticated, that only recognises a fundamental level of propositional contents will not be able to account for productivity. Millikan defends precisely a sophisticated teleosemantics that accords conceptcontents a merely derivative role. The aim of the next three sections will be to show that such a theory cannot explain human-thought productivity.（essay代写)

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