Wherein may be found such useful things as my C.V., a discussion of my primary philosophical research program, and links to my friends' web sites.
I argue that a satisfactory representationalist account of the mental must include a normative component, that this component cannot be derived from evolutionary functions, and that it can be found in a suitable notion of control. Along the way, I articulate and defend a methodological principle, which I call 'the principle of the near- unity of representation', and develop an account of conventional representation which parallels the account of mental representation.
There are two main things that any theory of a phenomenon should do: be empirically adequate and be explanatory. In the philosophy of mind, a lot has been said about getting theories to be empirically adequate, but not much has been said about explanation. So for instance, the most common complaint against naive identity theory was and is that the theory is chauvinistic; it denies minds to creatures that do (or would, if they existed) have minds. But even if we were to grant that no minds existed except those found in human-like brains (or even if we moved to a Lewis-like disjunctive identity theory) identity theory would still be deeply unsatisfactory because it would leave unexplained why it is that brains give rise to intentionality.
The great thing about teleosemantics, in my opinion, is that it offers substantial hope of providing an explanatory theory of the mind, as well as (if the details can be worked out, a big "if") an empirically adequate one. Here's why: teleosemantics says that the brain is a collection of structures which are supposed to stand in correspondence (indication, covariation, whathaveyou) relations to distal states of affairs, and so the brain is a collection of representations (by virtue of the correct analysis of 'representation'), and so the brain instantiates the mind, since minds are systems of interacting representations. That, crudely put, is the picture. It is, I think, a very attractively neat picture.
The main trouble with teleosemantics is that the 'supposed to' in 'supposed to correspond' seems analyzable only in evolutionary terms, and it just seems wrong to make having a mind a matter of having an evolutionary past. (This is what Pat Suppes has called the 'aristocratic theory' of mind - you only have a mind if you are of the right linneage.) My project is to save teleosemantics by discovering some source of 'supposed-to's' that apply to neural states other than evolutionary sources.
It is instructive to consider everyday 'supposed-to's' governing everyday representations. Some representations have parts that are supposed to correspond to states of the world because they were designed to do so. The lines on a map, the height of a thermometer's mercury column, characters in an allegorical play and so on are like this. In being design-based representations, they are analogs to evolution-based representations, since evolution is a process analogous to design. But there are also representations that have parts that are supposed to correspond to states of the world because they controlled, wielded, or used to do so. Bottlecaps moved about on a table in a manner meant to correspond to the movements of particular athletes provide a good example. Such representations are not analogous to designed representations. Their norms come, not from some historical fact about the intentions of a designer, but from some present fact about the intentions of a controller or user.
If the would-be teleosemanticist can discover control-like norms in the head, in addition to the design-like norms found there, she may find a basis on which to ascribe 'supposed-to's' without appeal to history. She may, that is, analyze mental representation in terms of being supposed to correspond without making mentality an Aristocratic property. I think that cybernetic systems are sources of control-like norms in the natural world. Any object driven toward correspondence in its properties with some distant state of affairs by a feedback-controlled system is one which is supposed to stand in that correspondence.
The line of thinking I am advocating obviously requires substantial defense along a number of fronts. Is there a robust analysis of what it is to be a cybernetic system? If there is, is it true that systems driven into correspondences by cybernetic systems are supposed to stand in such correspondences? And if so, can we go from these norms to an empirically adequate theory of content? These questions are all ones with which I grapple in my dissertation.
The inestimable Nat Tagg is a Ph.D. student in nuclear physics; his web site has pretty pictures of mountains.
The more readily estimated but still hard to pin a precise p-value on John Fleming is a free spirit trapped in the body of free enterprise; his web site makes fun of Lethbridge, Alberta, which just goes to show that John is no ordinary refugee from the Prairies.
And finally, the technically accomplished page of Brennan Sandusky, the closest thing to a comic-book superhero that Big Sky country has to offer.