The teleological theory of content

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 75, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 474-489

  Braddon Mitchell, David ^a   Jackson, Frank ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149122406     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409712348051     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
2. See, e.g., Karen Neander, 'Misrepresenting and Malfunctioning', Philosophical Studies 79 (1995)pp.lO9-141.
3. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p.94.
4. Ruth Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 15.
5. According to Neander, the place of conceptual analysis in the overall story is much as we sketched at the beginning. Puzzlingly, Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays, p.15, fn. 1, remarks that Neander offers 'a brilliant defence of the "etiological" account of function while remaining within the tradition of conceptual analysis'. We are not sure how one pursues 'a confused program, a philosophical chimera, a squaring of the circle' brilliantly.
6. Edmund L. Gettier, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?', Analysis 23 (1963) pp.121-123.
7. See, e.g., Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980),
8. and David Lewis, 'Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies', The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) pp.203-211.
9. See, e.g., Karen Neander, 'Swampman meets Swampcow', Mind and Language 11 (1996) pp.118-129, for a recent defence of this view.
10. David Papineau is especially explicit that he is offering a reduction, see Philosophical Naturalism, p.93.
11. See, e.g., Michael Devitt, Coming to Our Senses: a naturalistic program for semantic localism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
12. And Papineau does exactly this; see his response to Andrew Woodfield on pp.93-94 of Philosophical Naturalism.
13. Colin McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp.159-160. The final emphasis is ours. McGinn's phrasings here might suggest that he is primarily interested in the content of (public) language, but in fact he takes the point he is making to apply quite generally. We (and most teleonomists) take the content of intentional states to be the primary notion, and hold that language is contentful inasmuch as it is used to tell about the content of various intentional states.
14. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, p.58.
15. Kim Sterelny, The Representational Theory of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 124-125, also sees teleological considerations as providing 'more discriminatory machinery', but gives them a much more circumscribed role than does Papineau.
16. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1929), §§6ff
17. Donald Davidson, 'Knowing One's Own Mind', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (1987) pp.441-458.