Peter Schulte

This Element provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary theories of mental content. After clarifying central concepts and identifying the questions that dominate the current debate, it presents and discusses the principal accounts of the nature of mental content (or mental representation), which include causal, informational, teleological and structuralist approaches, alongside the phenomenal intentionality approach and the intentional stance theory. Additionally, it examines anti-representationalist accounts which question either the existence or the explanatory relevance of mental content. Finally, the Element concludes by considering some recent developments in the debate about mental content, specifically the “explanatory turn” and its implications for questions about representations in basic cognitive systems and the representational character of current empirical theories of cognition.

1. IntroductionIn What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter, Justin Garson offers a novel theory of biological functions, the generalized selected effects (GSE) theory.1 He presents the theory in a clear and comprehensive way, defends it against various objections and applies it to different areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of psychiatry, the debate about mechanisms and the debate about teleosemantic theories of mental content.2Like other proponents of the aetiological approach to functions, Garson maintains that a trait’s biological functions are grounded in its selectional history. However, his GSE theory differs from standard versions of the aetiological approach – so-called selected effects (SE) theories – in a crucial respect: while SE theories assume that all biological functions must ultimately be grounded in phylogenetic processes of natural selection or other (closely analogous) processes of differential reproduction (Millikan 1984: 15–82, Neander 1991, Godfrey-Smith 1994), the GSE theory allows that functions may also be grounded in processes of differential retention (see §2 for details). Garson forcefully argues that this broader account is theoretically well-motivated and has significant advantages over standard SE accounts when it comes to accommodating certain important classes of ontogenetically determined functions.

Sensory perceptions represent things in the outside world. This mundane fact raises a major problem for naturalistic theories of content: the ‘distality problem’. In a previous paper for this journal, I presented a solution to this problem which makes central appeal to constancy mechanisms. Justin Garson, also in this journal, recently criticized my solution and suggested a Dretskean alternative to it. Here, I defend my proposal by arguing, first, that Garson's criticisms ultimately miss the mark, and secondly, that his Dretskean alternative is not viable, because it faces two fundamental problems: the empirical problem and the problem of changing response functions.

"Menschen glauben aus den unterschiedlichsten Gründen an Gott. Aber ist dieser Glaube rational gerechtfertigt? In diesem Band streiten führende Religionsphilosoph/-innen um die Frage, ob die besten Gründe für oder gegen den Theismus sprechen. Einige Beiträge unterziehen klassische Argumente für bzw. gegen die Existenz Gottes einer neuen Betrachtung. Andere gehen der Frage nach, welche Bedingungen eigentlich erfüllt sein müssen, damit die Überzeugung, Gott existiere, als vernünftig angesehen werden kann. Gelten hier dieselben Standards wie bei Überzeugungen über die Existenz von Quasaren? Oder haben religiöse Überzeugungen einen besonderen epistemologischen Status? Und ist es rational zulässig, religiöse Erfahrungen oder tradierte Offenbarungen als Gründe für religiöse Überzeugungen anzuführen? Mit Beiträgen von Ansgar Beckermann, Katherine Dormandy, Franz von Kutschera, Winfried Löffler, Herman Philipse, Peter Schulte, Holm Tetens und Christian Weidemann."-- Back cover.

Perceptual constancies have been studied by psychologists for decades, but in recent years, they have also become a major topic in the philosophy of mind. One reason for this surge of interest is Tyler Burge’s (2010) influential claim that constancy mechanisms mark the difference between perception and mere sensitivity, and thereby also the difference between organisms with genuine representational capacities and ‘mindless’ beings. Burge’s claim has been the subject of intense debate. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we cannot hope to settle this debate (as well as related debates in the philosophy of mind) without a clear and substantive theoretical account of what perceptual constancies are. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the standard definitions in the literature fall short of providing such an account. Still, as I aim to show in the second part of the paper, by taking a closer look at some of the paradigm examples, it is possible to construct a plausible general account of perceptual constancies that is both clear and substantive, and that can serve as a firm foundation for settling debates like the dispute about Burge’s ‘constancy mechanism criterion’ for perception.

Liberal representationalism is the view that even some internal states of very simple organisms like plants or bacteria count as genuine representations. This view has been heavily criticized by many authors, including myself. In a recent paper, Marc Artiga attempts to defend liberal representationalism against these criticisms. One of his main targets is an argument of explanatory exclusion that he ascribes to Burge, Ramsey, Rescorla, Sterelny and me (among others). In this paper, I reply to Artiga by distinguishing the exclusion argument that he focuses on from what is, in my view, the real explanatory challenge for liberal representationalism, and I argue that none of the considerations put forward by Artiga in defense of the liberal view provide an adequate answer to this challenge.

The notion of grounding has gained increasing acceptance among metaphysicians in recent years. In this paper, I argue that this notion can be used to formulate a very attractive version of (property) nominalism, a view that I call ‘grounding nominalism’. Simplifying somewhat, this is the view that all properties are grounded in things. I argue that this view is coherent and has a decisive advantage over competing versions of nominalism: it allows us to accept properties as real, while fully accommodating nominalist intuitions. Finally, I defend grounding nominalism against several seemingly troublesome objections.

Menschen glauben aus den unterschiedlichsten Gründen an Gott. Aber ist dieser Glaube rational gerechtfertigt? In diesem Band streiten führende Religionsphilosoph/-innen um die Frage, ob die besten Gründe für oder gegen den Theismus sprechen. Einige Beiträge unterziehen klassische Argumente für bzw. gegen die Existenz Gottes einer neuen Betrachtung. Andere gehen der Frage nach, welche Bedingungen eigentlich erfüllt sein müssen, damit die Überzeugung, Gott existiere, als vernünftig angesehen werden kann. Gelten hier dieselben Standards wie bei Überzeugungen über die Existenz von Quasaren? Oder haben religiöse Überzeugungen einen besonderen epistemologischen Status? Und ist es rational zulässig, religiöse Erfahrungen oder tradierte Offenbarungen als Gründe für religiöse Überzeugungen anzuführen? Mit Beiträgen von Ansgar Beckermann, Katherine Dormandy, Franz von Kutschera, Winfried Löffler, Herman Philipse, Peter Schulte, Holm Tetens und Christian Weidemann.

According to standard teleosemantics, intentional states are selectional states. This claim is put forward not as a conceptual analysis, but as a ‘theoretical reduction’—an a posteriori hypothesis analogous to ‘water = H2O’. Critics have tried to show that this meta-theoretical conception of teleosemantics leads to unacceptable consequences. In this paper, I argue that there is indeed a fundamental problem with the water/H2O analogy, as it is usually construed, and that teleosemanticists should therefore reject it. Fortunately, there exists a viable alternative to the water/H2O model which avoids the fundamental problem, while explaining the a posteriori character of teleosemantics equally well.

Perceptual representations have distal content: they represent external objects and their properties, not light waves or retinal images. This basic fact presents a fundamental problem for ‘input-oriented’ theories of perceptual content. As I show in the first part of this paper, this even holds for what is arguably the most sophisticated input-oriented theory to date, namely Karen Neander's informational teleosemantics. In the second part of the paper, I develop a new version of informational teleosemantics, drawing partly on empirical psychology, and partly on philosophical considerations. I shall argue that this version has all the virtues of Neander's original theory, but also the further crucial advantage of being able to account for the distality of perceptual content.

Desires, or directive representations, are central components of human and animal minds. Nevertheless, desires are largely neglected in current debates about the naturalization of representational content. Most naturalists seem to assume that some version of the standard teleological approach, which identifies the content of a desire with a specific kind of effect that the desire has the function of producing, will turn out to be correct. In this paper I argue, first, that this common assumption is unjustified, since the standard approach is in fact deeply problematic. Secondly, I propose an alternative account of the content of desires which, while generating plausible and determinate content ascriptions, avoids the main problem that plagues the standard approach, and is also preferable on other grounds.

Truthmaker theorists hold that propositions about higher-level entities (e.g. the proposition that there is a heap of sand) are often made true by lower-level entities (e.g. by facts about the configuration of fundamental particles). This generates a problem: what should we say about these higher-level entities? On the one hand, they must exist (since there are true propositions about them), on the other hand, it seems that they are completely superfluous and should be banished for reasons of ontological parsimony. Some truthmaker theorists—most prominently David Armstrong—have tried to solve this puzzle by arguing that these entities are ‘an ontological free lunch’, i.e. real existents that are still ‘no addition of being’. This answer is prima facie attractive, but I argue in this paper that the standard approaches to truthmaking—modal theories and grounding theories—are unable to vindicate the doctrine of the ontological free lunch, and thus fail to solve the problem of higher-level entities. Fortunately, there is a non-standard account of truthmaking available, the reductive explanation account, which succeeds where the standard approaches fail

Teleosemantic theories of representation are often criticized as being “too liberal”, i.e. as categorizing states as representations which are not representational at all. Recently, a powerful version of this objection has been put forth by Tyler Burge. Focusing on perception, Burge defends the claim that all teleosemantic theories apply too broadly, thereby missing what is distinctive about representation. Contra Burge, I will argue in this paper that there is a teleosemantic account of perceptual states that does not fall prey to this problem, and that we can arrive at this account by combining some of Burge’s insights with a producer-oriented version of teleosemantics. The resulting theory turns out to be attractive and perfectly coherent. By contrast, the coherence of Burge’s own anti-teleosemantic approach becomes quite doubtful under closer examination—or so I will argue.

In this paper, I start from the observation that there are obvious instances of instrumental irrationality, i.e. cases where subjects act knowingly against their strongest preferences. This observation raises an important question: Which facts determine the ‘strength’ of preferences? I consider a standard answer to this question – ‘revealed preference theory’– which turns out to be unsatisfactory. Then I turn to a more promising alternative: the ‘higher order theory’ of preference strength. But this proposal also faces a major problem, the ‘problem of authority’. I argue that this difficulty can be overcome, but only if we are prepared to make some significant normative assumptions – assumptions which imply, among other things, that instrumentalism – the view that instrumental rationality is all there is to rationality – cannot be maintained

How do frogs represent their prey? This question has been the focus of many debates among proponents of naturalistic theories of content, especially among proponents of teleosemantics. This is because alternative versions of the teleosemantic approach have different implications for the content of frog representations, and it is still controversial which of these content ascriptions (if any) is the most adequate. Theorists often appeal to intuitions here, but this is a dubious strategy. In this paper, I suggest an alternative, empirical test for theories of content. I propose that we should examine whether a theory generates content ascriptions that fit with our best scientific explanations of animal behavior. I then focus on the most prominent version of teleosemantics, Ruth Millikan’s consumer-oriented approach, and argue that it fails the empirical test in the frog case, since it yields a content ascription that (i) does not include properties that should be included (namely, being small, dark and moving ) and (ii) includes a property that should not be included (namely, being frog food ). This is an important result in itself, but it also demonstrates by way of example how progress can be made in the complex debate about theories of content

Truthmakers are supposed to explain the truth of propositions, but it is unclear what kind of explanation truthmakers can provide. In this paper, I argue that ‘truthmaker explanations’ conflate two different explanatory projects. The first project is essentially concerned with truth, while the second project is concerned with reductive explanation. It is the latter project, I maintain, which is really central to truthmaking theory. On this basis, a general account of truthmaking can be formulated, which, when combined with a specific theory of reduction (the ‘conceptual entailment approach’), yields a new analysis of truthmaking. This analysis is intuitively appealing and avoids the problem of necessary truths, which poses a serious obstacle for standard accounts.

Fred Dretske’s account of mental causation, developed in Explaining Behavior and defended in numerous articles, is generally regarded as one of the most interesting and most ambitious approaches in the field. According to Dretske, meaning facts, construed historically as facts about the indicator functions of internal states, are the structuring causes of behavior. In this article, we argue that Dretske’s view is untenable: On closer examination, the real structuring causes of behavior turn out to be markedly different from Dretske’s meaning facts. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we set forth the problem of meaning individuation: We argue that the proposal that meaning facts are structuring causes of behavior commits Dretske to a very fine-grained individuation of meanings that is deeply counterintuitive. In a second step, we show that even these finely individuated meaning facts cannot do the job that they are supposed to do, since information facts—which are constitutive of, but distinct from Dretske’s meaning facts—are better candidates for the role of structuring causes. Finally, we argue that it is not even information facts, but facts of co-instantiation which are the real structuring causes of behavior. In concluding, we briefly consider the options that are left for Dretske if our arguments succeed

The claims about free will that Descartes makes in his writings seem, at first glance, to be inconsistent. In recent years, several authors have argued that we can dissolve the apparent contradiction by taking a closer look at the role that attention plays in Descartes’s theory of the processes of judging and deciding. Prima facie, this exegetical approach seems promising, thus its considerable influence is understandable. Nevertheless, I aim to show that the approach is doomed to failure, since its proponents are committed to ascribe incoherent or otherwise unacceptable doctrines to Descartes, thus violating the principle of charity. This result raises interesting methodological questions, which I discuss in the concluding section of the paper.

It is often claimed that Realism about universals is problematic because it cannot account for the relation between particulars and universals without falling prey to ,,Bradley's regress". In this article, I consider four different versions of this regress argument (the semantic regress, the explanatory regress, the ,One over Many' regress, and the truthmaker regress), each based on a different ,regress-generating' assumption. I argue that none of these arguments succeeds in refuting Realism. Still, I contend that two interesting conclusions can be drawn from the discussion. First, ,Bradleyan' regress problems show that some arguments for Realism have to be abolished because they involve ,regress-generating' assumptions. Second, these problems suggest that Realists about universals should opt for a nominalistic treatment of the ,exempflification relation'. As it turns out, this account of exemplification has the further advantage of being more in line with a science-oriented metaphysics than all the traditional alternatives. German Es wird oft behauptet, dass der Universalienrealismus problematisch ist, weil er die Beziehung zwischen Partikularen (Einzeldingen) und Universalien nicht erklären kann, ohne ,,Bradleys Regress zum Opfer zu fallen. In diesem Artikel betrachte ich vier verschiedene Versionen des Regresses (den semantischen Regress, den explanatorischen Regress, den ,,One over Many-Regress und den Wahrmacher-Regress), die alle von unterschiedlichen ,,regress-generie-renden Voraussetzungen ausgehen. Ich argumentiere dafür, dass keines dieser Regressargumente den Universalienrealismus widerlegt. Dennoch, so behaupte ich, können aus der Diskussion zwei interessante Schlussfolgerungen gezogen werden: Erstens zeigen ,Bradleysche' Regressproblem, dass einige Argumente für den Universalienrealismus aufgegeben werden müssen, weil sie sich auf ,,regress-generierende Voraussetzungen stützen; zweitens legen diese Probleme nahe, dass sich der Universalienrealist bei der Behandlung der ,,Exemplifikationsrelation für eine nominalistische Strategie entscheiden sollte. Wie sich herausstellt, hat diese Analyse von Exemplifikation zudem den Vorteil, besser zu einer wissenschaftsorientierten Metaphysik zu passen als die traditionellen Alternativen.

Morality and rationality are both normative: the moral claim “you ought to help others” is a genuine normative judgment, as well as the rational maxim “you ought to brush your teeth twice a day”. But it seems that there is a crucial difference these two judgments. In the first part of this paper, I argue that this difference is to be understood as a difference between two kinds of normativity: demanding and recommending normativity. But the crucial task is, of course, to explain the difference. In the second part of this paper, I suggest that metaethical expressivists can provide a good explanation: by extending the analysis of ordinary (non-normative) demands and recommendations to normative judgments, they can formulate a convincing account that captures the key differences between morality and rationality

The compatibilism debate revolves around the question whether moral responsibility and free will are compatible with determinism. Prima facie, this seems to be a substantial issue. But according to the triviality objection, the disagreement is merely verbal: compatibilists and incompatibilists, it is maintained, are talking past each other, since they use the terms “free will” and “moral responsibility” in different senses. In this paper I argue, first, that the triviality objection is indeed a formidable one and that the standard replies to it are unconvincing. This, however, does not mean that the objection succeeds. Starting with the debate about moral responsibility, I attempt to show that there is an account of moral responsibility which enables us to defend the compatibilism debate against the charge of triviality—namely, the normative conception of moral responsibility. If “moral responsibility” is defined in normative terms, then we cannot distinguish between a compatibilist and an incompatibilist sense of “moral responsibility”, because such a disambiguation would be inconsistent with the essential action-guiding force of normative expressions. Finally, I examine how the normative conception of moral responsibility can help us to defend the free will debate against the triviality objection and draw some general conclusions.