Comments | paulhope: Teleological theories of mental representations make me want to hit things.

paulhope

Teleological theories of mental representations make me want to hit things.

Oct 22, 2006 11:47

So all semester I've had to cope with Hill's embrace of Dretske's theory of representation:
X represents property F if and only if X has the function of indicating F (from here)
I gather this is supposed to be an improvement on the purely causal/correlational/informational account (roughly, "R represents F iff R co-varies with F") because it (a) ( Read more... )

representations, dretske, natural selection, chris hill, hot lovin' steve

Comments 7

rachiestar October 22 2006, 17:14:57 UTC

FUCK EVERYTHING I just made a really long reply and teh intraweb ate it. ANYWAY.

I am working on a paper on Plato and Aristotle's accounts of function (ergon) and arete (excellence) and a couple weeks ago I checked out Ariew, Cummins and Perlman's FUNCTIONS which was way fun and helpful, esp. Enc, Millikan and Hardcastle's articles ( ... )

rachiestar October 22 2006, 17:48:22 UTC

Actually upon reflection the problem with (b) seems to be more an overdetermination problem than an individuation problem. Whatevs.

paulhope October 26 2006, 04:49:44 UTC

One way might just be to go ahead and bite the bullet: function isn't a real property that's out there in the world to be carved at joints, but rather is viewer-dependent. I don't know how I feel about that.

I lean this way right now, although I think I may see a way around it. But yeah--you seem to know a lot more than me about this subject, but I think it may be possible to cash out functional properties into our judgments of "This is pretty effective at doing that action" or "Its creator intended for it to be used in such and such a way."

Or---actually, let me change that. I'll put my money on their being some kind of psychological primitive which assigns functions to things, but just is kind of bogus.

How awesome is that "carving at the joints" phrase, btw? Eleanor Rosch is so hot.

Are there other biological traits without the complications inherited from consciousness that we can try out theories of function?I think so, but I think they take us down the road I just went down: we say that my stomach has the function of ( ... )

barilosopher October 22 2006, 18:35:28 UTC

Yeah! Down with realism about teleology!

jeffrock October 28 2006, 04:39:24 UTC

This post made me want to hit things.

paulhope October 28 2006, 16:17:10 UTC

How so?

jeffrock October 31 2006, 08:11:41 UTC

"Reifying biological functions is so 1800's."

Some of us hold similar opinions about Darwinism (or at least the aspect of Darwinism that eschews teleology).