Reliable Misrepresentation and Teleosemantics

Reliable Misrepresentation and Teleosemantics

Mendelovici (forthcoming) has recently argued that (1) tracking theories of mental representation (including teleosemantics) are incompatible with the possibility of reliable misrepresentation and that (2) this is an important difficulty for them. Furthermore, she argues that this problem commits teleosemantics to an unjustified a priori rejection of color eliminativism. In this paper I argue t...

Olfactory experience, reliable misrepresentation, and justification

This paper argues that olfactory experiences represent their objects as having primitive olfactory properties, which they do not in fact have. Olfactory experiences misrepresent, but since they tend to misrepresent in the same way on multiple occasions, they reliably misrepresent. The reliability of olfactory experiences helps explain how they can be useful and lead to true and justified belief...

Teleosemantics and Productivity

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 productivi...

Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics

Introduction: Prospects and Problems for Teleosemantics