Teleosemantics Without Natural Selection

Adaptation without Natural Selection

How can a system become better adapted over time without natural selection? Although some argue for ‘organismic’ properties such as robustness and self-sustaining regulation in non-evolved systems [1,5,11], others insist that natural selection is the only source of true adaptation [3]. We suggest that understanding how adaptation can occur without natural selection remains a fundamental open qu...

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...

Evolution without natural selection: further implications of the daisyworld parable.

Daisyworld is a model dynamical system in which very simple mechanisms interact to produce complex behaviour. It was devised to show how regulation can arise without natural selection. Here we investigate the model in greater detail. We analyse the possible steady states and study the response of the system under different conditions, we consider the implications of the hysteresis which is foun...

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...

Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics