Abstract
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.
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Notes
Papineau does address this issue in his (2003). He confesses to have “doubts about the propriety of applying representational talk outside the paradigm areas of language and everyday psychology” (2003: 108), and argues for a distinction between components of belief-desire systems, which have determinate, non-relative content, and other states, which have multiple contents relative to different subsystems of the organism. As will become clear in the following discussion, the distinction between representational and non-representational states that I advocate is different from Papineau’s, and is partly in conflict with it, since I include perceptual states (which are clearly not components of the belief-desire system) among the class of genuine representational states with determinate intentional content. A detailed discussion of Papineau’s proposal is, however, beyond the scope of this paper.
Cf. also Rescorla (2013), who adopts Burge’s argument to criticize Millikan’s teleosemantic theory.
Or, as Rescorla (2013: 98) puts it: “Good terminology tracks underlying distinctions in explanatory structure. Well-chosen theoretical terms ‘carve nature its joints’ [sic], rather than blurring important distinctions among explanatory paradigms. We should reserve truth-conditional locutions for those domains where they play a genuine explanatory role.”
In her (2009: 406), she also mentions the case of the anaerobic bacteria and insists that including their magnetosome states in the realm of representations is essential: “The intentionality that characterizes pushmi-pullyu icons responsible for simple tropisms of this kind [e.g. for the bacterium’s movement towards the geomagnetic north; PS] is the limiting case of intentionality. […] If your theory doesn’t count in these cases you will find that it fails to account for any of the obvious cases either.” The account developed in the section “A producer-oriented solution” will show, I hope, that this last claim is unfounded: there are theories which are more restrictive than Millikan’s without being too restrictive.
The following argument, although inspired by Burge’s comments, should not be taken as an interpretation of them. While Burge is mainly interested in explanatory projects that presuppose correctness conditions for internal states, I focus on the explanatory role of content ascriptions in the explanation of behavior. This difference is spelled out in more detail in the section “Intentional explanation and non-perceptual representations”.
The distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations (or “causes”) of behavior is a standard distinction in ethology, cf. Danchin et al. (2008: 18). It is usually traced back to Tinbergen (1963). Typically, ethologists also include descriptions of the ontogeny of a behavior among its proximate explanations, and descriptions of its phylogeny among its ultimate explanations. However, since it is uncontroversial that these kinds of explanations have little or nothing to do with intentional explanations, I have omitted them here.
For a brief overview over these debates, cf. Shettleworth (2010), ch. 11 and 12. The role of content ascriptions in theories about corvid tool use is discussed in my (2012); the relevance of intentional characterizations in debates about primate social cognition is made clear by Sterelny (1995: 262–267).
Cf. also Rescorla (2013: 94), who comes to the same conclusion: “As applied to magnetotaxis, truth-conditional locutions are an expository flourish, not a serious contribution to good explanation.”
Cf. Burge's discussion of Dretske (Burge 2010: 304–307).
Other potential problem cases that Burge mentions are the “light sensors in Euglena […], the contact sensors in flat-worms, shadow sensors in molluscs”, and “proprioceptive feedback on self-motion in dragonflies” (Burge 2010: 318).
The relevant standards of proper functioning need not be standards that apply directly to the representation; they may instead be standards for the proper functioning of the representation’s producer or consumer. Cf. the section “A producer-oriented solution” for further discussion.
This is why Vicente’s (2012: 127–128) reply to Burge’s challenge seems insufficient to me. Vicente insists—rightly, I think—that Burge has not shown that teleosemanticists are unable to distinguish between genuine representations and mere sensations or even that his (Burge’s) own account of the difference is incompatible with teleosemantics. But since Burge has given some prima facie reasons for doubting that teleosemanticists are able to make a principled distinction of this sort, Vicente’s reply is too weak. By contrast, my aim is to give a positive argument for the claim that (1) teleosemanticists are able to make a principled distinction between representations and mere sensations and, more specifically, that (2) Burge’s own account of the difference can—and should—be combined with a teleosemantic approach to representation.
But, one might object, the explanation “the kidney increases water intake because the vasopressin signal tells it that plasma osmolarity is too low” is more compact than the full proximate explanation. Might this not be a reason to accord it independent explanatory force? I don’t think so. Instead, I would argue that, in this case, the intentional description of the process merely serves as a convenient abbreviation of the full causal story, and this is hardly enough to render it scientifically respectable.
Of course, scientists do engage in debates about the specific the factors that cause the vasopressin signal, but there is no need to interpret this as a debate about the intentional content of this signal.
There is also a further reason to deny that vasopressin signals have intentional content. In the section “Intentional explanation and non-perceptual representations”, I will argue that there exists a promising theoretical account of the special value of intentional explanations. However, this account implies that intentional explanations cannot be applied to systems like the vasopressin signaling system (as I have described it here).
Of course, this is not to say that Burge’s proposal is uncontroversial. Nudds (2012) and Ganson et al. (forthcoming), for instance, have leveled various objections against Burge’s account of perception. However, a discussion of these objections is beyond the scope of this paper.
This view has (at least) two important precursors. First, Dretske (1981: 163) holds that constancy mechanisms are necessary for having representations of “properties of objects, and not (say) the properties of the retinal stimulation”, but he does not claim that they are necessary for having representations tout court (cf. also Dretske 1986: 32–36). Secondly, Sterelny (1995: 262) formulates the following necessary condition for representations: There has to be a “sufficient variety in proximal routes, and sufficient stability of distal sources” for an internal (behavior-controlling) state to count as a representation.
Actually, the case of color constancy is especially complicated, so this characterization is bound to be controversial. More straightforward examples are mechanisms for shape, size and position constancy.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this objection.
This is not to say, of course, that perceptual psychologists restrict their investigations to well-functioning individuals in normal circumstances. Quite to the contrary, studies with abnormal individuals or normal individuals in abnormal circumstances are very important—but mainly because the subjects in these studies make “diagnostically valuable errors”, as Matthen (2010: 236) puts it.
There is also a further difference that should be mentioned briefly. Most teleosemanticists accept an etiological analysis of biological functions, according to which a trait has the function to φ only if, to put it very roughly, the trait has been selected for φ-ing. This analysis implies that “swampman”, a hypothetical creature that comes into being by pure chance, has no traits or subsystems with biological functions. Therefore, swampman’s light-sensitive systems possesses constancy mechanisms in the causal-disposition sense, but not in the functional sense. I agree, however, with Millikan (1989b) and Neander (1996) that the mere theoretical possibility of swampman is irrelevant for serious scientific theorizing, and that it should not affect our classificatory practices. Consequently, we can disregard this difference between the two conceptions of constancy mechanisms.
Maybe Burge would agree with this assessment. At one point, he acknowledges that “biological function is relevant to understanding […] the content of perceptual states”, but adds that “the connections between perceptual representation and biological functions are more complex and less direct than they are portrayed in the Deflationary Tradition” (Burge 2010: 299).
Millikan (2013: 104), for instance, complains in her response to Rescorla (2013): “I cannot find, in either man’s [i.e. Rescorla’s or Burge’s; PS] work, any clear statement of what it is that they take truth-conditions to ‘explain’ in the cases of those representation [sic] they do sanction, so I don’t know what I am to be looking for in the case of bees and bacteria.” I do not think that this is entirely fair to Burge, as I make clear in the following, but it is a legitimate question nevertheless.
This is a quite confusing feature of Burge’s theory, but also an important one. It means that Millikan’s (2013: 104) complaint that she cannot find “any clear statement of what it is that they [Burge and Rescorla; PS] take truth-conditions to ‘explain’” is, at least partly, beside the point. Burge does not introduce representations or truth-conditions as entities that explain certain phenomena, but rather as entities that are referred to in the characterization of the phenomena to be explained.
Cf. Sterelny (1995: 258–259). The distinction goes back to Jackson and Pettit (1992), who distinguish between low-level explanations that provide “modally contrastive information” (=actual-sequence explanations) and high-level explanations that provide “modally comparative information” (=robust-process explanations).
Did Pip represent the predator as a predator? This is a difficult question, and it cannot be answered, I think, without considering the behavioral repertoire of piping plovers in more detail. Such consideration, however, would lead us too far afield. What is important here is only that Pip represents the predator in some way or other.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this worry.
For example, it seems very plausible to suppose that constancy mechanisms have an important role to play in solving the “distality problem” (Neander 2013: 33).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Frank Hofmann, Fabian Hundertmark, Nikola Kompa, Christian Nimtz, Niko Strobach, Nicholas Shea and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Schulte, P. Perceptual representations: a teleosemantic answer to the breadth-of-application problem. Biol Philos 30, 119–136 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9390-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9390-2