Dretske's Account Of Naturalizing Intentionality And Its Meaning To Marxist Philosophy

Dretske's semantic theory of information is relatively new, which is one of the most important theories of naturalizing intentionality. It finds a way of transmission from communication theory to information theory by means of using information to explaining intentionality. In the same time it gives the definition of information and set up the information theory about knowledge.Communication theory is not only capable of telling us something about amount of information, but capable of giving an account of content of information. There is a relationship between informational amount and its content, namely that informational content is limited by the amount of information. Therefore we can give an adequate account of the definition of information. Information is a semantically relevant concept and something that is capable of yielding knowledge. Knowledge is identified with information-caused belief.The natural account of knowledge is not complete if beliefs exist. The account of beliefs is identified with internal account, which need to explore the processes of perception and cognition. By studying the way of coding and identifying three grades of intentionality, semantic theory of information lay a sound foundation for naturalizing beliefs. Semantic structure may be viewed as an ideal analog of information theory. A belief is a structure with semantic content, and it has higher-order intentionality as well as meaning. The semantic content of a structure is the information that it carries in completely digitalized form. Belief can be false, therefore semantic structure must be capable of misrepresenting, which makes sense by giving the distinction between a structure type and a structure token.The semantic theory of information mainly concerns something concrete and microscopic in the process of naturalizing intentionality, but it contains and reflects lots of important problems of philosophy. Many of its views and means can be useful to develop Marxist philosophy. Here I simply introduce its meaning to Marxist material ontology and its epistemology.