Teleosemantics And The Problem Of Circularity

Intentionality is a property of mental state to of or about other things outside of itself. The prepositional attitude we talk in normal life like belief or fear all have intentionality. And intentionality is a very important feature of mental phenomenon. If we can have a deep understand of intentionality, this will help us to understand mental phenomenon.Understanding intentionality is an important thesis in contemporary philosophy of mind. At the position of naturalism, we should find the position of intentionality in the sequence of nature, understand and explain it according to natural science. That is how to naturalize intentionality.There are three representative theories of intentionality naturalizing-covariance theory of Dretske,asymmetric dependency theory of Fodor and teleosemantics of Millikan. Covariance theory and asymmetric dependency theory appeal to the causal theory, they explain the intentional relation between representation and the world as causal covariance relation. They determine the content of representation by the input condition, which are causes. But many causes can determine the same content, so the reference of this representation is not the certain cause, but a disjunct set. Covariance theory and asymmetric dependency theory cannot solve the disjunction problem which is contained by the causal relation itself. So their explanations of naturalizing intentionality are incomplete.Millikanian teleosemantics has great advantage to solve the problem of naturalizing intentionality. It depends on the nature evolution theory and explains the relation between mind and world as correlation of purpose based on the mechanism of biological evolution. In teleosemantics, Millikan builds a special representation mechanism. Representation is produced by the producer system and the consumer system perform its proper function according the representation. When proper function is performed successfully, it means the normal condition is satisfied. Then the content of representation is determined. The way determining content by the output condition avoids the trouble of disjunction problem.But Shea considers that teleosemantics has the problem of circularity. If the content of representation is determined by the output condition of it-the behaviors of consumer, then we cannot use the true content to explain successful behaviors. So when we use true representation to explain successful behaviors, it becomes to circularity. Thus representation’s content of teleosemantics does not have explanatory effect. To solve this problem. Shea suggests supplying an input condition to teleosemantics. When representations carry correlational information about the adequacy condition then the content will get a feature to help explaining successful behaviors.Millikan replies to the problem of circularity. She thinks that appealing to purpose, history and mapping rules, teleosemantics can afford some substantive explanatory forms. We can explain successful behaviors in many ways and using representation’s content is just one of them. On the other hand, Millikan argues that the description of correlational information captures nothing definite. Because the correlational information does not have a reference class, then the possibility of the correlation between representation and successful condition cannot be determined.The key to eliminate the problem of circularity is the way to determine the content of representation, but Millikan does not discuss that. From the backward-looking properties and multiple causes of the content, we can see there is no certain correlation between the content and the success. The success determined content is the past success. When we explain the behaviors under the current situation, there is no relation between the truth of content and the current success. And the content of representation is not only determined by the behaviors, it needs many other conditions. The multiple properties of content can provide substantive explanations. So teleosemantics does not have the problem of circularity. What’s more, correlational information has a dilemma on the matter of misrepresentation. If misrepresentation carries correlational information then the information loses its explanatory effect; if misrepresentation does not carry, then it does not exist anymore.The conclusion of this paper is that teleosemantics does not have the problem of circularity, the way it naturalizing intentionality is feasible and deserves our persistence.