A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

Neander, Karen

ISBN 10: 0262036142 / ISBN 13: 9780262036146

Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017

About this Item

First printing, hardcover, has a skew to the binding, bumps to the spine ends and cover corners, a ding to the front hinge, and a previous owner's name penciled to the front fly leaf with some of their sparse penned marks to the text. Overall, this is a Near Very Good copy in a Very Good+ dust jacket, which has bumps with light creasing to the spine ends and corners, as well as some rubbing to the covers. The jacket is wrapped in Mylar.

Seller Inventory # 217059

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)
• Publisher: The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262036142
• ISBN 13: 9780262036146
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Near Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation.

In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind (the first being consciousness). The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual (nonconceptual) representations.

Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics (which appeals to relations of second-order similarity between representing and represented domains), causal theories of reference (which claim the reference relation is a causal one), and teleosemantic theories (which claim that semantic norms, at their simplest, depend on functional norms). She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics.

About the Author

Karen Neander is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.