Neuroscience and teleosemantics
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Neuroscience and teleosemantics Ruth Garrett Millikan1 Received: 15 July 2020 / Accepted: 25 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Correctly understood, teleosemantics is the claim that “representation” is a function term. Things are called “representations” if they have a certain kind of function or telos and perform it in a certain kind of way. This claim is supported with a discussion and proposals about the function of a representation and of how representations perform that function. These proposals have been retrieved by putting together current descriptions from the literature on neural representations with earlier explorations of the features common to most things we are inclined to call representations (… maps, graphs, human language, signals between animals, stop signs … etc.) as these were assessed in Millikan (Language, thought and other biological categories. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984 and following). Of interest is the degree to which these independent sources converge. I conclude that there is no need to employ any new or technical sense of the term “representation” for it to play an important role in neuroscience. Keywords Neural representations · Teleosemantics · Representations · Philosophy and neuroscience The call is for papers that will help us to “determine” “what ‘representation’ means” so that neuroscientists won’t talk past one another when using this term. Clearly this is not a call for lexicography. Nor is it a call for conceptual analysis, for criteria we would supposedly use in sorting out things in any possible world. What may be useful is to ask whether there are properties common and peculiar to all or to a dominant portion of the common things we actually call “representations” and if so whether things of this kind might be found in the brain so that looking for them might be helpful for the progress of neuroscience. Is there anything interesting that is common to indicative sentences of many kinds, along with maps, charts, diagrams, graphs, road signs, bee dances, mating dances, animals’ danger signals, labels on bottles and so forth that
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Ruth Garrett Millikan [email protected] Philosophy Department, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
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makes it natural to call all of them “representations”? If so, the hope would be that no special or technical meaning for “representation” needs to be fashioned for it to be naturally and fruitfully used in neuroscience. In (Millikan 1984) and several works following I offered support for the proposal that there are properties common and peculiar to most of the ordinary things we call “representations.” Here I want to compare results argued for in those earlier studies with contemporary views on what a representation in the brain would be. These views on what does or should count as a representation, derived in quite different ways at different times, show a surprising convergence. I offer this convergence as a kind of evidence for their soundness. “Representation” is primarily a “function term,” in
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