On Teleo-semantics

Abstract

    Philosophers of mind have advanced three approaches in the project of naturalizing semantics: information semantics, conceptual role semantics, and teleo-semantics. This paper examines the most celebrated but complicated version of teleo-semantics, that is, Millikan's theory of representations. The first half of this paper (section 1-3) motivates and formulates her theory. The latter half (section 4-6) provides clarification of the two technical notions in terms of which Millikan's theory is formulated. One is the cooperation among the producers and the consumers of the representations. The other is the Normal conditions where the consumers of the representations function properly.