Abstract
Naturalist theories of mental representation are often criticized on the grounds of failing to give an account of the distal content of representational states. They fail to give a principled explanation for why the representational state represents the distal feature, rather than the proximal one. Among teleological theories of representation, informational teleosemantics is specially threatened by the distalitity problem. My goal in this paper is to save informational teleosemantics by developing a counterfactual-based solution for the distality problem.
How to attend
This is a read-ahead seminar. The meetings have a hybrid format. We meet in person in GM 467 and digitally on Zoom (Zoom login required).
The meeting link, along with a copy of the paper to be discussed, will be made available in advance via the mailing list.