TELEOLOGY, ANALYTIC FUNCTIONS, AND ETIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS

In the last chapter, we examined informationally-based solutions to three problems raised by the semantic properties of beliefs: the insensitivity of belief contents to their informational origins; the intensionality of belief contents; and the problem of misrepresentation. I claimed that the first problem has an informational solution. Informational semantics – or so I argued – elegantly accounts for weak intensionality. It can accommodate strong intensionality so long as the difference between two information-carrying structures can be traced to differences in their compositional features. If we want to distinguish two information-carrying structures of a device containing two primitive constituents, then, I argued, the device must be credited with some logical power not derivable from informational relations between it and the environment. I then went on to distinguish two further problems: one was the problem of misrepresentation (or the disjunction problem) which arises from the imperfection of nomic correlations; the other one was the problem of indeterminacy – a conjunction problem – which arises from the transitivity of correlations. I argued that, on my informational assumptions, only the former, not the latter, can receive a purely informational solution. The latter, I claimed, requires a teleological solution, i.e., an appeal to functions.

Arguing for this claim amounts to a defense of a mixed approach to the transitivity problem: an informationally based teleological theory. I have discussed informational semantics at length in the second and third chapter.