7 Content naturalised
In this chapter we review the three main types of current project for
naturalising semantics – informational (or causal co-variance) semantics;
teleological semantics; and functional-role semantics. There are severe
problems for each, though perhaps least for the last. We then argue that
the natural status of content does not, in fact, require a fully reductive
semantics, but can rather be vindicated by its role in scientiWc psychology.
1 Introduction
Recall from chapter 2, that one of the main realistic commitments of folk
psychology is to the existence of states with representationalcontentor
meaning. This is then the source of what is perhaps the most serious
eliminativist challenge to folk psychology (which is also a challenge to any
content-based scientiWc psychology). This comes from those who doubt
whethermeaningandrepresentationhave any real place in the natural
world. The problem is this: how can any physical state (such as a pattern of
neuralWring) represent some aspect of the world (and so be true or false) in
its own right, independent of our interpretation of that state? The contem-
porary project of naturalising semantics is best seen as a response to this
problem. In various ways, people have attempted to spell out, in purely
natural terms (that is, terms either drawn from, or acceptable to, the
natural sciences) what it is for one state to represent, orbe about, another.
(The notion of thenatural, here, is parasitic upon the notion of natural
science. A natural property is one which is picked out by some term derived
from some or other (true) theory of natural science, or which is referred to
by a term which can be deWned in terms of the terminology of natural
science, including terms of general scientiWc coinage, such as ‘cause’. So the
property of being a mother is a natural one, since terms referring to it are
indispensable in scientiWc biology. And the property of being a second-
cousin-once-removed is also natural, since although terms referring to it
do notWgure in any scientiWc theory, they can be constructed by deWnition
out of terms whichdoWgure in such theories.)
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