Cognitive Lunch Abstract for March 25

The next Cognitive Lunch will be held Wednesday, March 25.

Time: 12:10-1:10 p.m.
Place: Psychology Conference Room (Room 128)

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Mental Causation and Love the Hippocampus: A Neo-Dretskean Account of Reasons as Causes" will be presented by Cameron Buckner, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University.

Abstract:
Intentional explanations—explanations which account for behaviors in terms of mental states with semantic contents, like beliefs and desires—are frequently deployed in psychology and cognitive ethology. Computationalism purports to legitimize these explanatory appeals to semantic content by suggesting that minds are syntactic, information-processing engines. Minds are therefore declared to be possible in a physical world because mental states have formal, nonsemantic properties which correspond to their semantic properties, and thus mental states can be manipulated to produce behavior using rules sensitive only to their syntax. A straightforward problem with this approach to intentional explanation, however, is that semantic properties themselves are apparently not causally relevant to the explanation of behavior, with syntax doing all the real causal work.

In the 1980s, an alternative approach to intentional explanation emerged called teleosemantics. Teleosemanticists held that semantic properties are causally relevant to the explanation of behavior in their own right, because the semantic properties of mental states caused them to be selected for positions of behavioral control in the organism’s history (either through evolution or learning). By the mid-to-late 1990s, popular opinion in philosophy of mind held that the approach had run into serious problems, and work in this area began to wane. In this talk, I will argue that there is life left in the teleosemantic program yet, especially given that proponents of the view never adequately made touch with the relevant psychology and neuroscience (which has progressed in leaps and bounds since the position was first developed). By drawing upon current cognitive neuroscience of the hippocampus, I will argue that if much of this work is right in its broad strokes, then many of the most common objections to teleosemantics can be rebutted with straightforward appeals to widely-available empirical findings. My hope is that the resulting view will provide a fully naturalizable theory of content which is of real use to the cognitive sciences.