Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017)
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What is the central problem of intentionality that the episode introduces?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Book
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figtor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Today's interview is with Karen Neander, Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Her new book, A Mark of the Mental, in Defense of Informational Teleosemantics, is just out from the MIT Press. The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The latter being the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that are about other things, for example, a thought about a tree that you saw when you walked down the street, or a perception of a tree.
Intentionality is difficult to understand, not least because we're able to have thoughts or perceptions about things that don't exist like unicorns, or anything in the future for that matter. A naturalistic theory of aboutness or intentionality Intentionality will be an account of this feature of the mind that involves only those elements that can be found in nature, like causal relationships or evolution. In her new book, Neander synthesizes a number of these elements, including causal relationships, a particular view of evolutionary functions, and an account of second-order similarity, which is similarity relationships, to provide a causal informational version of. Of teleosomantics that explains the content of sensory perceptual states.
For example, the content of a toad's perception when it perceives what we would call a fly. On her view, the content of a perceptual state is what is supposed to cause it, in the sense that it is what that state is adapted to respond to. She articulates differences between her account and other versions of teleosomantics, and she puts her theory. To work in responses to a series of problems that have been raised for teleosomantic theories. This is a well written, clearly argued book by one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of mind, particularly those working on the problem of intentionality. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Karen Neander. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hello, Carrie. Uh thank you for inviting me.
It's my pleasure um to be talking to one of the, you know, leading theorists about um naturalistic semantics. And the new book, as I as I've described, is a is a synthesis of a lot of work over the past um the past few decades, um, to which you have been a major contributor. Um and I I like one of one of the sentences that you have uh in the book uh that kind of very nicely encapsulates in simple form. uh what you're what you're doing is this idea that a a sensory perceptual representation refers to what i is supposed to cause it. And what's interesting about that sentence is that the the only Word perhaps of it that doesn't have a lot of work behind it is the word uh The rest of it it all the rest of it all involves a lot of a lot of very detailed and interesting work um that you talk about you know sort of throughout the the book.
Um but before we get to talking about, you know, your your view of of naturalized semantics, um can you just give a little background about, you know, how you came to philosophy and to the topics that you're interested in and to the writing of this book.
Yeah, um So I d I don't feel that I have a terribly interesting story to tell about how I came to philosophy as an undergraduate. I really didn't know what philosophy was. And I sampled it and immediately felt at home with it. I mean, I remember in high school. Occasionally asking teachers why what are in retrospect philosophical questions and getting very embarrassed responses, I'd say, and being told by my friends that I I thought too much. And um You know, you go into a philosophy class and all of a sudden here are these people who are encouraging you to think very hard about these
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem of intentionality that the episode introduces?
0:08–8:53
2
How does Karen Neander describe her academic background and early interests in philosophy of mind?
8:53–16:16
3
What is informational teleosemantics and how does Neander combine causal theory with evolutionary function?
16:16–24:31
4
How does the toad‑perception example illustrate the causal‑informational account of content?
24:31–32:12
5
What are the six indeterminacy challenges for naturalistic theories of intentionality and how does CT address them?
32:12–38:50
6
Why does Neander introduce second‑order similarity and how does it help resolve content determinacy?
38:50–47:46
7
What is the ‘stopping problem’ in causal theories of reference and how is it tackled in the book?
47:46–54:42
8
What future directions does Neander suggest for extending her theory to conceptual content and non‑conceptual representations?
54:42–1:02:03
Speakers
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