A Mark of the Mental by Karen Neander

A Mark of the Mental by Karen Neander

Author:Karen Neander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: intentionality; philosophy; mental content; representationalism; propositional attitudes; Franz Brentano; teleosemantics; semantic content; semantics; perception; cognitive science; philosophy of mind
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-06-29T16:00:00+00:00


A Simple Causal Analysis of Information

To recommend a simple causal analysis of natural-factive information for a theory of mental content, as I do, is not necessarily to recommend it for other purposes. Recall Scarantino’s point that “information is a mongrel concept comprising a variety of different phenomena under the same heading” (2013, 64). The theory of mental content given in the next few chapters is a causal-informational version of teleosemantics for nonconceptual representations. And it will be enough to at least get this theory off the ground if there can be information-bearing (teleonomic, normal-proper) functions on the part of such representations, assuming a simple causal analysis of information.

I plan to opt for the simplest causal analysis here and only complicate it later if I find I must.19 So, for now, I stipulate that one event carries information about another if the second causes the first. That there can be information-bearing functions on this analysis follows immediately from the fact that there can be response functions.

A few points are needed to gloss the simple causal analysis. Some of it is just bookkeeping or introducing a way of speaking. For instance, if the informational relata are causal relata, they are events on the most standard view of causal relata. So, to adopt a way of speaking, I will assume that the causal relata are events.20 But, as I shall speak, an event can be thin or thick; it can involve a single property being instanced (a very thin event) or it can involve many properties being instanced (a thick event). Events are causally efficacious in virtue of their properties, and events can be causally efficacious in virtue of some of their properties without being causally efficacious in virtue of all of them. (Remember Dretske’s soprano singer, whose singing smashes the glass in virtue of the pitch of her singing and not in virtue of the meanings of the words of her song.) Moreover, to introduce a shorthand way of speaking, when I say that a C-type event caused an R-type event (or, more briefly, that C caused R), what I mean is that the C-type event in virtue of its C-ness caused the R-type event.

This simple causal analysis of information refers to singular causation.21 A particular R-type event carries information about a particular C-type event just in case that C-type event caused that R-type event. These might have been the only R-type and C-type events to ever occur. Furthermore, the simple causal analysis makes no mention of any laws of nature. Instead, it leaves the relation between laws and causation open. Of course, causation will occur in accord with whatever laws of nature there are, since there are no miracles. But the simple causal analysis makes no mention of any such laws.22

In my view, the simple causal analysis is under no obligation to capture every nuance of the everyday intuitive notion of information carried by natural signs about what they signify. But, without wanting to push this point too hard, I would



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