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 scientific psychology.

Introduction

Recall from chapter 2, that one of the main realistic commitments of folk psychology is to the existence of states with representational content or 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 scientific psychology). This comes from those who doubt whether meaning and representation have any real place in the natural world. The problem is this: how can any physical state (such as a pattern of neural firing) represent some aspect of the world (and so be true or false) in its own right, independent of our interpretation of that state? The contemporary 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, or be about, another.