Abstract

Millikan’s and Papineau’s teleological accounts of mental content are among theories aimed to give a naturalistic semantics of mental content. It is said that those theories are faced with several problems, one of which emerges in explaining the link between having true mental representations and the success of behaviors based on the representations. As Godfrey-Smith pointed out, their teleological theories, which define mental representation’s content in terms of the success of behaviors directed by those representations, may not able to give a substantial account of why having true representation leads to organism’s success. I will discuss this problem and a solution suggested by Shea, which seems unsatisfactory to me. Next, I will point out another problem similar to this one: explaining behavior. Finally, I reconsider the theoretical status of teleo-semantics and draw a conclusion that although Millikan insists that teleo-semantics is not conceptual analysis, but a theoretical definition, the difference is not so big in this case.