Naturalizing semantics: Fodor and Dretske on the content of psychological states

Both Jerry Fodor and Fred Dretske have proposed that representational states of systems can have intrinsic content by virtue of their participation in law-governed or otherwise reliable relations with the world. Fodor suggests that the relevant relations are synchronic--asymmetric causal dependencies; Dretske invokes instead a genetic account of information-processing functions. I argue that neither proposal lives up to its author's hopes. Dretske's notion of functional meaning does not succeed in carrying us from purely objective or "natural" relations to the kind of intentionality characteristic of beliefs; in particular, invocation of learning and time-invariant natural meaning fails to establish the desired nomic possibility of misrepresentation. Fodor also has problems with error: I argue that his current characterization of misrepresentation in a labelling context as the misapplication of a symbol of the language of thought is unsatisfactory both with regard to the unclarity with which the concept of a labelling context is developed and in the dependence of the notion of symbol application upon concepts that it is supposed to explicate. In addition, I draw attention to infelicities of notation and reliance on analogies with natural language that threaten the intelligibility of Fodor's account of asymmetric causal dependency. Finally, I argue that it is by no means uncontroversial that a semantics for psychological states that can defend intentional explanation from eliminativist threat must, as Fodor supposes, identify events individuated under psychological description with events as individuated by physics. I conclude that the failure of a causal semantics need not be fatal to the claims of psychology.