Theories of Content: Teleosemantics and Neurosemantics

“Contents” are what mental states are about. There are many philosophical issues about contents, e.g., the problem of whether mental contents are explainable in physical terms or not, and the problem of how particular contents are associated with particular mental states, or in other words, how a particular content of a mental state is determined. I will introduce teleological and neurological theories of content after briefly introducing causal, conceptual-role, and double-factor theories in order to see how successful teleosemantics and neurosemantics are in comparison with those theories. Teleosemantics is the view that mental states are determined with teleological functions and neurosemantics is the view that mental states are determined with neuronal states.