Laying the Foundations

This chapter outlines a metaphysics of the representational content of action and perception. This is built on a teleosemantic account of perceptual content borrowed from Neander, which is here generalized to give an account of the content of action-guiding states. The key ingredient of such stories is an account of biological function, and this chapter lays out and responds to a central challenge to such approaches. After presenting Neander’s account, the chapter will show how to generalize this to the case of action-guiding states. The final section of this chapter takes a final look at these, the ultimate basis for representation on my three-layer story.