The aim of teleosemantics is to give a scientifically respectable or ‘naturalistic’ theory of mental content. This paper focuses on one of the key concepts of teleosemantics: biological function. It has been universally accepted in the teleosemantics literature that the account of biological function one should use to flesh out teleosemantics is that of etiological function. My claim is that if we replace this concept of function with an alternative one and if we also restrict the scope of teleosemantics, we can arrive at an account of biologizing mental content that is much less problematic than the previous attempts.

In a recent article in Philosophy of Science, De Vignemont and Jacob defend the view that empathy involves interpersonal similarity between an empathizer and a target person with respect to internal affective states. Focusing on empathy for pain, they propose a theory of the neural substrate of pain empathy. We point out several flaws in their interpretation of the data and argue that currently available data do not differentiate between De Vignemont and Jacob’s model and alternative models. Finally, we offer some suggestions about how this might be achieved in future research.

We suggest that, far from establishing an inconsistency in the standard theory of the geometrical linear continuum, Zeno’s Paradox of Extension merely establishes an inconsistency between the standard theory of geometrical magnitude and a misguided system of length measurement. We further suggest that our resolution of Zeno’s paradox is superior to Adolf Grünbaum’s now standard resolution based on Lebesgue measure theory.

Multilevel research strategies characterize contemporary molecular inquiry into biological systems. We outline conceptual, methodological, and explanatory dimensions of these multilevel strategies in microbial ecology, systems biology, protein research, and developmental biology. This review of emerging lines of inquiry in these fields suggests that multilevel research in molecular life sciences has significant implications for philosophical understandings of explanation, modeling, and representation.

This article concerns how rule-following behavior might evolve, how an old evolved rule might come to be appropriated to a new context, and how simple concepts might coevolve with rule-following behavior. In particular, we consider how the transitive inferential rule-following behavior exhibited by pinyon and scrub jays might evolve in the context of a variety of the Skyrms-Lewis signaling game, then how such a rule might come to be appropriated to carry out inferences regarding stimuli different from those involved in the original evolution of the rule, and how this appropriation involves a step toward the evolution of basic ordinal concepts.

This article uses sim-max games to model perceptual categorization with the goal of answering the following question: To what degree should we expect the perceptual categories of biological actors to track properties of the world around them? I argue that an analysis of these games suggests that the relationship between real-world structure and evolved perceptual categories is mediated by successful action in the sense that organisms evolve to categorize together states of nature for which similar actions lead to similar results. This conclusion indicates that both strongly realist and strongly antirealist views about perceptual categories are too simple.