PSYCHOFUNCTIONALISM AND SEMANTIC FUNCTIONALISM

Beliefs (and propositional attitudes generally) have three complementary features, two of which correspond to the two tasks I have ascribed to the program of intentional realism. They have been well captured by Ramsey's (1931) and Armstrong's (1973) slogan according to which an individual's beliefs are internal maps by means of which he or she steers.

On the one hand, on the informationally based teleosemantic account which I defended earlier, the semantic properties of an individual's propositional attitudes arise primarily out of two factors. They arise out of the nomic dependencies between an individual's states of mind and states of the world around him or her. And they arise out of the selective processes at work both on the phylogenetic evolution of the species to which the individual belongs and in the individual's ontogenetic history. So, on the above account, a belief derives its semantic property from its informational and selectional pedigree (or heritage). In this sense, beliefs are backward-looking structures.

On the other hand, beliefs are forward-looking structures. Unlike an individual's conscious experiences, an individual's beliefs have executive responsibilities. As I said in chapter 2, a conscious experience supplies an individual with analogically coded information which is then submitted to a process of digitalization or abstraction and exploited by higher cognitive states. As I then suggested, the acoustic experience of a particular sound produced on a particular piano differs from one's belief that the sound produced is a C of the third octave.