A naturalistic theory of intentional content

Abstract

Naturalistic theories of intentional content aim at explaining the phenomenon of representation in naturalistic terms: what kind of relation is a representational relation? What grounds the fact that certain states qualify as representations and some do not? What determines representational content? In my dissertation, I provide an original naturalistic theory of representational content along the lines of teleosemantics and use it in order to solve several questions related to cognition. So my thesis is divided into two main parts. The goal of the first part of the project was to provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a state to be endowed with representational content and, in the second part, I apply this naturalistic framework to cognition, focusing on perception and concepts