Function and representational content through Tinbergen’s levels of analysis

Abstract

Teleosemantics attempts to explain the content of mental representations through an appeal to functions, and typically attributes function to selection history. The narrowest cases focus on only evolutionary fitness benefit through natural selection, while broader theories have come to accept multiple levels of selection, including those over the course of a lifetime such as neural selection. The precise way to define function has given rise to many debates over the content of hypothetical mental representations. In this paper, I argue that defining function through the lens of Nikolas Tinbergen’s levels of analysis provides a valuable framework in organizing and analyzing teleological theories of function, and can advance the debate into a more organized discourse. In particular, after defining and defending them on theoretical grounds, I go through three classic teleosemantic debates about content ascription and function and attempt to organize them in a Tinbergian framework in order to demonstrate their general applicability, followed by two more examples from humans and primates in order to give insight on the role of each level of analysis in cases where we have more direct internal access to the content of such representations. I finally suggest that a pluralist viewpoint of the content of representations in complex organisms may be justified. I argue that in light of Tinbergen’s levels of analysis framework, teleosemantic theories of mental content can be more clearly discussed and advanced.