ok, I reread the essay. I no longer feel like there’s a bunch of things I don’t understand. One point I still don’t understand is why the map/territory distinction commits a Homunculus Fallacy (even after reading your Homunculus Problem post). But I also don’t feel like understand the notion of teleosemantics yet, or why it’s important/special. So by the end of the post I don’t feel like I truly understand this sentence (or why it’s significant):
Teleosemantics identifies the semantics of a symbolic construct as what the symbolic construct has been optimized to accurately reflect.
Also “reflect” seems to do some heavy lifting in that sentence which I wouldn’t usually object to, but it seems similar to “correspondence” which this essay has some objections to.
Later in the essay, I don’t understand why all the distinctions you make require teleosemantics.
My current understanding of the argument is something like this:
The map reflects the territory. How does it reflect the territory? Because it can be interpreted by somebody/something as reflecting the territory/conveying information about the territory. But the act of interpretation itself instantiates a belief that refers to (reflects) the territory. So we’re back to square one unless the kind of reference relationship between a literal map (or more generally, an information-about-territory-carrier external to the mind) and the territory is importantly different than that between a belief and the territory. In that case, the belief-as-map analogy/way of thinking doesn’t make sense.
ok, I reread the essay. I no longer feel like there’s a bunch of things I don’t understand. One point I still don’t understand is why the map/territory distinction commits a Homunculus Fallacy (even after reading your Homunculus Problem post). But I also don’t feel like understand the notion of teleosemantics yet, or why it’s important/special. So by the end of the post I don’t feel like I truly understand this sentence (or why it’s significant):
Also “reflect” seems to do some heavy lifting in that sentence which I wouldn’t usually object to, but it seems similar to “correspondence” which this essay has some objections to.
Later in the essay, I don’t understand why all the distinctions you make require teleosemantics.
My current understanding of the argument is something like this:
The map reflects the territory. How does it reflect the territory? Because it can be interpreted by somebody/something as reflecting the territory/conveying information about the territory. But the act of interpretation itself instantiates a belief that refers to (reflects) the territory. So we’re back to square one unless the kind of reference relationship between a literal map (or more generally, an information-about-territory-carrier external to the mind) and the territory is importantly different than that between a belief and the territory. In that case, the belief-as-map analogy/way of thinking doesn’t make sense.