Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Dretske

Fred Dretske (1932–2013) was an American philosopher whose work moved from perception and knowledge to naturalistic accounts of representation, mental causation, and consciousness. His central project was to explain how a physical state can carry information, acquire a representational function, and sometimes misrepresent its surroundings. His informational approach should be distinguished both from bare correlation theories and from interpretations that make representation entirely dependent on an observer.

Major Works

  • Seeing and Knowing (1969) examines perception and knowledge.
  • Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) connects information with knowledge and mental content.
  • “Misrepresentation” (1986) addresses how naturally occurring representations can be false.
  • Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (1988) develops an account of the causal relevance of content.
  • Naturalizing the Mind (1995) presents his representational approach to mental life and experience.

Information and Representation

In Dretske’s technical account, a signal carries information that a condition obtains when, given the relevant channel conditions, the signal’s occurrence guarantees that condition. This is stronger than a loose statistical association. Information can occur without anyone interpreting it: a natural indicator may convey information about an environmental condition even if no organism notices it.

Representation requires a further step. A system must have the function of indicating a property. Dretske’s speedometer example separates this function from the instrument’s actual success. A pointer position represents a particular speed because the instrument is supposed to indicate speed. When it malfunctions, it still represents that speed although the vehicle is moving differently.

The distinction makes error possible. Information, in the relevant factive sense, cannot be false; a state with an information-carrying function can fail to perform it. Applying this account to organisms requires explaining how such functions arise through biological history or learning, rather than simply importing a human designer’s intentions into every case.

Learning, Content, and Mental Causation

Dretske distinguishes functions belonging to a system’s inherited organization from functions acquired through learning. In the latter case, a state is recruited to control behavior because it has carried useful information about a condition. Its subsequent occurrence can continue to represent that condition even when an unusual situation disrupts the original correlation.

This gives representational content an externalist dimension: what a state represents can depend on its environmental relations and recruitment history, not just its present physical structure. Two internally similar states might therefore differ in content if their relevant histories differ.

In Explaining Behavior, Dretske asks how content can help explain action when physical events already have physical causes. His answer distinguishes the immediate production of a movement from the explanation of how a behavior-controlling system acquired its organization. The information carried during learning helps explain why the system came to respond as it does. Critics question whether this historical role gives content enough causal relevance to present action; Dretske regards structuring explanations as genuine explanations rather than as competition with the immediate physical causes.

Experience and the Representational Thesis

Naturalizing the Mind argues that mental facts are representational facts. For sensory experience, the qualities of which a subject is aware are properties represented in the environment or body. An experience of a red, round object presents redness and roundness; it need not contain an inner red, round object for the subject to inspect.

Dretske treats experience as nonconceptual representation. A creature can perceptually represent a property without possessing a concept with which to judge that property. This permits a distinction between sensory awareness and knowing or believing what one sees.

His view converges with Michael Tye’s representational account, but their theories are not interchangeable. PANIC—Poised, Abstract, Nonconceptual, Intentional Content—is Tye’s formulation, not Dretske’s. Dretske’s explanatory framework centers on indicator functions and the distinction between systemic and acquired representation.

Criticisms and Replies

Which property is represented? A state may correlate with several connected conditions: an environmental property, a proximal stimulus, and a later behavioral opportunity. Critics ask what privileges one as its content. Dretske appeals to the state’s indication function and the circumstances of its recruitment. Teleosemantic alternatives place different weight on the downstream use of a state, so these approaches should not be collapsed into one theory.

History and newly formed duplicates. Historical accounts face thought experiments involving a physical duplicate with no ordinary learning or evolutionary history. Critics argue that the duplicate could still think or feel. Dretske’s externalism resists identifying present internal similarity with sameness of representational function. The disagreement tests whether history is constitutive of mentality or merely explains its usual production.

Phenomenal character. Inversion cases, blurry vision, and experiences allegedly lacking representational content challenge the claim that representation accounts for everything experiential. Representationalists reply by examining differences in content and kind of representation. The further question of why some representations are conscious remains distinct from the question of what they represent; the fact that a speedometer represents does not make it conscious on Dretske’s account.

  • Information and Meaning — information versus representational content.
  • Intentionalism — representational accounts of phenomenal character.
  • Teleosemantics — biological and learned functions in theories of content.
  • Transparency — awareness of represented properties rather than inner colored objects.
  • Tye — a related but distinct theory of consciousness.
  • Millikan — a different emphasis on the functions of representational systems.

Further Reading

  • Dretske, Fred. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. MIT Press, 1981.
  • Dretske, Fred. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press, 1988.
  • Dretske, Fred. Naturalizing the Mind. MIT Press, 1995.
  • Dretske, Fred. “Misrepresentation.” In Belief: Form, Content, and Function, edited by Radu J. Bogdan, 17–36. Oxford University Press, 1986.

Mind, Matter, and Meaning presents the site author’s arguments about mind and meaning. It is a separate argumentative work, not a neutral source for the account above.