ABSTRACT
The last two chapters have examined various ways in which the mechanisms of thought might acquire content, and so how we might provide a solution to the ‘symbol-grounding’ problem. But our investigations have raised a fundamental question about intentionality or mental representation: to what extent are a thinker’s thoughts determined by relations to things in the environment of the thinker? Is the actual nature of the environment essential to the the nature of a thinker’s thoughts? The causal theory, for example, says that what gives a mental representation its content is the way it is caused; the biological theory says that what makes representations have their content is the way they came about through natural selection. Both these theories, then, treat intentionality as grounded in real relations to things in the environment.
