ABSTRACT
This chapter calls for an “organismic” approach to teleosemantics, integrating insights from the 4E cognition paradigm (Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Ecological) and deeply transforming one of the strongest naturalizing projects in analytic philosophy. Classical teleosemantics traditionally explains mental intentionality through evolutionary selection, positing that the function of cognitive states derives from historical adaptive advantages. However, this view faces challenges, including insufficient explanatory power regarding specific intentional properties and conflicts with contemporary biological theories that emphasize structural constraints and developmental processes over pure selection pressures. The proposed organismic turn shifts normativity from evolutionary history to current autonomous organization, particularly to sensorimotor dynamics in embodied organisms. Drawing on organizational biology and enactivism, we suggest that intentionality and normativity naturally emerge from the organization of a network of sensorimotor schemes. This perspective reframes intentional states as integral to the immediate, dynamic organization of an organism’s sensorimotor life, providing a grounding for cognitive normativity and teleology. Bringing together environmental (ecological) and agent-side (neurodynamic and musculoskeletal) support structures for the enaction of sensorimotor schemes makes possible to reconcile internalist theories of meaning (such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Semantic Networks) with teleosemantics. This connection provides a holistic, biologically plausible, foundation for the naturalization of meaning and intentionality in more traditional yet renewed analytic (and synthetic) terms.
