THE PERSISTENCE OF INDETERMINACY: CONTEMPORARY THEORIES AND KRIPKENSTEIN'S CHALLENGE TO REPRESENTATIONAL CONTENT

This thesis is concerned with the foundations of representational content. There is a familiar feature of words, sentences, beliefs, and perceptions: they are about, or mean, or represent something. The sentence “cats are cute” is about cats being cute, and my belief that cats are cute is also about cats being cute. Most things in the world are not about something else – they just are. In virtue of what, then, do words, sentences, beliefs, and perceptions represent the things they represent? In other words, in virtue of what do they have the contents that they do? In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982/1995), Saul Kripke argued that there is no fact of the matter about what we mean by our words. Though Kripke intended to target theories of meaning in the linguistic sense, his arguments ultimately challenge theories of mental content as well. The effects of Kripke’s argument have been devastating: Theories of content have struggled to avoid his sceptical paradox ever since. The aim of this work is to investigate and determine whether several contemporary approaches to meaning broadly understood meet the sceptical challenge Kripke set up nearly fifty years ago. These contemporary approaches include causal theories of reference, teleosemantic theories of mental content, and phenomenal intentionality theories. The result of my investigation is, unfortunately, negative. None of the contemporary approaches examined in this work successfully isolate what makes representations have the contents that they do.