There is a paradoxical air surrounding mental content. On the one hand we take it to be a localized property of our minds—of our mental states—distinct from the world in which we are embedded. Yet on the other hand, it is the means by which our minds reach out and make “cognitive contact” (Kriegel 2003) with this surrounding environment. How is such action-at-a-distance possible? The standard solution to this conundrum is to assume that the relational character of mental content can be explained by the fact that mental content is a relational property of our mental states. This line of thought leads to content externalism, according to which mental content is determined in part by factors beyond our heads. But once content externalism is combined with a couple of unexceptional theses about (i) the role of content in mental causation and (ii) the brain-basis of the causal determinants of behaviour, we encounter the content causation problem—the problem of explaining how the content of mental states can be causally efficacious of behaviour when it doesn’t supervene on what’s in our heads.
The solution I offered in my target paper was to sever the connection between the relational character of mental content and the assumption that the latter is a relational property of our mental states (O’Brien this collection). My suggestion was that unlike a dyadic story that seeks to explain representation solely in terms of relations between vehicles and their represented objects, a triadic account of representation opens up space to explain the relational character of mental content in terms of brain-based behavioural dispositions—specifically, dispositions to respond selectively to specific features of the external environment. According to this triadic account, the aboutness of mental content is not some mysterious relational property that brings our minds into contact with various aspects of the surrounding environment; it is the relatively straightforward cognitive capacity, bestowed by the intrinsic properties of our brains, to regulate our behaviour in response to specific environmental conditions.
In her insightful commentary, Anne-Kathrin Koch, after carefully rendering explicit some of the background assumptions on which I rely, focuses on the connection between the proposed solution to the content causation problem and my further contention that it makes mandatory the rehabilitation of the resemblance theory of mental content determination (Koch this collection). Her counter claim is that if the relational character of mental content can be successfully captured in terms of the brain’s behavioural dispositions, then this manoeuvre in its own right solves the content causation problem and hence offers no support for resemblance or any other theory of content determination. In this reply, I will show that the relation between the proposed solution to the content causation problem and the resemblance theory of content determination is stronger than Koch allows.