Cameron Buckner

I am a fifth year graduate student in philosophy at Indiana University in Bloomington.  I am currently writing a dissertation on the role of rationality in the philosophical foundations of cognitive science.  I start from the perspective that most rational inference is driven by heuristics and most representations are comprised of graded category structures like prototypes, arguing that a system built out of these components can demonstrate behaviors exhibiting a sufficient degree of rationality for intentional explanation to be legitimately and usefully applied to them.  These foundations are bolstered with a Neo-Dretskean theory of content which construes the hippocampal system as implementing the kind of intelligent representational plasticity characteristic of intentional agents. Instead of taking learning to merely recruit fully-formed indicators to positions of behavioral control, my modified Dretskean view holds that learning revises representations intelligently in response to errors so as to better improve their causal contact with adaptively-significant categories and situations.  This innovation proves important in helping the position avoid some of its most common criticisms, and the result is, I think, a plausible teleosemantic theory of content firmly grounded in the relevant psychology and neuroscience.