Rehabilitating resemblance redux : a reply to Anne-Kathrin Koch

Abstract

Anne-Kathrin Koch’s insightful commentary places a great deal of pressure on the connection between my deployment of the triadic analysis of representation to solve the content causation problem and my contention that it makes mandatory the rehabilitation of the resemblance theory of mental content determination. She argues that if the relational character of mental content can be captured in terms of brain-based behavioural dispositions, as I claim, 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 argue that the relation between the proposed solution to the content causation problem and the resemblance theory of content determination is stronger than Koch allows.