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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1998 49(4):557-574; doi:10.1093/bjps/49.4.557
© 1998 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Individualism and the Nature of Syntactic States

Thomas Bontly

Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin Madison, WI 53706, USA

It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are type-individuated by their semantic or intentional properties. First, I argue that this assumption is implausible for theories like David Marr's [1982] that seek to provide computational or syntactic explanations of psychological processes. Second, I examine the implications of this conclusion for the debate over psychological individualism. While most philosophers suppose that syntactic states supervene on the intrinsic physical states of information-processing systems, I contend they may not. Syntatic descriptions must be adequately constrained, and the most plausible such constraints appeal to a system's teleological function or design and hence to its history. As a result, physical twins may not realize the same syntactic states.


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