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Biosemantics grounds mental content in evolutionary history: neural representations have their specific content because evolution selected for organisms using those representations to solve adaptive problems. Your fear response represents danger because natural selection favored ancestors whose fear representations accurately tracked genuine threats.
Trace a specific behavioral example (like a frog's snap response to flies) and ask: what makes that neural trigger 'about' flies? Evolution is the answer.
Thinking biosemantics requires full-blooded intentionality; confusing adaptive function with conscious purpose; assuming non-evolved systems cannot have content.
From your prerequisite work on intentionality and teleosemantics, you know the core puzzle: mental states are *about* things — beliefs, desires, and perceptions have content that can be true or false, satisfied or unsatisfied, accurate or inaccurate. But the physical world seems to just consist of particles, fields, and causal processes — none of which are "about" anything. How does content enter a purely physical system? Biosemantics, developed primarily by Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, answers: through evolutionary history.
The central move is to ground content in biological function. A heart has the function of pumping blood — not because it actually pumps blood (a defective heart doesn't), but because pumping blood is what hearts were *selected for* over evolutionary history. Hearts that pumped blood reproduced better than hearts that didn't, so pump-blood became the heart's proper function. Biosemantics applies this same logic to neural representations: a mental state has the content *X* because it was selected for being caused by X-type situations and because its proper function is to respond to Xs. The frog's fly-detection mechanism has the content "fly" because ancestors whose mechanism fired in response to flies (rather than pellets or other small moving objects) caught more flies and reproduced more successfully.
This explains a key asymmetry: misrepresentation. For content to exist at all, it must be possible to get things wrong — a representation of X can occur even when no X is present. Many rival theories of content struggle to account for this. On biosemantics, misrepresentation is natural: the frog's mechanism can fire when presented with a small dark pellet, which is a malfunction — a case where the mechanism fails to perform its proper function. The content remains "fly" (because that's what the mechanism was selected to track), but the representation is incorrect in this token case. Misrepresentation is just the gap between proper function and actual performance.
The power and limits of the view become clear by examining the selectional history requirement. Biosemantics implies that content is constitutively tied to evolutionary history — something with no evolutionary past (a brain spontaneously formed from a cosmic coincidence, or an early artificial system) would have no genuine content on the strictest reading of the view. Defenders respond that "derived" functions from design or learning can also ground content; critics press that the appeal to selection is doing mysterious work. Understanding these tensions prepares you for the content externalism and representationalism debates this course builds toward, where the question is not just what grounds content, but whether content is determined by factors inside or outside the organism.
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