Frogs catch flies by way of a rapid strike with their tongue. Thus, it is plausible to suppose, mediating between the environmental presence of a fly and the motor response of a tongue strike is some sort of neural mechanism that registers the fly's presence in the vicinity and causes the strike of the frog's tongue… According to the teleofunctional account, the content of state S should be, roughly, `fly!', or `fly, there!', and it derives this content from the fact that the proper or Normal function of its underlying mechanism is to detect the presence of flies. The state is, thus about flies; it means that there are flies in the vicinity.
There is, however, an alternative construal of the function of the mechanism. On this construal, what the mechanism in question has been selected to respond to are little ambient black things (To avoid becoming entangled in a completely different issue, let me make it clear that the little ambient black things are environmental entities and not dots on a retinal image). The proper function of the mechanism, on this construal, is to mediate between little ambient black things and tokenings of a state that causes the frog's tongue to strike. This state will then be about little ambient black things and will, therefore, mean that there are little ambient black things in the vicinity.
The proper function of the mechanism is different in each case since, in the latter case but not the former, the frog's mechanism is functioning properly or Normally when the frog strikes at a little ambient black thing that is not, in fact, a fly (but, say, a lead pellet or ‘BB’). And the content underwritten by the function is different in each case since not all little ambient black things are flies.
VIDEO... Frogs catching flies
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