Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Lawrence Shapiro (University of Wisconsin-Madison), William Roche (Texas Christian University)
If belief N has proposition p as its content precisely when N and p are positively correlated, then it is obvious that misrepresentation is possible. Here we look at some interesting details that arise when this theory of content is applied to the disjunction problem. We identify circumstances in which natural selection will lead organisms to form a belief with propositional content X rather than a belief with propositional content XorY. We also describe how meaning hypotheses can be formulated as models that contain adjustable parameters, thus allowing the Akaike Information Criterion to apply to them.
