In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic content to behaviors that reliably achieve a difficult goal-directed function, and it also suggests a productive role for attributions of semantic content in the process of animal behavior research.

中文翻译：

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什么使神经生理学有意义？昆虫导航研究中的语义内容归属

在调查生物世界的过程中，生物学家经常将语义内容归因于他们研究的现象。在本文中，我考察了一个研究蚂蚁导航行为的当代研究项目的案例，并阐述了研究人员在研究实践中对语义内容归属的规范。该帐户认为，研究人员将语义内容分配给可靠地实现困难的目标导向功能的行为，这也表明语义内容的归因在动物行为研究过程中具有生产性作用。