The question of meaning, or intentionality, is plagued by the homunculus fallacy: postulating an 'internal observer' appraising mental representations leads to an infinite regress of such observers. We exhibit the structure behind this problem, and propose a way to break it down, by drawing on work due to von Neumann. This allows to eliminate the dichotomy between a representation and its user, eliminating the infinite regress. We briefly comment on how the resulting model handles other problems for a naturalistic account of meaning, such as the problem of error and the frame problem.
Jochen Szangolies