UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Representation: Where Philosophy Goes When It Dies. Author (original) (raw)

Robert Cummins (1996, p.1) has characterised the problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now". This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the Seventeenth Century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern, confirming Jerry Fodor's disparaging remark: "Cognitive science is where philosophy goes when it dies" (Fodor, 1994b, p. 110). The Tripartite Schema Recently Bechtel (1998, p. 299) states the essentials of a modern theory of representation: "There are ... three interrelated components in a representational story: what is represented, the representation, and the user of the representation".