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

Representation: Where Philosophy Goes When It Dies

2001

Representation: Where Philosophy Goes When It Dies. Peter Slezak (p.slezak@unsw.edu.au) Program in Cognitive Science, University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA Abstract 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 inte...

In Defense of Mental Representation

In P. Gardenfors, J. Wolenski, and K. Kijania-Placek (eds.) In the Scope of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Volume Two of the 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Cracow, August 1999 (Kluwer, 2002)., 1999

BARBARA VON ECKARDT IN DEFENSE OF MENTAL REPRESENTATION One of the principal tenets of contemporary cognitive psychology is that there are mental representations. In this paper I consider two critiques of that assumption by philosophers who are otherwise disposed to be friendly towards cognitive psychology. In other words, these are not radical critiques; each critic believes that, if understood in the right way, cognitive psychology is a worthy scientific endeavor. However, each also believes that it is an endeavor that could be and ought to be conducted without the notion of mental representation. The two critiques I will consider are by Stephen Stich and Stephen Horst. Although, as we will see, the arguments given in each case are quite different, they, ultimately turn on the same basic point: that the positing of mental representations, contrary to what most cognitive psychologists believe, does no real explanatory work.

Representation and mental representation

Philosophical Explorations, 2018

This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of mental representations in contemporary cognitive scientific modeling.

Understanding the representational mind

1993

... distinguish appearance from reality. Introducing basic distinctions in philosophy ofmind for characterizing the mental, Perner discusses differences in how commonsense and cognitive psychology view the mind. Tracing the onset of ...