Representation in Cognitive Science
Nicholas Shea
Abstract
The representational theory of mind (RTM) has given us the powerful insight that thinking consists of the processing of mental representations. Behaviour is the result of these cognitive processes and makes sense in the light of their contents. There is no widely accepted account of how representations get their content – of the metaphysics of representational content. That question, usually asked about representations at the personal level like beliefs and conscious states, is equally pressing for the subpersonal representations that pervade our best explanatory theories in cognitive science. ... More
The representational theory of mind (RTM) has given us the powerful insight that thinking consists of the processing of mental representations. Behaviour is the result of these cognitive processes and makes sense in the light of their contents. There is no widely accepted account of how representations get their content – of the metaphysics of representational content. That question, usually asked about representations at the personal level like beliefs and conscious states, is equally pressing for the subpersonal representations that pervade our best explanatory theories in cognitive science. This book argues that well-understood naturalistic resources can be combined to provide an account of subpersonal representational content. It shows how contents arise in a series of detailed case studies in cognitive science. The account is pluralistic, allowing that content is constituted differently in different cases. Building on insights from previous theories, especially teleosemantics, the accounts combine an appeal to correlational information and structural correspondence with an expanded notion of etiological function, which captures the kinds of stabilizing processes that give rise to content. The accounts support a distinction between descriptive and directive content. They also allow us to see how representational explanation gets its distinctive explanatory purchase.
Keywords:
mental representation,
intentionality,
theories of content,
teleosemantics,
semantic information,
RTM,
meaning,
naturalism,
exploitable relation,
structural correspondence
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198812883 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198812883.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Nicholas Shea, author
Professor of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, University of London
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