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Mental representations are ubiquitous in cognitive science, and are used to account for many cognitive capacities, from perception to decision making. Yet we lack a clear understanding of what they are. This collection assembles essays by leading philosophers, each trying to provide answers to the puzzles posed by mental representation.
List of contents
- Preface
- 1. Introduction
- Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dö¿ga, and Tobias Schlicht
- 2. A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation
- Frances Egan
- 3. Defending Representation Realism
- William Ramsey
- 4. Deflating Deflationism about Mental Representation
- Dan Hutto and Erik Myin
- 5. Representing as Coordinating with Absence
- Nico Orlandi
- 6. Reifying Representations
- Michael Rescorla
- 7. Situated Mental Representations: Why we need mental representations and how we should understand them
- Albert Newen and Gottfried Vosgerau
- 8. Representational Kinds
- Joulia Smortchkova and Michael Murez
- 9. Functionalist Interrelations Amongst Human Psychological States Inter Se, ditto for Martians
- Nicholas Shea
- 10. Nonnatural Mental Representation
- Gualtiero Piccinini
- 11. Error Detection and Representational Mechanisms
- Krystyna Bielecka and Marcin Mi¿kowski
- Index
About the author
Joulia Smortchkova is a philosopher of cognitive science, working at the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow. She completed her PhD at the Jean Nicod Institute with a thesis on the social contents of perception. She works on social cognition, metacognition, mental representations, types of explanation and natural kinds in psychology.
Krzysztof Dołęga is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he previously completed his PhD under the supervision of Tobias Schlicht and Daniel Dennett. His research interests cluster around topics such as consciousness, mental representation, computational explanation, and models of explanation more generally.
Tobias Schlicht is Professor of Philosophy at the Ruhr-Universit¨ Bochum with an interdisciplinary interest in consciousness and cognition. He wrote two books on the mind-body problem and social cognition and published numerous papers on consciousness, cognition and the foundations of
cognitive science.
Summary
Mental representations are ubiquitous in cognitive science, and are used to account for many cognitive capacities, from perception to decision making. Yet we lack a clear understanding of what they are. This collection assembles essays by leading philosophers, each trying to provide answers to the puzzles posed by mental representation.
Additional text
Are mental representations real (and what would that mean anyway)? Should the notion of mental representation continue to play a core explanatory role in the sciences of mind, or it slowly being revealed as a false friend? This stunning collection covers all that ground and more. Essential reading for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and anyone interested in the nature of mind.
