A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation

INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY

IP Lunchtime seminar: Room 246, Senate House, London WC1

Tuesday 25 November 2014, 12:30 - 14:00

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures such as ourselves is the capacity to represent.  We can represent features of our immediate environment, states of affairs remote in space and time, and states of our own bodies and minds.  It is a vexed question whether cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the sciences charged with explaining our manifest representational capacities, do so by positing internal representations, and if so, how these internal representations function in explanations of cognition.  The relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to the mind has intensified the representationalism debate but often it seems to amount to little more than a clash of intuitions about specific cases.  In this talk I sketch an account of how internal representations function in explanatory models in cognitive neuroscience.  The account couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of mental content.  I call the resulting package a deflationary account of mental representation and I argue that it avoids the problems that beset competing accounts.