Entity Realism About Mental Representations

Bence Nanay

doi:10.1007/s10670-019-00185-4

Abstract

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations.

Highlights

Mental RepresentationsThe concept of mental representation is a central concept of cognitive science and of philosophy of mind
If we describe our mental life as the combination of beliefs, desires and other propositional attitudes, this makes it problematic to talk about animal minds and the minds of young children, and to talk about many of our everyday actions without overintellectualization
The scope of the argument I presented in the last section was very limited: it was about motor representations and pragmatic mental imagery

Summary

Introduction

The concept of mental representation is a central concept of cognitive science and of philosophy of mind. The very origins of cognitive science could be traced to the opposition to behaviorism in positing some kind of representations in the mind (again, not necessarily beliefs or desires). This emphasis on representations provided a common ground for philosophy of mind and cognitive science that facilitated interaction between the two disciplines. Neo-behaviorism comes in different flavors, some more radical than others Most proponents of this view would accept that some complex, maybe linguistic human behavior could not be described without talking about representations, but insist that the vast majority of our actions and our perception can be fully explained in non-representationalist terms (Chemero 2009; Hutto and Myin 2014; see Ramsey 2007 for a nuanced summary of this approach). Be a debate in the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology about when we are justified to posit an unobservable mental entity: mental representation

Realism About Theories Versus Realism About Entities

Entity Realism

Entity Realism About Representations

Conclusion