Causation and cognition: an epistemic approach

Cognitive Instrumentalism about Mental Representations

“…8 8 According to a standard or radical instrumentalist view, reference to mental representations would be non‐committal with regard to their reality, even if talk of mental representations amounts to a useful theoretical device for prediction and systematisation. One problem with this approach is that it precludes construing mental representations as having any causal powers, which, in turn, would leave us unsure of how to interpret – and, perhaps, unsure if we could even accept – those cognitive scientific explanations that posit mental representations with causal roles (Taylor 2021b). For example, Marr's account of primal sketches in visual processing (Marr 1982).…”