Mental representations: What philosophy leaves out and neuroscience puts in

Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts: A critical appraisal

“…Elsewhere, I explore this project in considerably more detail (Kraemer, unpublished). Numerous philosophers have clearly been engaged in the semantic project including Mills and Beatty (), Kitcher (), Amundson (), Amundson and Lauder (), Godfrey‐Smith (), Waters (), Ashcroft (), Jacobson (), Delord (), Ereshefsky (), Bergstrom and Rosvall (), Piccinini and Scarantino (), Clavien and Chapuisat (), Stegmann (), Cofnas (), and Taylor (forthcoming).…”

“…Let us consider further instances where considerations that are relevant to one type of project are used to support a different venture where they have marginal value. For example, Jacobson () indicates that she is interested in how the term “representation” is used in cognitive neuroscience. She also suggests that philosophy of mind has neglected a sense of “representation” that is present in neuroscience and mentions “reference” in the abstract of her paper.…”

“…Philosophers often go to great lengths to provide what they call “analyses” of scientific concepts. An extremely wide range of scientific concepts have been analyzed by philosophers including FUNCTION (Amundson & Lauder, ; Godfrey‐Smith, ; Kitcher, ; Neander, ; Roe & Murphy, ), REPRESENTATION (Bechtel, ; Jacobson, ; Ramsey, ), GENE (Griffiths & Stotz, ; Kitcher, ; Stotz, ; Stotz, Bostanci, & Griffiths, ; Stotz & Griffiths, ; Stotz, Griffiths, & Knight, ; Waters, ), INFORMATION and INFORMATION PROCESSING (Bergstrom & Rosvall, ; Piccinini & Scarantino, ), FITNESS (Mills & Beatty, ), HEALTH and DISEASE (Boorse, ; Fuller, forthcoming; Griffiths & Matthewson, forthcoming), CLIMATE (Werndl, ), RACE (Gannett, ), ALTRUISM (Clavien & Chapuisat, ), CLINICAL EFFECTIVENESS (Ashcroft, ), EVOLVABILITY (Brown, ), SPECIES (Ereshefsky, ), EVOLUTIONARY NOVELTY (Pigliucci, ), FUNCTIONAL HOMOLOGY (Love, ), HOMOLOGY (Otsuka, ), GENETIC CODE (Stegmann, ), EXTINCTION (Delord, ), CULTURAL ATTRACTOR (Buskell, ), INNATENESS (Ariew, , ; Cofnas, ; Khalidi, ; Mallon & Weinberg, ; Samuels, ), CONSTRAINT (Amundson, ), EVOLUTION (Brandon, ), BIOLOGICAL POPULATION (Stegenga, ), REUSE (Barack, forthcoming), ATTENTION (Taylor, forthcoming), and surely many others.…”

Is the brain a memory box?

“…Further, neuroscience is full of talk about mental representations, a fact which may allay philosophical anxieties. However, the representations of neuroscience can be quite unlike those that are needed to carry the contents we ascribe to memories, as we are about to see (see Jacobson 2003).…”