Explaining Cognitive Phenomena with Internal Representations: A Mechanistic Perspective

• Authors: Paweł Gładziejewski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a (truly, genuinely, nontrivially, etc.) representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition.

Keywords

EN

mechanistic explanation; representationalism; antirepresentationalism; mental representation; s-representation; emulation theory; predictive coding

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 63-90

Dates

published

2015-03-01

online

2015-04-10

Contributors

author

Paweł Gładziejewski

• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/slgr-2015-0004