About this topic
Summary Representations vary along many different dimensions. First, representations can differ in their attitude, or the stance they take towards their content. For example, a belief that p and a desire that p represent the same content, but differ in the attitude they take towards it. Second, representations can differ in their content. Some contents are propositional (or truth-evaluable) while others are non-propositional, and some contents are conceptual (in that certain concepts are needed to entertain the content) while other contents are non-conceptual. Finally, representations can differ in their format, or in how their content is encoded. For example, a mercury thermometer and a digital thermometer can both represent the same content, but they encode that content in different ways. The mercury thermometer is analog while the digital thermometer is digital. Other examples of formats include discursive, pictorial, diagrammatic, and cartographic formats. The entries in this category investigate the dimensions along which representations can vary, and explore the ways in which these dimensions are related to each other.
Key works For issues concerning non-propositional content, see papers collected in Grzankowski & Montague 2018. For foundational readings on conceptual and nonconceptual content, see Evans 1982, McDowell 1994, and Heck 2000. For accounts of analog representation, see Maley 2011 and Lee et al 2023. For a discussion of diagrams, see Shimojima 2015. For discussion of different representational formats in both perception and thought, see Fodor 2007, Camp 2007, Quilty-Dunn 2019, Beck 2019, and Block 2023.
Introductions For an introduction to the debate over non-conceptual content, see Heck 2007 and the papers in Gunther 2003. For an introduction to iconic and diagrammatic representation, see Giardino & Greenberg 2015.
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  1. Using and understanding maps.Stephen Butterfill - unknown
    Many philosophers who advocate broadly pragmatist accounts of belief or language treat maps as paradigm examples of representation and they often assume that a pragmatic account of representation is obviously correct for maps (e.g. Dewey, Dretske, Millikan, Putnam and Ramsey). By examining mapping activities and the representational properties of maps in detail, this paper argues that no single notion of representation can fit every map or every mapping activity. This is bad news for pragmatists: if there are maps they can’t (...)
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  2. Analog Mental Representation.Jacob Beck - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science.
    Over the past 50 years, philosophers and psychologists have perennially argued for the existence of analog mental representations of one type or another. This study critically reviews a number of these arguments as they pertain to three different types of mental representation: perceptual representations, imagery representations, and numerosity representations. Along the way, careful consideration is given to the meaning of “analog” presupposed by these arguments for analog mental representation, and to open avenues for future research.
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  3. Non-propositional Contents and How to Find Them.Alex Grzankowski - forthcoming - Journal of Consciousness Studies 25 (3-4):233-241.
    To understand what non-propositional content is and whether there are any such contents, we first need to know what propositional content is. That issue will be the focus of the first section of this essay. In the second section, with an understanding of propositional content in hand, we will consider representations that fail to have propositional content. In contrast to recent literature, it will be argued that metaphysical considerations concerning what's represented, rather than linguistic considerations, are a more promising way (...)
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  4. Non-propositional intentionality: an introduction.Alex Grzankowski & M. Montague - forthcoming - In Alex Grzankowski & Michelle Montague (eds.), Non-Propositional Intentionality. Oxford University Press.
    Book synopsis: Our mental lives are entwined with the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality — how it is that our minds make contact with the world — is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent (...)
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  5. Pictorial Syntax.Kevin J. Lande - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing the form and content of images. These models are empirically credible and can be construed as literal grammars for images. (...)
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  6. Contours of Vision: Towards a Compositional Semantics of Perception.Kevin J. Lande - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Mental capacities for perceiving, remembering, thinking, and planning involve the processing of structured mental representations. A compositional semantics of such representations would explain how the content of any given representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their mode of combination. While many have argued that semantic theories of mental representations would have broad value for understanding the mind, there have been few attempts to develop such theories in a systematic and empirically constrained way. This paper contributes to (...)
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  7. Non-Inferential Transitions: Imagery and Association.Eric Mandelbaum & Jake Quilty-Dunn - forthcoming - In Timothy Chan & Anders Nes (eds.), Inference and Consciousness. New York, NY, USA:
    Unconscious logical inference seems to rely on the syntactic structures of mental representations (Quilty-Dunn & Mandelbaum 2018). Other transitions, such as transitions using iconic representations and associative transitions, are harder to assimilate to syntax-based theories. Here we tackle these difficulties head on in the interest of a fuller taxonomy of mental transitions. Along the way we discuss how icons can be compositional without having constituent structure, and expand and defend the “symmetry condition” on Associationism (the idea that associative links and (...)
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  8. The informational profile of valence: The metasemantic argument for imperativism.Manolo Martínez & Luca Barlassina - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative content, (...)
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  9. How Imagination Informs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...)
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  10. Imaginative Beliefs.Joshua Myers - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...)
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  11. Maps and Models.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - forthcoming - In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling. London, UK:
    Maps and mapping raise questions about models and modeling and in science. This chapter archives map discourse in the founding generation of philosophers of science (e.g., Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman, Thomas Kuhn, and Stephen Toulmin) and in the subsequent generation (e.g., Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, and Bas van Fraassen). In focusing on these two original framing generations of philosophy of science, I intend to remove us from the heat of contemporary discussions of abstraction, representation, and practice of science and thereby (...)
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  12. Imagination constrained, imagination constructed.Christopher Gauker - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1):485-512.
    A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against this it will be argued (...)
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  13. Contents and Vehicles in Analog Perception.Jacob Beck - 2023 - Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 55 (163):109–127.
    Building on Christopher Peacocke’s account of analog perceptual contentand my own account of analog perceptual vehicles, I defend three claims: that theperception of magnitudes often has analog contents; that the perception of magni-tudes often has analog vehicles; and that the first claim is true in virtue of the second—that is, the analog vehicles help to ground the analog contents.
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  14. The Border Between Seeing and Thinking.Ned Block - 2023 - New York, US: OUP Usa.
    This book argues that there is a joint in nature between seeing and thinking, perception, and cognition. Perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual, and nonpropositional, whereas cognition does not have these properties constitutively. The book does not appeal to “intuitions,” as is common in philosophy, but to empirical evidence, including experiments in neuroscience and psychology. The book argues that cognition affects perception, i.e., that perception is cognitively penetrable, but that this does not impugn the joint in nature. A key part of (...)
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  15. Compositionality and constituent structure in the analogue mind.Sam Clarke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):90-118.
    I argue that analogue mental representations possess a canonical decomposition into privileged constituents from which they compose. I motivate this suggestion, and rebut arguments to the contrary, through reflection on the approximate number system, whose representations are widely expected to have an analogue format. I then argue that arguments for the compositionality and constituent structure of these analogue representations generalize to other analogue mental representations posited in the human mind, such as those in early vision and visual imagery.
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  16. The Formats of Cognitive Representation: A Computational Account.Dimitri Coelho Mollo & Alfredo Vernazzani - 2023 - Philosophy of Science.
    Cognitive representations are typically analysed in terms of content, vehicle and format. While current work on formats appeals to intuitions about external representations, such as words and maps, in this paper we develop a computational view of formats that does not rely on intuitions. In our view, formats are individuated by the computational profiles of vehicles, i.e., the set of constraints that fix the computational transformations vehicles can undergo. The resulting picture is strongly pluralistic, it makes space for a variety (...)
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  17. The Structure of Analog Representation.Andrew Y. Lee, Joshua Myers & Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):209-237.
    This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...)
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  18. Emojis as Pictures.Emar Maier - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    I argue that emojis are essentially little pictures, rather than words, gestures, expressives, or diagrams. ???? means that the world looks like that, from some viewpoint. I flesh out a pictorial semantics in terms of geometric projection with abstraction and stylization. Since such a semantics delivers only very minimal contents I add an account of pragmatic enrichment, driven by coherence and nonliteral interpretation. The apparent semantic distinction between emojis depicting entities (like ????) and those depicting facial expressions (like ????) I (...)
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  19. Analogue Computation and Representation.Corey J. Maley - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):739-769.
    Relative to digital computation, analogue computation has been neglected in the philosophical literature. To the extent that attention has been paid to analogue computation, it has been misunderstood. The received view—that analogue computation has to do essentially with continuity—is simply wrong, as shown by careful attention to historical examples of discontinuous, discrete analogue computers. Instead of the received view, I develop an account of analogue computation in terms of a particular type of analogue representation that allows for discontinuity. This account (...)
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  20. Icons, Magnitudes, and Their Parts.Corey J. Maley - 2023 - Critica 55 (163):129-154.
    Analog representations come in different types. One distinction is between those representations that have parts that are themselves representations and those that do not (i.e., those for which the Parts Principle is true and those for which it is not). I offer a unified account of analog representation, showing what all types have in common. This account clarifies when the Parts Principle applies and when it does not, thereby illuminating why the Parts Principle is less interesting than one might have (...)
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  21. Facing Up to the Problem of Intentionality.Angela Mendelovici & David Bourget - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):228-247.
    We distinguish between different problems of “aboutness”: the “hard” problem of explaining the everyday phenomenon of intentionality and three less challenging “easy” sets of problems concerning the posits of folk psychology, the notions of representation invoked in the mind‐brain sciences, and the intensionality (with an “s”) of mental language. The problem of intentionality is especially hard in that, as is the case with the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness, there is no clear path to a solution using current methods. We (...)
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  22. Correspondence Theory of Semantic Information.Marcin Miłkowski - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (2):485-510.
    A novel account of semantic information is proposed. The gist is that structural correspondence, analysed in terms of similarity, underlies an important kind of semantic information. In contrast to extant accounts of semantic information, it does not rely on correlation, covariation, causation, natural laws, or logical inference. Instead, it relies on structural similarity, defined in terms of correspondence between classifications of tokens into types. This account elucidates many existing uses of the notion of information, for example, in the context of (...)
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  23. The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences.Jake Quilty-Dunn, Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e261.
    Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...)
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  24. Mapping the Visual Icon.Sam Clarke - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (3):552-577.
    It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its (...)
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  25. Modest Propositional Contents in Non-Human Animals.Laura Danón - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (5):93.
    Philosophers have understood propositional contents in many different ways, some of them imposing stricter demands on cognition than others. In this paper, I want to characterize a specific sub-type of propositional content that shares many core features with full-blown propositional contents while lacking others. I will call them modest propositional contents, and I will be especially interested in examining which behavioral patterns would justify their attribution to non-human animals. To accomplish these tasks, I will begin by contrasting modest propositional contents (...)
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  26. Representationalism, Scepticism and Phenomenal Realism.Manas Kumar Sahu - 2022 - Prometeica - Revista De Filosofía Y Ciencias 25:51-65.
    The irreducibility thesis of phenomenal consciousness can only succeed against the sceptical attack and avoid solipsism iff it can coherently establish the transition from subjective certainty to the objectivity of knowledge. The sceptical attack on the relationship between the phenomenal qualitative character of experience about the subjects own mental fact and the awareness of the qualitative properties of the phenomenal object can be avoided through establishing the immediacy of experience. The phenomenal realist become successful in establishing the subjective certainty about (...)
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  27. Heterogeneous inferences with maps.Mariela Aguilera - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3805-3824.
    Since Tolman’s paper in 1948, psychologists and neuroscientists have argued that cartographic representations play an important role in cognition. These empirical findings align with some theoretical works developed by philosophers who promote a pluralist view of representational vehicles, stating that cognitive processes involve representations with different formats. However, the inferential relations between maps and representations with different formats have not been sufficiently explored. Thus, this paper is focused on the inferential relations between cartographic and linguistic representations. To that effect, we (...)
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  28. Maps, Language, and the Conceptual–Non-Conceptual Distinction.Mariela Aguilera & Federico Castellano - 2021 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 98 (2):287-315.
    To make the case for non-conceptualism, Heck draws on an apparent dichotomy between linguistic and iconic representations. According to Heck, whereas linguistic representations have conceptual content, the content of iconic representations is non-conceptual. Based on the case of cartographic systems, the authors criticize Heck’s dichotomous distinction. They argue that maps are composed of semantically arbitrary elements that play different syntactic roles. Based on this, they claim that maps have a predicative structure and convey conceptual content. Finally, the authors argue that, (...)
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  29. Cognitive Models Are Distinguished by Content, Not Format.Patrick Butlin - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):83-102.
    Cognitive scientists often describe the mind as constructing and using models of aspects of the environment, but it is not obvious what makes something a model as opposed to a mere representation....
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  30. Are Generative Models Structural Representations?Marco Facchin - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (2):277-303.
    Philosophers interested in the theoretical consequences of predictive processing often assume that predictive processing is an inferentialist and representationalist theory of cognition. More specifically, they assume that predictive processing revolves around approximated Bayesian inferences drawn by inverting a generative model. Generative models, in turn, are said to be structural representations: representational vehicles that represent their targets by being structurally similar to them. Here, I challenge this assumption, claiming that, at present, it lacks an adequate justification. I examine the only argument (...)
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  31. Structural representations do not meet the job description challenge.Marco Facchin - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5479-5508.
    Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...)
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  32. Models in Science (2nd edition).Roman Frigg & Stephan Hartmann - 2021 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models such as inflationary models in cosmology, general-circulation models of the global climate, the double-helix model of DNA, evolutionary models in biology, agent-based models in the social sciences, and general-equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains is a case in point (the Other Internet Resources section at the end of this entry contains links to online resources that discuss these models). Scientists spend significant amounts of time building, (...)
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  33. The Analog-Digital Distinction Fails to Explain the Perception-Thought Distinction: An Alternative Account of the Format of Mental Representation.Piotr Kozak - 2021 - Studia Semiotyczne 35 (1):73-94.
    The format of mental representation is the way information is organized in the mind. The discussion surrounding the format of representation addresses the problem of what representational primitives are and the rules of information processing. In philosophy, the discussion is dominated by the distinction between analog and digital representational systems. It is thought that this distinction can bring us closer to an understanding of the nature of perceptual and discursive representations. I argue that the analog-digital distinction cannot meet that expectation. (...)
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  34. Belief Fragments and Mental Files.Michael Murez - 2021 - In Andrea Onofri, Cristina Borgoni & Dirk Kindermann (eds.), The Fragmented Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 251-278.
    Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. Philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; (...)
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  35. Intelligent action guidance and the use of mixed representational formats.Joshua Shepherd - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 17):4143-4162.
    My topic is the intelligent guidance of action. In this paper I offer an empirically grounded case for four ideas: that [a] cognitive processes of practical reasoning play a key role in the intelligent guidance of action, [b] these processes could not do so without significant enabling work done by both perception and the motor system, [c] the work done by perceptual and motor systems can be characterized as the generation of information specialized for action guidance, which in turn suggests (...)
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  36. The perception/cognition distinction.Sebastian Watzl, Kristoffer Sundberg & Anders Nes - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (2):165-195.
    ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...)
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  37. Universal Tokenization.Ilexa Yardley - 2021 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
  38. Fodor on imagistic mental representations.Daniel C. Burnston - 2020 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 11 (1):71-94.
    : Fodor’s view of the mind is thoroughly computational. This means that the basic kind of mental entity is a “discursive” mental representation and operations over this kind of mental representation have broad architectural scope, extending out to the edges of perception and the motor system. However, in multiple epochs of his work, Fodor attempted to define a functional role for non-discursive, imagistic representation. I describe and critique his two considered proposals. The first view says that images play a particular (...)
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  39. Directive Content.Patrick Butlin - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (1):2-26.
    Representations may have descriptive content, directive content, or both, but little explicit attention has been given to the problem of distinguishing representations of these three kinds. We do not know, for instance, what determines whether a given representation is a directive instructing its consumer to perform some action or has descriptive content to the effect that the action in question has a certain value. This paper considers what it takes for a representation to have directive content. The first part of (...)
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  40. Modelling Nature. An Opinionated Introduction to Scientific Representation.Roman Frigg & James Nguyen - 2020 - New York: Springer.
    This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive (...)
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  41. Pictures, Propositions, and Predicates.Dominic Gregory - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2):155-170.
    Do representational pictures have propositional contents? The current paper argues that the characteristic contents of pictures are predicative rather than propositional: pictures characterise things as looking certain ways, and they thereby express properties of visual perspectives. The paper argues that the characteristic predicative contents of pictures are nonetheless able to feature in fully-fledged propositional contents once they are combined with contents of other suitable sorts. Various facts about communicative uses of pictures are then explained. The paper concludes by considering the (...)
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  42. Modeling the Meanings of Pictures: Depiction and the Philosophy of Language.John V. Kulvicki - 2020 - Oxford University Press.
    John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.
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  43. Mental Structures.Kevin J. Lande - 2020 - Noûs (3):649-677.
    An ongoing philosophical discussion concerns how various types of mental states fall within broad representational genera—for example, whether perceptual states are “iconic” or “sentential,” “analog” or “digital,” and so on. Here, I examine the grounds for making much more specific claims about how mental states are structured from constituent parts. For example, the state I am in when I perceive the shape of a mountain ridge may have as constituent parts my representations of the shapes of each peak and saddle (...)
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  44. Another Look at Mode Intentionalism.Jonathan Mitchell - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2519-2546.
    A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of (...)
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  45. Concepts and predication from perception to cognition.Jake Quilty-Dunn - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):273-292.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 273-292, October 2020.
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  46. Object individuation by iconic content: How is numerosity represented in iconic representation?Athanasios Raftopoulos - 2020 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 11 (1):42-70.
    : Fodor argues that perceptual representations are a subset of iconic representations, which are distinguished from symbolic/discursive representations. Iconic representations are nonconceptual and they do not support the abilities afforded by concepts. Iconic representations, for example, cannot support object individuation. If someone thinks that perception or some of its parts has imagistic NCC, they face the following dilemma. Either they will have to accept that this NCC does not allow for object individuation, but it represents instead conglomerations of properties and (...)
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  47. On Content Uniformity for Beliefs and Desires.Daniel Skibra - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2):279-309.
    The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents and desire contents which shows (...)
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  48. What Are Mental Representations?Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołrega & Tobias Schlicht (eds.) - 2020 - New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    Mental representation is one of core theoretical constructs within cognitive science and, together with the introduction of the computer as a model for the mind, is responsible for enabling the ‘cognitive turn’ in psychology and associated fields. Conceiving of cognitive processes, such as perception, motor control, and reasoning, as processes that consist in the manipulation of contentful vehicles representing the world has allowed us to refine our explanations of behavior and has led to tremendous empirical advancements. Despite the central role (...)
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  49. Articulating a Thought.Eli Alshanetsky - 2019 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we are struggling to articulate.
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  50. The Threshold of Representations. Integrating Semiotics and the Cognitive Sciences.Marta Caravà - 2019 - Versus 1:157-174.
    I assess the conditions that philosophers of mind usually use to identify mental representations. I argue in favor of a minimal definition of mental representation, which is similar to definitions endorsed by some philosophers of embodied cognition. I claim that, even if we endorse this minimal definition of mental representation, important aspects of perception cannot be explained in representational terms. Therefore I suggest endorsing a non-representational approach to perception made of a combination of the enactive approach and ecological psychology and (...)
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