Conclusion
I've tried to argue that there is more to representational content than CRS can acknowledge. CRS is attractive, I think, because of its rejection of atomism, and because it is a plausible theory of targets. But those are philosopher's concerns. Someone interested in building a person needs to understand representation, because, as AI researchers have urged for some time, good representation is the secret of good performance. I have just gestured in the direction I think a viable theory of representation must take. I hope, however, to have created some advance sympathy for the gesture by distinguishing the problem of representation from the problem of targets on the one hand, and from the problem truth-conditions for the attitudes on the other.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Armstrong, David, 1968,A Materialist Theory of Mind. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cummins, Robert, 1986, ‘Inexplicit information’, in M. Brand and R. M. Harnish, eds.,The Representation of Knowledge and Belief. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 116–126.
Loui, R., 1991, ‘Ampliative inference, computation and dialectic’, in Robert Cummins and John Pollock, eds.,Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence: Essays at the Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, a Bradford Book.
Fodor, Jerry, 1990,A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, a Bradford Book.
Fodor, Jerry, 1987,Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, a Bradford Book.
Fodor, Jerry and Zenon Pylyshyn, 1988, ‘Connectionism and cognitive architecture’,Cognition 28, 3–71.
Henkin, L., 1949, ‘The completeness of the first-order functional calculus’,The Journal of Symbolic Logic 14, 159–166.
Pollock, John, 1990,How To Build a Person. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, a Bradford Book.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cummins, R. Conceptual role semantics and the explanatory role of content. Philos Stud 65, 103–127 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00571319
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00571319