Reifying Representations

The representational theory of mind (RTM) holds that the mind is stocked with mental representations: mental items that represent. They can be stored in memory, manipulated during mental activity, and combined to form complex representations. RTM is widely presupposed within cognitive science, which offers many successful theories that cite mental representations. Nevertheless, mental representations are still viewed warily in some scientific and philosophical circles. This chapter develops a novel version of RTM: the capacities-based representational theory of mind (C-RTM). According to C-RTM, a mental representation is an abstract type that marks the exercise of a representational capacity. Talk about mental representations embodies an ontologically loaded way of classifying mental states through representational capacities that the states deploy. Complex mental representations mark the appropriate joint exercise of multiple representational capacities. The chapter supports C-RTM with examples drawn from cognitive science, including perceptual representations and cognitive maps, and applies C-RTM to long-standing debates over the existence, nature, individuation, structure, and explanatory role of mental representations.

Actions do not speak louder than words in an interactive false belief task

Traditionally, it had been assumed that meta-representational Theory of Mind (ToM) emerges around the age of 4 when children come to master standard false belief (FB) tasks. More recent research with various implicit measures, though, has documented much earlier competence and thus challenged the traditional picture. In interactive FB tasks, for instance, infants have been shown to track an interlocutor's false or true belief when interpreting her ambiguous communicative acts (Southgate et al . 2010 Dev. Sci. 13 , 907–912. ( doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x )). However, several replication attempts so far have produced mixed findings (e.g. Dörrenberg et al . 2018 Cogn. Dev. 46 , 12–30. ( doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001 ); Grosse Wiesmann et al. 2017 Dev. Sci. 20 , e12445. ( doi:10.1111/desc.12445 ); Király et al . 2018 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115 , 11 477–11 482. ( doi:10.1073/pnas.1803505115 )). Therefore, we conducted a systematic replication study, across two laboratories, of an influential interactive FB task (the so-called ‘Sefo’ tasks by Southgate et al . 2010 Dev. Sci. 13 , 907–912. ( doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00946.x )). First, we implemented close direct replications with the original age group (17-month-olds) and compared their performance to those of 3-year-olds. Second, we designed conceptual replications with modifications and improvements regarding pragmatic ambiguities for 2-year-olds. Third, we validated the task with explicit verbal test versions in older children and adults. Results revealed the following: the original results could not be replicated, and there was no evidence for FB understanding measured by the Sefo task in any age group except for adults. Comparisons to explicit FB tasks suggest that the Sefo task may not be a sensitive measure of FB understanding in children and even underestimate their ToM abilities. The findings add to the growing replication crisis in implicit ToM research and highlight the challenge of developing sensitive, reliable and valid measures of early implicit social cognition.

Representation in Cognitive Science

The representational theory of mind (RTM) has given us the powerful insight that thinking consists of the processing of mental representations. Behaviour is the result of these cognitive processes and makes sense in the light of their contents. There is no widely accepted account of how representations get their content – of the metaphysics of representational content. That question, usually asked about representations at the personal level like beliefs and conscious states, is equally pressing for the subpersonal representations that pervade our best explanatory theories in cognitive science. This book argues that well-understood naturalistic resources can be combined to provide an account of subpersonal representational content. It shows how contents arise in a series of detailed case studies in cognitive science. The account is pluralistic, allowing that content is constituted differently in different cases. Building on insights from previous theories, especially teleosemantics, the accounts combine an appeal to correlational information and structural correspondence with an expanded notion of etiological function, which captures the kinds of stabilizing processes that give rise to content. The accounts support a distinction between descriptive and directive content. They also allow us to see how representational explanation gets its distinctive explanatory purchase.

What Structure Lurks in the Minds of Men?

An idea of Wittgenstein’s: Given the questions (e.g.) belief ascriptions speak to, there is no reason to expect what they ascribe to correspond in any interesting or significant way with any identifiable intracranial states or happenings. There is a viewpoint from which this seems at best perverse. It is incarnated in something known as the Representational Theory of Mind. After setting out that theory, this chapter works to make Wittgenstein’s idea plausible, or at least reasonable; correspondingly, RTM becomes less plausible, or at least less reasonable. It works in this direction by borrowing, and working out, some ideas of Frege’s—very broadly speaking, ideas on what is, what not, a psychological question; in large part ideas on the generality of thought and the particularity of what thought is about. Later Wittgenstein is generally much indebted to Frege. Here is one area where the debt shows.

Thinking about Things

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things like unicorns. The explanation centers on display theory, a theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Display theory explains away these seeming anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking. The book describes how concepts can be learned, originated, and given a systematic semantic description, independently of whether there exist things to which they refer. There being no things we are thinking about does not mean that we are not thinking about things.