Cognitive Science
subject: What Are Neural Representations?
supervisor: Prof. Oron Shagrir
Abstract: I am interested in the role representations have in accounting for our cognitive capacities. The notion of mental representations might be the single most dominant explanatory posit in the cognitive sciences to date, yet the mysteriousness regarding the nature of representation and its role within our mind (or within theories of the mind) has withstood many years of debate. The classic debate over the existence of representations has drawn a long standing line between representationalists, who believe cognition must include mental states or structures which represent (or have content/semantics/intentionality) and eliminativists, who believe cognitive theories should dispense with such notions of representation. I aim to explore and argue for a third option, largely overlooked in the existing literature, which could be called the pragmatic view of representations. On the pragmatic view, the mind in fact does not use representations but nevertheless- they are still necessary within our cognitive theories. I intend to offer a complete and thorough account for a pragmatic view of representation in hope that it will help carve out significant room for this view within the traditional representationalist/eliminativist debate.
Presidential Stipend 2014/15