Deflating Mental Representation (Jean Nicod Lectures) - Softcover

Egan, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262551608 ISBN 13: 9780262551601

Publisher: MIT Press, 2025

Synopsis

"A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation. Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors’ explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. Neither view is satisfactory. In Deflating Mental Representation, Frances Egan develops and defends a distinctive third way—a view she calls a deflationary account of mental representation—that both resolves philosophical worries about content and best fits actual practice in science and everyday life. According to Egan’s deflationary account, appeal to mental representation does indeed pick out causes of behavior, but the attribution of content to these causes is best understood as a pragmatically motivated gloss, justified in part by attributors’ explanatory interests and goals. Content plays an explanatory role in the deflationary account, but one quite different than that assumed by robust representational realists. Egan also develops a novel account of perceptual experience as a kind of modeling of our inner lives by aspects of external reality and explains the role of appeal to representation in this process."

About this title

About the Author

Frances Egan is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers University. She has held research fellowships at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld and the Center for Mind and Cognition at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2021.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262551608
• ISBN 13: 9780262551601
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192