Information and Mental Representation

Moral Philosophy and Mental Representation

Let me begin with a bit of autobiography. I am, by profession, a teacher of philosophy. Year in and year out, for the last fifteen or twenty years, I have taught a large undergraduate course on contemporary moral issues issues like abortion, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, genetic engineering, and animal rights. Over the years, I have written a handful of papers on some of these topics. How...

Mental Representation, Naturalism, and Teleosemantics

Objective Similarity and Mental Representation

The claim that similarity plays a role in representation has been philosophically discredited. Psychologists, however, routinely analyze the success of mental representations for guiding behavior in terms of a similarity between representation and the world. I provide a foundation for this practice by developing a philosophically responsible account of the relationship between similarity and re...

Semantic Maps and Mental Representation

Semantic maps are usually assumed to describe a universal arrangement of different conceptual situations in a speaker's mind as determined by perceived relations of similarity between these conceptual situations. This paper provides a number of arguments that challenge this view, based on various types of evidence from processes of semantic change and synchronic implicational universals. The mu...

The Mental Representation in Mental Rotation

What is rotated in mental rotation? The implicitly or explicitly most widely accepted assumption is that the rotated representation is a visual mental image. We here provide converging evidence that instead mental rotation is a process specialized on a certain type of spatial information. As a basis, we here develop a general theory on how to manipulate and empirically examine representational ...