Objective Similarity and Mental Representation

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...

Transformation and Representation in Similarity

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

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...