Mental Representation, Conceptual Spaces and Metaphors
نویسنده
چکیده
What is the form of mental representation? One very influential contemporary answer to this question starts from the assumption that the brain functions like a Turing machine. This assumption, which is basically a metaphor, provides the foundation for much theoretical speculation in cognitive science and related fields. According to one version of the computer metaphor, the atoms of mental representations are symbols which combine to form meaningful expressions.1 These symbolic expressions represent propositions and they stand in various logical relations to each other. Information processing involves above all computations of logical consequences. In brief, the mind is seen as a kind of logic machine that operates on sentences from a mental language by symbol manipulation. Following Patricia S. Churchland (1986, Ch. 9.6), I will call this approach to mental representations the sentential paradigm.2
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