The debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists as I construe it in this chapter is a debate about whether truth-conditions are or should be assigned directly to natural language sentences (NLSs) – the anti-representationalist view – or whether they are or should be assigned instead to mental representations (MRs) that are related in some appropriate way to these NLSs. On ...

There is a definite challenge in the air regarding the pivotal notion of internal representation. This challenge is explicit in, e.g., van Gelder, 1995; Beer, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wheeler, 1994; and elsewhere. We think it is a challenge that can be met and that (importantly) can be met by arguing from within a general framework that accepts many of the basic premises of the work (in new ...

1. The Situation in Cognition The situated cognition movement in the cognitive sciences, like those sciences themselves, is a loose-knit family of approaches to understanding the mind and cognition. While it has both philosophical and psychological antecedents in thought stretching back over the last century (see Gallagher, this volume, Clancey, this volume,), it has developed primarily since t...

The ability to generate, narrate, and understand stories allows humans to accomplish tasks they would otherwise find difficult or impossible. We draw on observations of human narrative to identify a number of capabilities underlying the narrative faculty that we assert must be integrated into any cognitive architecture intended to achieve human-level performance. In particular, we identify sequ...

In this essay we respond to some criticisms of the guidance theory of representation offered by Tom Roberts. We argue that although Roberts’ criticisms miss their mark, he raises the important issue of the relationship between affordances and the action-oriented representations proposed by the guidance theory. Affordances play a prominent role in the anti-representationalist accounts offered by...

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic "intra-action" (Barad 2007). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles's situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definitio...

I argue that any account of perceptual experience should satisfy the following two desiderata. First, it should account for the particularity of perceptual experience, that is, it should account for the mind-independent object of an experience making a difference to individuating the experience. Second, it should explain the possibility that perceptual relations to distinct environments could y...

Abstract Berkeley's likeness principle is the claim that ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’. The intended to undermine representationalism: view (that Berkeley attributes thinkers Descartes and Locke) all human knowledge mediated by ideas in mind represent material objects. Yet, appears leave unargued for. This has led several attempts explain why accepts it. In contrast metaphysical epi...