: The current orthodoxy on mental representation can be characterized in terms of three central ideas. The first is ontological, the second semantic, and the third methodological. After elucidating those, I argue that the emerging picture of mental representation is satisfactory only as an account of mental representation at the sub-personal level. It is unsatisfactory, in a principled way, as ...

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...

Hume’s arguments in the Treatise require him to employ not only the copy principle, which explains the intrinsic properties of perceptions, but also a thesis that explains the representational content of a perception. I propose that Hume holds the semantic copy principle, which states that a perception represents that of which it is a copy. Hume employs this thesis in a number of his most impor...

Logical connectives, such as "AND", "OR", "IF. THEN", and "IF AND ONLY IF" are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a "minimalist" one-possibility representation. As a res...

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 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...