Naturalising Representational Content

Nicholas Shea

doi:10.1111/phc3.12033

Naturalising Representational Content

Nicholas Shea

Philosophy

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445 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper sets out a view about the explanatory role of representational content and advocates one approach to naturalising content – to giving a naturalistic account of what makes an entity a representation and in virtue of what it has the content it does. It argues for pluralism about the metaphysics of content and suggests that a good strategy is to ask the content question with respect to a variety of predictively successful information processing models in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience; and hence that data from psychology and cognitive neuroscience should play a greater role in theorising about the nature of content. Finally, the contours of the view are illustrated by drawing out and defending a surprising consequence: that individuation of vehicles of content is partly externalist.

Original language	English
Article number	N/A
Pages (from-to)	496-509
Number of pages	14
Journal	Philosophy Compass
Volume	8
Issue number	5
Early online date	27 Mar 2013
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12033
Publication status	Published - May 2013

Keywords

representational content
theories of content
naturalism
meta-semantics

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10.1111/phc3.12033

Naturalising Representational Content
King's has now paid for public Open Access to this article. Accordingly, the pre-print pdf should be replaced online by this Open Access pdf, which can be freely publicly distributed under the publisher's licence.
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Naturalising Representational Content

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Keywords

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