Deflating Mental Representation

A novel account of the explanatory role of representation in both the cognitive sciences and commonsense practice that preserves the virtues without the defects of the prevailing two views about mental representation.

Philosophers of mind tend to hold one of two broad views about mental representation: they are either robustly realist about mental representations, taking them to have determinate, objective content independent of attributors’ explanatory interests and goals, or they embrace some form of anti-realism, holding that mental representations are at best useful fictions. Neither view is satisfactory. In Deflating Mental Representation, Frances Egan develops and defends a distinctive third way—a view she calls a deflationary account of mental representation—that both resolves philosophical worries about content and best fits actual practice in science and everyday life.

According to Egan’s deflationary account, appeal to mental representation does indeed pick out causes of behavior, but the attribution of content to these causes is best understood as a pragmatically motivated gloss, justified in part by attributors’ explanatory interests and goals. Content plays an explanatory role in the deflationary account, but one quite different than that assumed by robust representational realists. Egan also develops a novel account of perceptual experience as a kind of modeling of our inner lives by aspects of external reality and explains the role of appeal to representation in this process.Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Representation in Cognitive Science
2 Reconstructing Intentionality
3 Belief and Its Linguistic Representation
4 The Structure of Perceptual Experience: A New Look at Adverbialism
Afterword
Notes
References
Index“It is uncommon for a philosophical theory to be truly groundbreaking, but Egan's theory of mental representation is an exception. It allows us to overcome the impasse between naive realism and radical rejections: while the attribution of mental representation is merely a pragmatic gloss, it can still serve as a scientifically valuable explanation, firmly rooted in computational cognitive mechanisms.”
—Albert Newen, Professor and Director of the Center for Mind and Cognition at Ruhr University Bochum
 
“Relying on a careful examination of computational theories in the cognitive and brain sciences, Egan advances the most thorough deflationary account of mental representation. It is a nuanced analysis that combines realism about the computational mechanisms of mental representations with anti-realism regarding their content. Egan’s book is a must-read for those interested in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.”
—Oron Shagrir, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of JerusalemFrances Egan is Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rutgers University. She has held research fellowships at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld and the Center for Mind and Cognition at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2021.