A New Perspective on Representational Problems

I argue that current flaws in the methodology of contemporary cognitive science, especially neuroscience, have adversely affected philosophical theorizing about the nature of representation. To highlight these flaws, I introduce a distinction between adopting the animal’s perspective and the observer’s perspective when characterizing representation. I provide a discussion of each and show how the former has been unduly overlooked by cognitive scientists, including neuroscientists and philosophers. I also provide a specific neuroscientific example that demonstrates how adopting the animal’s perspective can simplify the characterization of the representation relation. Finally, I suggest that taking this perspective seriously supports in a specific thesis regarding content determination: the statistical dependence hypothesis.