According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena —those involving absent and abstract features— require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the considerati...

The dynamical approach to cognition is often considered to be ‘revolutionary’. In contrast to the well-established approaches of computationalism and connectionism, dynamicism is typically thought to be anti-representational, holistic, phenomenological and law-based. In this paper, I will argue that this way of thinking about dynamicism is too restrictive: it fails to capture the heterogeneous ...

Abstract A powerful idea put forward in the recent philosophy of science literature is that scientific models are best understood as instruments, tools or, more generally, artifacts. This has thus far been developed combination with traditional representational approach: accordingly, current artifactualist accounts treat tools. But artifactualism and representationalism independent views, adopt...

Kriegel's self-representationalist (SR) theory of phenomenal consciousness pursues two projects. The first is to offer a positive account of how conscious experience arises from physical brain processes. The second is to explain why consciousness misleadingly appears to be irreducible to the physical i.e. to 'demystify' consciousness. This paper seeks to determine whether SR succeeds on the sec...

As part of a defense of a physicalist view of experiences, David Papineau (2002) has offered an explanation for the intuition that properties found in experiences are distinct from neural properties. After providing some necessary background, I argue that Papineau’s explanation is not the best explanation of the distinctness intuition. An alternative explanation that is compatible with dualism ...

According to representionalists, qualiaÐ the introspectible properties of sensory experienceÐ are exhausted by the representational contents of experience. Representationalists typically advocate an informational psychosemantics whereby a brain state represents one of its causal antecedents in evolutionarily determined optimal circumstances. I argue that such a psychosemantics may not apply to ...

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representatio...