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Entity Realism About Mental Representations

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pThe concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind (or some subset thereof) without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations.</jats:p>

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Keywords

5003 Philosophy, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5002 History and Philosophy Of Specific Fields, 3 Good Health and Well Being

Journal Title

Erkenntnis

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0165-0106
1572-8420

Volume Title

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Sponsorship
This work was supported by the ERC consolidator Grant [726251]