1. Carl Mair
Do minds represent the world, and if so, how do those representations get there?
Introduction
The idea that minds represent the world is a core assumption of many theoretical
investigations into the nature of mind. It is a starting premise of both cognitive science and
psychology1, and even the more empirical approaches engage the language of representation
in their explanations.2
But ‘mental representation’ is far from a settled concept, and there are many different notions
about what the term means. Part of this confusion may be due to the numinous character of
the word ‘mental’. Although the 'mind' presents as a unitary category, it is in fact the
emergent outcome of a multitude of brain processes (hence forth mind/brain). Unlike the early
days of cognitive linguistics, when Chomsky famously reinstated a mentalist approach to
cognitive capacities3, in modern debates the 'brain' has assumed a position of increasing
importance.4 This essay will treat ‘mental representation’ as referring to a restricted set of
mind/brain processes, and in particular, to those involved with what is commonly known as
‘thinking’. Though ‘thinking’ will take up much of the ensuing analysis, a large part of this
essay will try to disentangle other cognitive activities which have often been assumed to be
representational. The distinction between environmentally ‘de-coupled’ representative
activities and ‘coupled’ activities will be presented as critical to getting a clear understanding
of the term.
One of the most detailed and prevalent accounts of mental representation is given by Fodor’s
work in the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). This position will be examined first with
a view to outlining the concerns and stakes of the mental representation debate. The
connectionist architecture account will be examined next, along with its competing theoretical
commitments. The following sections will present two less main-stream approaches to mental
representation, in the form of Andy Clark’s minimal-Cartesian ‘embodied cognition’ and Jay
Garfield’s anti-representationalist stance. The theoretical commitment of these last two
models to the ‘coupled’/’de-coupled’ distinction will be argued to provide the most plausible
account of ‘representation’, notwithstanding the challenge these theories present to the notion
of mental representation all together.
The classical approach
The classical approach to cognitive science and mental representation is closely aligned with
the early work of Fodor, and centres around two closely linked hypotheses, namely CTM and
the language of thought hypothesis.
First, some historical and terminological issues. CTM was born out of Turing's work in the
1950's which showed that any sophisticated process that reduced to serial syntactical inputs
could be computed by a machine so as to give the corresponding outputs. 'Thinking' (to use a
disputed term) could therefore be defined in purely formal terms, 'as those causal relations
1
J. Fodor, Concepts: where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Clarendon Press, 1998), p 8
2
A. Damasio The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace, 1999) p 333
3
N Chomsky in his Review of Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1959), generally
4
The work of Churchland in particular, see P Churchland The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (MIT Press,
1996), P 5
1

2. among symbols which reliably respect semantic properties of relata'5. Elsewhere6, Fodor has
called the process of delivering semantic output from syntactical processes ‘syntax/semantics
parallelism', and claims it as the 'main philosophical interest of computational psychology'7.
The 'relata' in the above quote are mental representations (henceforth, representations), and it
is these that bear the semantic content. When a thinker bears a relation to these
representations (be it belief, desire or some other folk psychological category), he has what is
called a 'propositional attitude': a mental representation plus its relational nature equals a
'propositional attitude'. Furthermore, a 'thought' is merely the 'cover term for the
representation which expresses the proposition that is the object of the attitude'8. For example,
S may have the belief that 'Hilary is a girl's name'. This qualifies as a thought since it is both a
representation (with semantic content) as well as an expression of S's relation towards it.
'Hilary'9 on the other hand is simply one concept among others which composes the thought.
The fact that thoughts decompose into concepts Fodor refers to as compositionality.
To briefly summarise. A thought is the representation of the 'object' of an attitude, and is
composed of concepts. Thinking is the movement from thought to thought via a causal
process driven by a purely 'syntactic engine'. The ‘engine’ itself is the set of rules which
governs the causality.
The key to this account is that of syntax/semantics parallelism. Fodor explains the way
content-rich thoughts can be produced from content-ignorant computation (i.e. how
intentional mental processes are implemented by syntactical ones) as follows10:
consider a psychological causal law of the form A-states cause B-states where
"A" and "B" express intentional properties. For present purposes the, the imple-
mentation principle says: for each individual that falls under the antecedent of
this law there will be some syntactic property AS, such that for each individual
that falls under the consequent of the law there will be some syntactic property
BS such that AS-states cause BS-states is a law
The idea that syntax can entirely explain semantics has come under attack from numerous
theorists, including Putnam's famous demonstration that syntax in fact underdetermines
semantics.11 However, the idea remains compelling for a number of reasons. If thinking is the
manipulation of compositional elements by formal rules, then the observed 'productivity' and
'systematicity' of thought can be explained. Productivity (or the ability of thinkers to construct
novel thoughts) is simply seen as the result of the combinatorial possibilities for a large set of
elements. Since thoughts are made of concepts, and since the human repertoire of concepts is
so vast, the possible number of thoughts is almost incalculable.12 Likewise, if thoughts
decompose into concepts, any thought involving a one way relation such as aRb can also exist
as bRa, which explains the apparent systematicity of thought: if S can believe that Hilary
loves Noam, S can also believe that Noam loves Hilary. The syntactic processes which govern
these manipulations are said to be sets of generative rules similar to those Chomsky posits for
5
J Fodor, Concepts: where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Clarendon Press, 1998), p 10
6
Loewer and Rey (ed) Fodor's reply to Devitt in Meaning in Mind (Blackwell, 1991), p 284
7
Loewer and Rey (ed), see n 6above, p 285
8
J. Fodor, see n 3 above, p 25
9
Actually this isn't entirely accurate, see Fodor, n 4 above, p 284
10
Loewer and Rey (ed), see n 6above, p 284
11
Using the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem in logic. In fact other weaker views of the relation between syntax and
semantics were endorsed by the main proponents of CTM [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/]
12
S. Pinker, How the mind works (Softback Preview, 1998) p 88
2

3. language. In fact, Fodor argues that all these operations occur in a language, which he calls
the 'language of thought'.
Fodor proposes a language of thought (LOT) wherein exist both the vocabulary of concepts
and the syntactic laws which govern their manipulation. Given that it is a language, it follows
that its representations (thoughts) are sentential not imagistic. Furthermore, since thoughts are
merely the representation of the object of a propositional attitude, it also holds that LOT is
committed to the legitimation of folk psychology (if thoughts are an instantiation of a relation
which is a folk psychological category, then folk psychology is naturalised to a certain
extent). This issue will be picked up again later in the essay.
One difficulty in suggesting that there is a language of thought is the same difficulty that
Chomsky's research program faces in having to determine which aspects are learned and
which innate. Certainly the sets of syntactic operations are likely candidates for innateness.
But the difficulty really starts when deciding how much of the substantive content, in the form
of concepts, is innate. In Fodor's hierarchy of structural complexity, thoughts are composed of
concepts, which in turn may be composed of simpler concepts, but there comes a point when
the concepts become 'primitive' and irreducible. According to Fodor, 'if a concept belongs to
the primitive basis from which complex mental representations are constructed, it must be
ipso facto unlearned'.13 Exactly what is primitive (and thus innate) and what is complex (and
learned) is still the subject of on-going debate, though some candidate examples of conceptual
primitives are concepts like Red, Cause etc.14
It is useful to summarise Fodor's model of mental representation by adverting to his wider
explanatory project. In general, one can view most of Fodor's theoretical work as kind of
apologia for intentionalist psychology15. That is to say, Fodor is committed to a theory of
human behaviour which relies on causal explanation in the terms of folk psychology. For
instance, Fodor is interested in defending the empirical validity of the following kind of
statements, 'P did X because he desired Y and he needed to do X in order to achieve Y'. His
models of CTM and LOT help to give this endeavour a theoretical base.
It is interesting to note that Fodor applies this model of inner symbols standing for external
objects or concepts to all mental processes indiscriminately. There appears to be no allowance
for the apparent heterogeneity of cognitive abilities. ‘Decoupled’ and ‘coupled’ cognitive
activities are presented as sub-served by the same representational system. This issue will be
dealt with in some detail in the section dealing with ‘embodied cognition’, but it should be
noted that this failure to distinguish between ‘coupled’ and ‘decoupled’ cognitive processes
will be argued to constitute a major weakness in Fodor’s explanatory project.
A very different model of mental representation with contrasting theoretical commitments is
given by CTM’s old adversary, connectionism, which we will now review.
The connectionist approach
In general, classical CTM theorists have given connectionist models of the mind fairly short
shrift.16
13
J. Fodor, see n 3 above, p 27
14
J. Fodor, see n3 above, p 124
15
M. Cain, Fodor, (Polity, 2002) p 150
16
see in particular S. Pinker in How the Mind works, see n 12 above, p 112-120,
3

4. Classical critiques of connectionist theories seem to follow the lines of the 1988 article by
Fodor and Pylysyn17 (henceforth, the FP critique), which gave connectionists a choice of
either 1.) being wrong. or 2.) being just an implementation of the classical approach. Since an
understanding of connectionist mental representation is required to understand the force of the
FP critique, this will be outlined first.
Of the different kinds of connectionist theories, 'parallel distributed processing' (PDP)
represents the standard approach (an ‘updated’ version of PDP will be looked at in the section
dealing with ‘embodied cognition’). The salient difference between PDP and classical CTM is
that PDP dispenses with symbols and rules entirely, and replaces them with 'patterns of
numerical activity over groups of units, and patterns of weights over groups of connections'18.
Since PDP rejects mentalist objects such as symbols and rules and focuses instead on the
physical realizability in the material of the brain, it is eliminative with respect to the mental.
But this rejection of discrete mental symbols in favour of a distributed pattern of neural
activity has several consequences. The most important of which is the implied valediction to
the concept of compositionality so crucial to Fodor's project. If a mental representation is a
'pattern' of activity, and each representation has a different pattern of activity (set by repeated
exposure, i.e. learning) then every representation is theoretically primitive in Fodor's sense of
the word; and every thought is primitive. Since everything is primitive, the distinction
between thoughts, complex concepts, and primitive concepts necessarily breaks down. The FP
critique uses this result in a kind of syllogism:
(a) Thoughts are systematic.
(b) Compositionality is the only way to ensure systematicity
(c) PDP is non-compositional
Therefore, either:
(1)PDP fails as an explanation for thinking, and is useless.
or (2) you save the show by demonstrating (c) is false with the
result that PDP does not really differ from classical CTM.
This last result is often called the implementationalist approach to PDP, in that PDP is seen
mainly as a way of neurally realizing classical CTM. Though some PDP theorists have
swallowed this bitter pill, others, like Smolensky19 have developed what he calls a hybrid
connectionist/symbolic architecture which he claims can still maintain the essential
differences of a connectionist approach while ensuring compositionality (and thus explaining
systematicity.) The explication involves reasonably complicated formal methods in the shape
of tensor calculus, and is outside the scope of this essay. The important point to extract from
this discussion is that the PDP notion of mental representation rejects the classical image of
thoughts as complex symbols/tokens and of thinking as symbol-crunching. PDP
representations are simply distributed patterns of 'neural' activity, which get there by
'experience', moderated by PDP learning procedures.
Two theoretical spin-offs from this result are the elimination of innate structures or content
and the de-legitimation of folk psychology. The first spin-off comes from an assumption
which underlies PDP learning and is shared with all Associationist/Behaviourist/Empiricist
17
J. Fodor and Pylyshyn's Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A critical analysis (1988)
18
P. Smolensky in Computational Theory of Mind in S. Guttenplan (ed) A Companion to the Philosophy of
Mind, p 178
19
P. Smolensky Connectionism, Constituency, and the Language of Thought in Loewer and Rey (eds), see n 4
above, p 201
4

5. approaches to mental content: that it comes from outside the organism. If all concepts and
thoughts are primitive- or to put it differently (though meaning the same thing), - if there are
no primitive concepts or thoughts, then all concepts are acquired the same way: through
experience (moderated perhaps by innate learning mechanisms). Mental representations are
simply experiential imprints of regularities on the outside, derived through a kind of
statistical-frequency filter. The second spin-off also relates to the non-compositional nature of
PDP representations. If PDP representations really are distributed and superpositional, then
'connectionist models do not seem to have internal states that could be discretely identified as
particular intentional states'.20
It is important to note that these conclusions fly in the face of Fodor's explanatory project of
legitimising an intentionalist psychology for human behaviour.
At this point it is useful to summarise the major philosophical differences between the
classical and connectionist approaches. It has been widely observed that the respective
explanatory powers of the two approaches are in fact near mirror-images. While the "chunky
symbolic" approach excels at 'structural' tasks like logical reasoning, it is weak with respect to
statistical generalizations; the PDP approach, on the other hand, is weak at anything structural
(due to the non-compositionality of its representations), but excels at statistical analyses21.
Furthermore, PDP models have the added advantage of being able to explain patterns of
actual human brain damage, where computational capacity is reduced but not completely
destroyed as would likely be the case if 'thinking' was simply due to a single system of rules
and representations. So while the classical approach seems to have greater explanatory power
in regard to the ratiocinative aspects of thought, PDP has advantages in respect of neural
plausibility. However, despite these differences, the two models share the assumption that
cognitive activities are sub-served by a single representational system; one where the world is
re-presented regardless of whether the cognitive process is ‘coupled’ to the object in real-time
or if it is absent.
The two models which will be examined next, that of 'embodied cognition' and Garfield's
anti-representationalist stance, develop this important distinction as a core theoretical
requirement.
The 'embodied cognition' approach
A recent article by Andy Clark22 explains how the model of PDP outlined above has been
extended in recent work in 'single recurrent neural networks', so that representations are no
longer just instantaneous patterns of activity but 'patterns of activity in temporally extended
processing trajectories.'23 This model supports the conceptualisation of representations as less
like 'simple inner states' and more like 'complex inner processes'. Such a model is aimed at
capturing situations which involve heavily interactive agent-environment activities in real-
time like dancing24, where the ‘representation’ is constantly ‘updated’. Many so-called post-
Cartesian philosophers of mind have interpreted the success of some of these models as a fatal
blow to the Fodorean account of mental representation as a system of static inner symbols,
and indeed as fatal for any representational theory of mind at all.
20
Churchland's critique, see S. Guttenplan (ed), A Companion to Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1995) p 207
21
S. Guttenplan (ed), see n 18 above, p178
22
A. Clark, Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind, in Virtual Course book
23
A. Clark, see n 22 above, p 6
24
A. Clark, see n 22 above, p 6
5

6. This model, known as 'embodied cognition' aims to replace the traditional Cartesian
dichotomy of 'mind' and 'world' (still assumed by models which rely on notions of the 'inner'
and 'outer' like classical PDP and classical CTM) with a model of 'mind in world', where an
extensive feed-back relationship breaks down the inner/outer divide. Clark disagrees with this
extreme view, and instead develops a kind of 'minimal Cartesianism' (MC).
In essence, MC follows along the lines of the 'embodied cognition' model in situations of rich
agent-world interaction, but departs when situations become 'representation hungry'25:
Properly representation-hungry scenarios would be planning next year's
vacation, using mental imagery to count windows in your old house,
doing mental arithmetic, dreaming etc.
This departure from 'embodied cognition' in 'representation-hungry' scenarios is characterised
as an acceptance of the near-Fodorean idea of thinking as 'off-line environmentally de-
coupled reason'. However, unlike Fodor, Clark restricts the application of this faculty to those
cases which do not require real-time interactive engagement with the world. Furthermore,
contra Fodor, Clark takes pains to explain this faculty without recourse to the classical
'content-neutral, rich, action-independent, highly manipulable inner symbolic structure'.26 The
model Clark pursues is one which allows rich, action-neutral structures but seeks to place this
structure 'outside', in 'our experiences with public language and other externalizable and
interpersonally shareable symbol systems.'27 Environmentally de-coupled human thought and
reason is said to be 'scaffolded' by the external structure of sign-systems, and manifests as
'extended computational processes spanning the boundaries between brain, body and world'.28
It is important to make clear the philosophical consequences of this model. In contrast to both
classical CTM and traditional PDP, MC does not assume that all cognitive processes are sub-
served by a single system of representation. ‘On-line’ cognitive activities, such as physical
interactions with the world, are served by coupled representative processes. ‘Off-line’
cognitive activities, like planning, or what is traditionally called ‘thinking’ is served by a
system of de-coupled representations which are learnt via culture in the shape of natural
language. It is only these last types of activities, which according to Clark, are
‘representation-hungry’ enough to actually require such a system.
Garfield modifies Clark’s model by denying that the ‘coupled’ interactions with the world
need be called ‘representative’ at all. He argues this point by developing a distinction he
believes has been overlooked in the literature: that between intention and representation. We
will now examine this argument.
Garfield's anti-representationalist stance
A large portion of Garfield's article29 is a kind of meta-philosophical inquiry into the idea of
mental representation as a concept in its own right. The overall thesis is that it is a metaphor
that has been misapplied as literal in the philosophy of mind. With characteristic audacity, he
25
A Clark, see n 22 above, p 18
26
A Clark, see n 22 above, p 23
27
A Clark, see n 22 above,p 24
28
A Clark, see n 22 above,p 25
29
J. Garfield, Intention: (Doing away with Mental representation),
(http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/jgarfieldintention.htm)
6

7. urges that we get rid of it entirely.30 Interestingly, his argument is not eliminativist in that he is
a firm believer in desire-belief psychology.31. Furthermore, he reminds us that even the
eliminativists follow a representational theory of mind (a PDP representation is a pattern of
neural activity). The anti-representationalist model Garfield presents walks a kind of tight-
rope, as he acknowledges himself32:
I remain a friend of belief, though I find myself becoming a foe of representation,
and so position myself at the same time closer to the mainstream and further on
the lunatic fringe.
Like Clark, Garfield considers the differences between different types of cognitive activities
as vitally important. Although he does not share the terminology, Garfield draws the
distinction between agent/environment interactive cognition and environmentally de-coupled
reason. Garfield attributes both the traditional PDP and CTM approaches' tendency to treat all
cognitive skills under one representational system as due to the pervasiveness of the
representation metaphor33
There is the assumption that any kind of information-bearing states or processes
are representational, however much they might not look to be- that representation
is the default assumption regarding the nature of cognitive activity; even the
processes that subserve motor-control are thought of as representational- the
drive to treat all cognition homogenously is not taken as a drive to treat conceptual
activity as similar to motor control in virtue of being non-representational, but the
reverse.
Although roughly on the same side of the argument as Clark, Garfield dislikes Clark's habit of
still referring to environmentally-coupled cognitive activities as representational. Using the
example of the visual system, Garfield considers the perception of rotating blocks. He argues
that there is 'no need to represent them; I can simply see them'34. The statement may seem a
little glib, and needs some unpacking before it can be properly understood. The object of
perception is present in front of him, and though the visual system may perform operations on
the percept, these are merely to 'mediate detection and interaction'35: there is no need to re-
present what is already present- all this is part of presenting the object. The point is a subtle
one. Indeed, neurophysiologists refer to the inputs from the sensory modalities in
representational terms. Damasio36 refers to auditory or tactile ‘images’. It is also clear that the
sensory modalities, and the visual system in particular, do use various ‘cortical maps’. The
crucial distinction Garfield seems to be driving at is representation as standing in for
something absent or non-existent, and representation as a model for something that is already
present. Since the latter is rather a means of processing that which is present and not in fact
something which ‘stands in’ for something else, there is no reason to call it representational.
Once this distinction is drawn, to continue to call visual and auditory ‘images’ representations
rather than presentations seems a kind of Kantian hang-over, where only that which is the
noumenal ‘thing-in-itself’ can escape the designation.
30
J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p 2
31
J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p2
32
J. Garfield, see n 29 above,p 2
33
J. Garfield, see n 29 above,p 3
34
J. Garfield, see n 29 above,p 5
35
J. Garfield, see n 29 above,p 5
36
A. Damasio, TheFeeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace, 1999) p 333
7

8. What Garfield wants to deny is that all cognitive activity is merely the manipulation of inner
representations; he wants, in his own words, 'to leave the external world outside'37, and only
talk about representations when they become part of that external world.
The distinction that Garfield thinks Clark overlooked to lead him to the erroneous view that
agent/environment interactive activities were representational, was that between intentionality
and representation. According to Garfield, 'what our mental processes are good for is
intending'38. Environmentally coupled cognitive activities only exhibit intentionality, they do
not require representation. For instance, S's hitting a tennis ball with a racket is not
representational (in terms of involving a rich content-neutral symbol system); it is simply
intentional, in that it involves a cognitive process directed at or about something.
'Mental intentionality plus linguistic representation equals human thought’.39 Representation
then, in the only sense which Garfield permits it, is something humans do in a 'derivative
sense', in that the 'representational burden' is borne by the external sign system of public
language. It is the only means we have to think about the 'non-existent, the abstract and the
distant'. He later adds40:
The representation in this case is, crucially, not the vehicle of thought, not
a cognitive state, but rather the immediate object of thought, a linguistic item.
Cognition intends the object, which in turn represents the abstract fact in question.
...the kernel of truth in the language of thought hypothesis is the intuition that
representation must have determinate, and indeed, compositional content and that
only language can provide that. It does not follow, however that thought is in language
only that it is of language.
Fodor's internal and private LOT is thus replaced with external and public natural language,
which among other things41 is the sign system which allows environmentally de-coupled
representative thought. The idea that the 'language of thought' is natural language is not a new
one42, but Garfield presents some empirical evidence to substantiate the claim.
In another paper43, Garfield reports some experimental results which seem to suggest that the
acquisition of certain features of natural language grammar are necessary to scaffold certain
kinds of thinking. The ability of children to reason about the mental states of other agents
seemed to be causally related to children’s' ability to master the sentential complement (S
believes that X). Other studies by Berk et al44 in different areas of 'thinking' also corroborate
the causal relationship between language acquisition and other mental abilities.
The problem with this model, as with all models which suggest that natural language is the
language of thought, is that it seems to disallow the existence of non-linguistic thought.
Garfield addresses this issue by falling back on his notion of mental intentionality as distinct
37
J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p 19
38
J. Garfield, see n 29 above ,p 15
39
J. Garfield, see n 29 above ,p 15
40
J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p 17
41
Garfield is keen to stress that this is not language’s sole purpose
42
Has been expressed by Dennett, and also by Chomsky (in some moods): 'language is a tool for thought'.
43
J. Garfield Lets pretend: the role of language in the acquisition of Theory of Mind,
(http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/jgarfieldletspretend.doc)
44
Referenced in J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p 15
8

9. from representation. Only humans can think since as well as intentionality we also possess a
sign-system, but animals and pre-lingual infants can still have intentional actions45.
Conclusion
Having surveyed three different models of mental representations and one anti-
representational account, we are in the position to draw some conclusions.
This analysis commenced with the fairly concrete and detailed position of Fodor’s classical
CTM theorists, then addressed the connectionist program and finally attempted to present the
more abstract and recent accounts of Clark and Garfield. The changing pattern of concerns
and considerations which motivated each model is fairly obvious. Fodor's project to naturalise
folk psychology and thus legitimate intentionalist-causal explanations of human behaviour
required thought to be a private process, biologically endowed, and hence the centrality of
LOT hypothesis to his whole enterprise. The PDP approaches, on the other hand, seem to be
driven by a concern for neural plausibility, and secondarily perhaps (at least in Churchland's
case) as an implementation of the eliminitivist program. Both of these models try to get the
'outside' in, in the form of representations whether these are innate or learned, and both
attempt to explain all mind/brain processes as using a single representational system. Clark
and Garfield's recognition of the mind/brain's cognitive heterogeneity and the important
distinction between environmentally coupled and de-coupled activities seem to this author to
be a well taken point, and one whose philosophical consequences will now form the bulk of
these conclusions.
In many ways the Garfield/Clark account of representation is an interesting combination of
both the classical CTM and the PDP approaches. The updated PDP model has been used to
explain environmentally coupled cognitive activities as really non-representational temporally
structured processes. Garfield's insight that the crucial feature of these sub-symbol activities is
intentionality helps to explain their outcome-directed character. The account of
environmentally-decoupled cognitive activities as the product of intentionality plus a shared
public sign-system also recognises the 'kernel of truth' in Fodor's LOT: namely, that thought is
compositional.
However, once the distinction between coupled and de-coupled 'representations' has been
made, it is also clear that Garfield's argument against the latter as only 'derivatively
representational’ only cuts ice in regards to sentential representations. By placing the
representative burden on an external sign-system rather than on an internal LOT, he
successfully debunks 'mental representation', but he also skirts the mental imagery debate
entirely: surely de-coupled activities like dreaming or imagining images are not sentential,
and yet he does not suggest how these are to fit into his model. Are mental images products of
the visual system or some 'central system'?; are they allowed to be called representational?;
are they compositional? Garfield leaves these important questions open.
It is this author's hunch that Garfield's anti- mental representationalist stance is too strong, and
that though both CTM and connectionism were wrong to suggest that all cognitive activity is
representational, there are many cognitive activities which are both non-sentential and
representational, like playing chess. Given this, it is more useful to think of the Clark/Garfield
approach to mental representation as reminding us of some crucial distinctions between
cognitive activities. Interacting with the world is one thing; having a conversation another;
45
J. Garfield, see n 29 above, p7
9

10. playing chess, something else again. If we choose to call one of these activities
'representational' it has to mean something; and that meaning should capture the fact that
something actually is re-presented. Dreaming, talking, thinking, and any manipulation of
abstract symbols which 'stand in' for something else qualify. Simply doing something, though
the sensory modalities create cortical maps and images in the brain, seems something
completely different.
In conclusion, the answer to the question 'Do minds represent the world?' is a convoluted
'yes', if the question refers to content rich de-coupled sentential representations. Although in
this case, the 'representation' is derivative via the use of public language. If the question refers
to a single system of mental representation which sub-serves all cognitive activities
indiscriminately, then the answer is no.
Bibliography
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Cain, M. Fodor (Polity, 2002
10

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11