How Does Mind Matter, Reviving Mental Representation in Cognitive Science

Prof. Gerard O'Brien will have two lectures on Wednesday, October 13, room 434, Filozofska fakulteta, Ljubljana. The first lecture will be at 14:40h:

1. How Does Mind Matter?

Nothing could be more obvious than that minds matter. Specifically, nothing could be more obvious than that mental phenomena—beliefs, desires, thoughts, perceptions, and so forth—have a causal impact on behaviour. Yet it has proved notoriously difficult to explain how this can be so. The problem of mental causation takes a number of forms in the philosophy of mind. One of these arises from the widely held thesis that the representational properties of mental phenomena are not determined by the intrinsic properties of brains. In this lecture I will explain how this version of the mental causation problem arises. I will then suggest that the apparent insolubility of this form of the problem stems from the “referential” conception of mental content that dominates the philosophy of mind. Once we recognise we are not obliged to accept this conception, and moreover that there is an alternative conception available, some elbow room is opened up for exploration. I will conclude the lecture by briefly exploring the space created by this alternative conception of mental content.

The second lecture will be at 18:50h, room 434 as well:


2. Reviving Mental Representation in Cognitive Science

Several lines of argument have lately converged to make trouble for representation in the philosophy of cognitive science. The charge, in a nutshell, is that mental representation no longer earns its explanatory keep, and hence that it’s time to discard this troublesome concept. This lecture will begin with a brief explanation as to why mental representation is on the endangered list in cognitive science. It will then proceed by exploring the nature of representation in connectionist models of cognition. The general aim will be to determine whether representation does play an important explanatory role in these models, and hence whether the recent calls to dispense with this concept are justified.