A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation

Abstract Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, enactive, and Bayesian approaches to cognition. This paper sketches an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of representational content. The resulting package is called a deflationary account of mental representation, and the chapter argues that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts.