Frances Egan

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and the representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language.

Representationalism, in its most widely accepted form, is the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are to be understood as representational capacities. This chapter distinguishes several distinct theses that go by the name "representationalism," focusing on the view that is most prevalent in cogntive science. It also discusses some objections to the view and attempts to clarify the role that representational content plays in cognitive models that make use of the notion of representation.

Ever since Berkeley discussed the problem at length in his Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision, theorists of vision have attempted to explain why the moon appears larger on the horizon than it does at the zenith. Prevailing opinion has it that the contemporary perceptual psychologists Kaufman and Rock have finally explained the illusion. This paper argues that Kaufman and Rock have not refuted a Berkeleyan account of the illusion, and have over-interpreted their own experimental results. The moon illusion remains unexplained, and a Berkeleyan account is still a contender

The computational theory of mind construes the mind as an information-processor and cognitive capacities as essentially representational capacities. Proponents of the view claim a central role for representational content in computational models of these capacities. In this paper I argue that the standard view of the role of representational content in computational models is mistaken; I argue that representational content is to be understood as a gloss on the computational characterization of a cognitive process.Keywords: Computation; Representational content; Cognitive capacities; Explanation