Danielle J. Williams

Whether neurons represent or play a mere causal role is a foundational issue in philosophy of neuroscience. Evidence that neurons perform a representational role is weakened by the possibility of explaining experimental results by appeal to brute causal processes alone. Despite this, neuroscientists ascribe representational content to patterns of neural activity to explain experimental results. An important problem with this practice is determining which content to ascribe to the neural representation. One view is that researchers are only warranted in ascribing the content determined by particular experimental results. An alternative view is that researchers are warranted in appealing to the broader research domain to determine the content of a putative neural representation. In this paper, I argue that both are warranted; either alone is insufficient. Using optogenetics research on memory engrams as a case study, I show how researchers ascribe content to neural representations and justify their approach. Whether a particular content ascription is warranted depends on particular experimental results, the broader research domain that is appealed to, and how results from various animal models, probes, and experimental paradigms are generalized.