• Understanding Structural Representations
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
  • Prominent views about representation share a premise: that mathematical communication theory is blind to representational content. Here I challenge that premise by rejecting two common misconceptions: that Claude Shannon said that the meanings of signals are irrelevant for communication theory (he didn't and they aren't), and that since correlational measures can't distinguish representations from natural signs, communication theory can't distinguish them either (the premise is true but the conc…Read more
  • Strong liberal representationalism
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (3): 645-667. 2022.
    The received view holds that there is a significant divide between full-blown representational states and so called ‘detectors’, which are mechanisms set off by specific stimuli that trigger a particular effect. The main goal of this paper is to defend the idea that many detectors are genuine representations, a view that I call ‘Strong Liberal Representationalism’. More precisely, I argue that ascribing semantic properties to them contributes to an explanation of behavior, guides research in use…Read more
  • Content in Simple Signalling Systems
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4): 1009-1035. 2018.
    Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational co…Read more
  • Consequences of a Functional Account of Information
    Stephen Francis Mann
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-19. 2018.
    This paper aims to establish several interconnected points. First, a particular interpretation of the mathematical definition of information, known as the causal interpretation, is supported largely by misunderstandings of the engineering context from which it was taken. A better interpretation, which makes the definition and quantification of information relative to the function of its user, is outlined. The first half of the paper is given over to introducing communication theory and its compe…Read more
  • Informational Theories of Content and Mental Representation
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3): 613-627. 2020.
    Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations …Read more