Zoe Drayson

Mental fictionalists propose that we should continue to engage in truth-conditional discourse about the mind, even though we have reason to believe that the discourse lacks truthmakers. In Mind As Metaphor, Toon attempts to motivate mental fictionalism with two arguments, one negative and one positive. Toon’s negative argument is that there are no internal mental states with intentional and causal properties, and therefore there are no truthmakers for the standard interpretation of our everyday folk-psychological discourse. This paper challenges Toon’s negative argument by arguing that a commitment to internal mental states does not require a commitment to the representational theory of mind. Toon’s positive argument is that engaging with the discourse as form of pretense or make-believe enables us to make sense of the relation between mind and behavior in a way that other nonrepresentational interpretations of the discourse cannot. This paper argues that Toon’s positive argument undermines rather than supports his case for mental fictionalism, as it seems to ontologically commit him to the types of mental states he is trying to deny.

Mental fictionalists propose that we should continue to engage in truth-conditional discourse about the mind, even though we have reason to believe that the discourse lacks truthmakers. In Mind As Metaphor, Toon attempts to motivate mental fictionalism with two arguments, one negative and one positive. Toon’s negative argument is that there are no internal mental states with intentional and causal properties, and therefore there are no truthmakers for the standard interpretation of our everyday folk-psychological discourse. This paper challenges Toon’s negative argument by arguing that a commitment to internal mental states does not require a commitment to the representational theory of mind. Toon’s positive argument is that engaging with the discourse as form of pretense or make-believe enables us to make sense of the relation between mind and behavior in a way that other nonrepresentational interpretations of the discourse cannot. This paper argues that Toon’s positive argument undermines rather than supports his case for mental fictionalism, as it seems to ontologically commit him to the types of mental states he is trying to deny.

The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conception of modularity than the one advanced by Fodor, and who argue that the architecture of the mind is more pervasively modular than Fodor claimed. Where Fodor (1983, 2000) draws the line of modularity at the relatively low-level systems underlying perception and language, post-Fodorian theorists such as Sperber (2002) and Carruthers (2006) contend that the mind is modular through and through, up to and including the high-level systems responsible for reasoning, planning, decision making, and the like. The concept of modularity has also figured in recent debates in philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language—further evidence of its utility as a tool for theorizing about mental architecture.

The debate over whether cognitive science is committed to the existence of neural representations is usually taken to hinge on the status of representations as theoretical posits: it depends on whether or not our best-supported scientific theories commit us to the existence of representations. Thomson and Piccinini (2018) and Nanay (2022) seek to reframe this debate to focus more on scientific experimentation than on scientific theorizing. They appeal to arguments from observation and manipulation to propose that experimental cognitive neuroscience gives us non-theoretical reasons to be ontologically committed to representations. In this paper, I challenge their claims about observation and manipulation, and I argue that the question of whether we are ontologically committed to representations is still best understood as a question about the level of support we have for our representation-positing scientific theories.

Clark (_Philosophical Psychology_ 19(3):291–307, 2006) proposes that a standard challenge to the hypothesis of extended cognition can be avoided in the case of linguistically structured cognition, because the role played by our public manipulation of linguistic artifacts is irreducible to the role played by the brain’s operations over internal representations. I demonstrate that Clark’s argument relies on a view of the brain’s cognitive architecture to which he no longer subscribes. I argue that on Clark’s later view of the brain as engaged in ‘predictive processing’, his earlier defense of extended cognition from this challenge is no longer an effective strategy. I explore the implications of this for Clark’s attempts to reconcile his previous arguments for extended cognition with his characterization of the predictive-processing brain.

The debate over whether cognitive science is committed to the existence of neural representations is usually taken to hinge on the status of representations as theoretical posits: it depends on whether or not our best-supported scientific theories commit us to the existence of representations. Thomson and Piccinini (2018) and Nanay (2022) seek to reframe this debate to focus more on scientific experimentation than on scientific theorizing. They appeal to arguments from observation and manipulation to propose that experimental cognitive neuroscience gives us non-theoretical reasons to be ontologically committed to representations. In this paper, I challenge their claims about observation and manipulation, and I argue that the question of whether we are ontologically committed to representations is still best understood as a question about the level of support we have for our representation-positing scientific theories.

The computational properties of a system are generally thought to be independent in some sense from its physical properties, in virtue of the fact that computation is a formally characterized concept. Several philosophers have recently challenged the idea that such “medium‐independence” is an essential feature of computation by arguing that some kinds of computation lack medium‐independence. This paper explores and rejects three such arguments in an attempt to defend the essential medium‐independence of computation.

The distinction between personal-level and subpersonal-level attributions of cognition raises interesting questions. What is the relationship between personal-level and subpersonal-level attributions of cognition, for example? Does the personal/subpersonal distinction pick out two different kinds of cognitive processes, or does it merely reflect two different kinds of explanatory projects we might have? This piece gives an overview of the personal/subpersonal distinction and explores how the distinction is used to guide research in cognitive science and beyond.

Explicit knowledge is consciously accessible to the knower: the person can introspect what it is that they know and articulate it in the form of a statement (Dummett 1991, Davies 2015, Thompson 2023). If a person possesses some knowledge which they are unable to articulate to themselves or others, this knowledge is said to be implicit rather than explicit. Standard examples of implicit knowledge include a speaker’s knowledge of language, or practical knowledge such as how to ride a bike. The concept of implicit knowledge, however, raises challenging philosophical questions. This piece explores some of the different ways in which cognitive psychology can attempt to explain implicit knowledge and considers how these scientific explanations relate to the more traditionally philosophical questions about the concept of implicit knowledge.

There are two distinct approaches to Bayesian modelling in cognitive science. Black-box approaches use Bayesian theory to model the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a cognitive system without reference to the mediating causal processes; while mechanistic approaches make claims about the neural mechanisms which generate the outputs from the inputs. This paper concerns the relationship between these two approaches. We argue that the dominant trend in the philosophical literature, which characterizes the relationship between black-box and mechanistic approaches to Bayesian cognitive science in terms of the dichotomy between instrumentalism and realism, is misguided. We propose that the two distinctions are orthogonal: black-box and mechanistic approaches to Bayesian modelling can each be given either an instrumentalist or a realist interpretation. We argue that the current tendency to conflate black-box approaches with instrumentalism and mechanistic approaches with realism stems from unwarranted assumptions about the nature of scientific explanation, the ontological commitments of scientific theories, and the role of abstraction and idealization in scientific models. We challenge each of these assumptions to reframe the debates over Bayesian modelling in cognitive science.

In Thinking and Perceiving, Stokes challenges “the pernicious cognitive effects assumption”: the assumption that it would be epistemically problematic if our thoughts were to directly influence our perceptual experience. In doing so, Stokes takes himself to be supplementing the epistemological claims of philosophers like Siegel and Lyons with descriptive claims about human psychology. I argue that his conclusions are more radical than they first appear, to the extent that Stokes’s project is at odds with the standard epistemological discussions of cognitive penetration.

Fictionalists propose that some apparently fact-stating discourses do not aim to convey factual information about the world, but rather allow us to engage in a fiction or pretense without incurring ontological commitments. Some philosophers have suggested that using mathematical, modal, or moral discourse, for example, need not commit us to the existence of mathematical objects, possible worlds, or moral facts. The mental fictionalist applies this reasoning to our mental discourse, suggesting that we can use ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ talk without committing to the existence of beliefs and desires as mental entities. Most arguments for mental fictionalism are based on two key suppositions: first, that there are ontological concerns about mental entities; and second, that these ontological concerns justify a fictionalist interpretation of mental discourse. This paper challenges both suppositions and argues that the standard arguments for mental fictionalism are substantially weaker than arguments for other forms of fictionalism in the philosophical literature.

In some situations, we attribute intentional mental states to a person despite their inability to articulate the contents in question: these are implicit mental states. Attributions of implicit mental states raise certain philosophical challenges related to rationality, concept possession, and privileged access. In the philosophical literature, there are two distinct strategies for addressing these challenges, depending on whether the content attributions are personal-level or subpersonal-level. This paper explores the difference between personal-level and subpersonal-level approaches to implicit mental state attribution and investigates the relationship between the two approaches. It concludes by highlighting the methodological and metaphilosophical commitments which can result in different perspectives on the relative priority of personal-level and subpersonal-level theories.

How does the philosophical debate between naive realism and intentionalism relate to the psychological debate between ecological theories and constructivist theories? The participants in each debate take themselves to be doing something distinctive, but I show that characterizing the distinction is difficult: the theories in both debates use inference to the best explanation to draw contingent conclusions about the constitutive nature of perception. I argue that both debates concern the metaphysics of perception, and that philosophers of perception are wrong to think that constructivist and ecological theories are engaged in a distinct and non-metaphysical task.

Intellectualism is the claim that practical knowledge or ‘know-how’ is a kind of propositional knowledge. The debate over Intellectualism has appealed to two different kinds of evidence, semantic and scientific. This paper concerns the relationship between Intellectualist arguments based on truth-conditional semantics of practical knowledge ascriptions, and anti-Intellectualist arguments based on cognitive science and propositional representation. The first half of the paper argues that the anti-Intellectualist argument from cognitive science rests on a naturalistic approach to metaphysics: its proponents assume that findings from cognitive science provide evidence about the nature of mental states. We demonstrate that this fact has been overlooked in the ensuing debate, resulting in inconsistency and confusion. Defenders of the semantic approach to Intellectualism engage with the argument from cognitive science in a way that implicitly endorses this naturalistic metaphysics, and even rely on it to claim that cognitive science support Intellectualism. In the course of their arguments, however, they also reject that scientific findings can have metaphysical import. We argue that this situation is preventing productive debate about Intellectualism, which would benefit from both sides being more transparent about their metaphilosophical assumptions.

Many models of cognitive ability and disability rely on the idea of cognition as abstract reasoning processes implemented in the brain. Research in cognitive science, however, emphasizes the way that our cognitive skills are embodied in our more basic capacities for sensing and moving, and the way that tools in the external environment can extend the cognitive abilities of our brains. This chapter addresses the implications of research in embodied cognition and extended cognition for how we think about cognitive impairment and rehabilitation, how cognitive reserve mitigates neural impairment, and the distinction between medical and social models of disability.

Two very different forms of externalism about mental states appear prima facie unrelated: Williamson’s (1995, 2000) claim that knowledge is a mental state, and Clark & Chalmers’ (1998) extended mind hypothesis. I demonstrate, however, that the two approaches justify their radically externalist by appealing to the same argument from explanatory generality. I argue that if one accepts either Williamson’s claims or Clark & Chalmers’ claims on considerations of explanatory generality then, ceteris paribus, one should accept the other. This conclusion has implications for philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science.

The neural vehicles of mental representation play an explanatory role in cognitive psychology that their realizers do not. In this paper, I argue that the individuation of realizers as vehicles of representation restricts the sorts of explanations in which they can participate. I illustrate this with reference to Rupert’s (2011) claim that representational vehicles can play an explanatory role in psychology in virtue of their quantity or proportion. I propose that such quantity-based explanatory claims can apply only to realizers and not to vehicles, in virtue of the particular causal role that vehicles play in psychological explanations.

Contemporary scientific and philosophical literature on perception often focuses on the relationship between perception and action, emphasizing the ways in which perception can be understood as geared towards action or ‘action-oriented’. In this paper I provide a framework within which to classify approaches to action-oriented perception, and I highlight important differences between the distinct approaches. I show how talk of perception as action-oriented can be applied to the evolutionary history of perception, neural or psychological perceptual mechanisms, the semantic content or phenomenal character of perceptual states, or to the metaphysical nature of perception. I argue that there are no straightforward inferences from one kind of action-oriented perception to another. Using this framework and its insights, I then explore the notion of action-oriented perceptual representation which plays a key role in some approaches to embodied cognitive science. I argue that the concept of action-oriented representation proposed by Clark and Wheeler is less straightforward than it might seem, because it seems to require both that the mechanisms of perceptual representation are action-oriented and that the content of these perceptual representations are action-oriented. Given that neither of these claims can be derived from the other, proponents of action-oriented representation owe us separate justification for each claim. I will argue that such justifications are not forthcoming in the literature, and that attempts to reconstruct them run into trouble: the sorts of arguments offered for the representational mechanisms being action-oriented seem to undermine the sorts of arguments offered for the representational content being action-oriented, and vice-versa.

Predictive approaches to the mind claim that perception, cognition, and action can be understood in terms of a single framework: a hierarchy of Bayesian models employing the computational strategy of predictive coding. Proponents of this view disagree, however, over the extent to which perception is direct on the predictive approach. I argue that we can resolve these disagreements by identifying three distinct notions of perceptual directness: psychological, metaphysical, and epistemological. I propose that perception is plausibly construed as psychologically indirect on the predictive approach, in the sense of being constructivist or inferential. It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that perception is therefore indirect in a metaphysical or epistemological sense on the predictive approach. In the metaphysical case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect solutions to the metaphysical problem of perception (e.g. naïve realism, representationalism, sense datum theory). In the epistemological case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect approaches to the justification of perceptual belief. In this paper, I demonstrate how proponents of the predictive approach have conflated these distinct notions of perceptual directness and indirectness, and I propose alternative strategies for developing the philosophical consequences of the approach.

Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. By contrast, explanations in psychology are described as subpersonal when they attribute psychological phenomena below the level of the person, as occurs when scientists describe parts of the brain as representing or evaluating, for example. The practice of subpersonal psychology raises a number of philosophical issues: whether it is acceptable to attribute psychological phenomena to parts of persons, for example, and whether such attributions can yield any explanatory benefit. Even those who endorse subpersonal psychology do not necessarily agree on what this entails: there are several distinct ways of understanding the relationship between subpersonal psychology and personal psychology, which depend in part on how the ontological commitments of subpersonal explanations are understood.