COGS 2160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Mental Representation, Mind, Intentionality

• School: York University
• Department: Cognitive Science
• Course: COGS 2160
• Professor: Muhammad Ali Khalidi

Document Summary

Lecture #13 mental representation & symbolic systems (1) Behavior (cid:272)a(cid:374)"t just (cid:271)e explai(cid:374)ed i(cid:374) ter(cid:373)s of stimulus-response. Various types of evidence indicate that human and non-human animals process information: e. g. cognitive maps, attention, meaning, structure-dependent rules, etc. Roughly: the manipulation of mental representations according to rules, to generate new representations. Words, signs, symbols represent (partly) because of conventions or agreements. Do mental representations represent based on resemblance? (crane pp. 13-18: resemblance not sufficient for representation, resemblance is not necessary for representation, pictorial representation not accurate. Implementational, algorithmic, computational: lower-level representations that are indefinite and only loosely related to higher -level representation, maybe representational content arises gradually, like life (compare: viruses, plants, and humans, degrees of representation. Something defined as directedness or aboutness (= representation) Is intentionality necessary and sufficient for mentality (i. e. for being a mind: sufficient: can something be intentional but not mental? (crane pp. 37-39)