In this concluding post I’ll briefly summarise what I have argued so far and then outline three pressing research questions moving forward. Summary My aim in the thesis as a whole has been to outline and defend a theory of some important aspects of mental representation based on the idea of idealised models in the … Continue reading Chapter 11: Looking Forward

Ok, this is the last substantive chapter in the thesis. In the next post—the concluding one—I’ll summarise the main lessons of previous chapters and outline some important questions and issues to address in future work. In this chapter I address another challenge to representationalist accounts of the mind, this one focused on representational content. Roughly, … Continue reading Chapter 10: Generative Intentionality

In this chapter I’m going to address another challenge to a representationalist understanding of perception. This one is less precise than the one that I addressed in the previous post, but it has nevertheless had a large influence in motivating anti-representationalism among a motley crew of anti-representationalists: pragmatists, ecological psychologists, enactivists, and so on. Roughly, … Continue reading Chapter 9. Modelling the Umwelt

“Cognition is for action!” “Cognition is not just for action; cognition is action!” “The world is its own best model!” “Organisms don’t represent the world. They enact a world inseparable from their own structure!” And so on. These are just some of the claims you’ve likely come across if you’ve spent any time reading the … Continue reading Chapter 8: The World Is Not Its Own Best Generative Model

In the previous post I outlined research that offers some tentative support to a conception of the neocortex as a predictive modelling engine, constructing hierarchical generative models of those features of the world responsible for generating the sensory data to which it is exposed and then exploiting these models for prediction-based processing. In this post … Continue reading Chapter 7: Representation, Prediction, Regulation