Mind and representation

Abstract

There are various kinds of views in the history of philosophy that have been offered as an account for the nature of mind. We can classify those views under two main categories as monist and dualist metaphysics of mind. Although monist and dualist philosophers seem to be in a complete disagreement regarding the analysis of the mental and the material, most of them at least seem to agree on one simple feature of mind: Mind is, at bottom, a representing capacity. The difficult task, however, begins exactly here, because now we have to find an answer for the following relevant questions: what is the ground of mental representation? In virtue of what does something in the mind come to represent something in the world? The primary target of this thesis is to find an answer for the question about the ground of mental representations by surveying some of the theories of mental representation in the history of philosophy. As far as I know, we have three main views in the history of philosophy that have been proposed as the ground of mental representations: (i) the resemblance view, (ii) the causal view, and (iii) Aristotle’s hybrid view that combines the intuitions of the causal and resemblance views. Following Aristotle, I believe that the fact that mind is part of nature does not mean that representation consists in a physical/material process. In understanding the nature of mind as a representing capacity, we should also look for the formal criterion for representation as Aristotle does in De Anima. In this context, the philosophical investigation should not only limit itself to the physical/material explanation, it should go further and give a formal/conceptual analysis of what is being represented and misrepresented in mind. This task, however, is very demanding and it really pushes one to practice philosophy as excellently as possible. Aristotle’s rigorous practice of philosophy in De Anima is an example of this kind of excellence. I think we should take the same Aristotelian attitude when we deal with the very nature of mind as a representing capacity. Representation is a very complex intellectual capacity, and we just cannot explain it through a materialist functionalist method, the method that is employed by Dretske and Millikan. Representation, as Aristotle would say, is essentially/conceptually related to both perceiving and thinking. That is the nature of representation, which very much resists any sort of material reduction.