Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Anne Jaap Jacobson on Mind and Representation

Anne Jaap Jacobson has been doing some excellent guest posts at "The Brains Blog", broadly related to her recently published book, Keeping the World in Mind. The series:

Introducing Anne Jaap Jacobson

(1) "Let Me Quickly Wash My Hands One More Time" (the role of dopamine in perception and action, which serves as a useful set of research for the rest of the discussion)
(2) Anxiety about the Internal (what is meant by 'representation' in cognitive neuroscience and in contemporary philosophy of mind)
(3) Representations in the History of Philosophy, and a Bit about Red Pandas (Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume; as well as the problem of fakes)
(4) Human Errors and My Errata (issues of error and the need for consideration of the mind as in some sense necessarily social)

This is all great discussion; I particularly liked the discussion in (3) of how Aquinas and Hume, despite radically different views of mind, nonetheless share some very basic ideas that are not generally found in contemporary philosophical discussions of mental representation.