The Brains Blog

Reply to Mace and Roskies  Caitlin Mace and Adina Roskies (hereafter, M&R) argue that the identification of vehicles in neuroscience depends intimately on the prior assignment of content, and so content cannot be relegated to an extra-theoretical gloss. Identifying neural vehicles is notoriously difficult and, they claim, subject to indeterminacy.  To identify computational vehicles, experimenters look for neural signals whose activity appears …

Title: Vehicle realism, content pragmatism: Uneasy bedfellows Caitlin Mace and Adina L. Roskies  Frances Egan’s (2025) “Deflating Mental Representation” poses an interesting challenge to both realists and fictionalists about mental representation. In the book she argues for a pragmatic view of representational content and realism about representational vehicles.   The book as a whole is a deflationary take on the primary ways in …

Reply to Oron Shagrir  Oron Shagrir argues that computation and content are more interconnected than my account allows. Computational individuation, he claims, is subject to indeterminacy, and at least in some cases the indeterminacy is resolved by appeal to content. If content is a gloss, as I argue, then according to Shagrir computational characterization is partly a gloss too.   …

On Egan’s Conception of Computation Oron Shagrir  In Deflating Mental Representation, Frances Egan advances an exemplary account that combines realism about the computational vehicles of mental representations with anti-realism regarding their content. While the more contentious thesis concerns content, my focus is on Egan’s conception of computation, which has shaped much of the ongoing debate on physical …

Brains Blog precis of Deflating Mental Representation  In the book I propose what I call a deflationary account of mental representation, characterized by three claims:  (1) Construing a mental (or neural) state as a representation does not presuppose a special, substantive relation (or relations) – what we can call a representation relation – holding between the state and what the representation is about, for example, the …

Join us this week for our first event of the year, another fantastic book symposium!  This time, we have Frankie Egan discussing her new book, Deflating Mental Representation.  We have three great commentaries from Oron Shagrir, Caitlin Mace and Adina Roskies, and Mazviita Chirimuuta, along with responses from Frankie.  Feel free …