Empirical and Metaphysical Anti-Representationalism

Abstract

Anti-representationalism is in the air. In the last few years, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have considered or even embraced the claim that cognition is not representational, often without giving explicit consideration to what exactly this means. The point of this essay is to try to make some sense of claims that cognitive science can do without representations by proposing a taxonomy for them. In what follows, I will make a distinction between two different varieties of anti-representationalism. And, with this distinction in hand, I will consider some actual scientific work that has led to claims that cognitive science can do, at least in part, without representations.