| Part I of the dissertation argues for the production view of mental representation, on which that mental representation is a product of the mind rather than a relation to things in the world. I argue that the production view allows us to make best sense of cases of reliable misrepresentation. I also argue that there are various theoretical benefits of distinguishing representation from the tracking and other relations that representations might enter into.;Part II is about the relationship between representational content and phenomenal character, the "what it's like" to be in certain states. I argue for what I call the phenomenal-intentional identity theory ( PIIT), the view that phenomenal character is identical with representational content. In the course of arguing for PIIT, I argue that we need to distinguish representational content from what we might call "computational content," the type of content a state might be said to have solely in virtue of its role in a computational system.;Part III of the dissertation presents a view of the structure and content of concepts: the efficient concept view. On this view, concepts are structurally simpler and represent less complex contents than is usually thought, but can be unpacked to yield further related contents when needed. We can define various notions of derived content that capture these related contents. I argue that these notions of derived content can do much of the work that the notion of content was initially supposed to do. For instance, I claim that the type of content most closely related to folk psychological notions of content is a species of derived content. As a result, when we are interested in the truth-value of our thoughts, what we happen to be interested in is the truth conditions of a type of derived content, not of content proper.;The view that emerges is one on which mental representation does not play all the roles it is often thought to play, such as roles in computational or folk-psychological theories of mind and behavior, or roles in metaphysical theories of truth and reference. Rather, it turns out that these roles are played by other features of mental states, each crucial for understanding the mind and its place in nature, and each importantly related to mental representation. |
