Objective subjectivity: Allocentric and egocentric representations in thought and experience

My dissertation is an investigation of the distinction between the objective and the subjective as it arises within naturalistic accounts of mental representation. Among the core problems of philosophy is the problem of objectivity: the problem of specifying the conditions, if any, of representing the way the world is independently of its being represented. Correlative are problems of subjectivity, most notably, those concerning the subjectivity of conscious experience. In an objective scientific account of the world, what room is there, if any, for things that are essentially subjective, of things constituted by particular points of view on the world? Approaches to understanding the relations of dependence and independence between representations and the extra-representational world cannot help but be guided by particular conceptions of representation. One conception of representation that has received much attention construes representational content as being determined, at least in part, by causal relations between a representation and that which it represents. My project concerns the best way to understand objectivity and subjectivity within such naturalistic approaches to mental representation. I defend a correspondence theory of objectivity whereby objective representations represent things that exist mind-independently and subjective representations represent things that exist mind-dependently.;My arguments begin with an investigation of objectivity in the context of judgement. I discuss subjective judgments like "vanilla is better than chocolate" and objective judgements like "gold nuclei are more massive than oxygen nuclei". After sketching my position in terms of the objectivity of judgment, I turn to further develop the correspondence theory of objectivity against a backdrop of naturalized accounts of mental representation. Using examples drawn from cognitive scientific research on visual object recognition, navigation, and mental imagery, I develop a notion of subjectivity modeled on the point-of-view or perspective embodied in imagistic representations. I show how this notion comports with the notion of objectivity as correspondence. I then sketch a way of understanding the objective/subjective distinction within naturalized accounts of representation that construe representational content as being determined by causal relations between representations and what they represent.