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Introduces the criticisms put forward by philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty to the idea that one thing might represent another: that thoughts, utterances, and inscriptions are said to have content by virtue of their power to represent reality; and that those that do the job accurately are true, they correspond to the facts, or mirror reality—they are representations of reality. The author then outlines the deductive proof that he will present in the book to show that Davidson's and Rorty's criticisms are unfounded. The content of the proof is based on the work of Kurt Gödel and W. V. Quine, and demonstrates conclusively that (i) any supposedly non‐truth‐functional operation must satisfy an exacting logical condition in order to avoid collapsing into a truth‐function, and (ii) any theory of facts, states of affairs, situations, or propositions must satisfy a corresponding condition if such entities are not to collapse into a unity. The three main sections of the chapter: examine the case against representations made by Davidson and Rorty, including Davidson's notorious argument against facts; discuss Rorty's critique of representational philosophy (his anti‐representationalism); and consider collapsing (or slingshot) arguments that discredit the existence of facts (and are used in the critique of the fact–representation distinction), as put forward by Gottlob Frege, and developed by Alonzo Church, Quine, Davidson, and Gödel. The last section of the chapter outlines the structure of the book.

This chapter introduces the general approach followed in the rest of the book—the starting point for explaining the human mind is the simple mental processes that we share with animals: the perceptual guidance of actions. This mental process is described with the help of the concept of “pragmatic representations”—perceptual representations that represent those features of objects that are relevant for the performance of an action. This approach is distinguished from the two most influential contemporary ways of thinking about the human mind: computationalism/propositionalism (according to which beliefs, desires or other propositional attitudes mediate between sensory input and motor output), and anti-representationalism/enactivism (according to which nothing mediates between sensory input and motor output—they form one intertwined dynamic process). According to the picture explored in this book, there are some special kind of representation, “pragmatic representations”, that (sometimes directly) mediate between sensory input and motor output.

In his recent book, Meaning and Normativity, Allan Gibbard argues at length that meta-ethical expressivism can be profitably extended to semantic and intentional language: meta-linguistic discourse about meaning, reference, content, and the like. This chapter argues that the extension of expressivism to semantic discourse is unprofitable and—worse still—in a certain sense self-undermining. It is unprofitable because it sheds no light on the problem of intentionality; and it undermines itself because many of the sentences that make up the expressivist’s theory are semantic sentences, and if these are understood to express non-cognitive attitudes of some kind, the expressivist’s explanations are spurious.

This chapter argues that the Normative Guidance Account of practical reasoning defended in Chapter 2 provides constructivists with the resources to formulate an anti-representationalist account of reason judgements. According to this account, these judgements are mental states whose characteristic cognitive function is to guide our reasoning, rather than to represent certain facts. The chapter also introduces a distinction between this rationalist version of anti-representationalism, which characterizes reason judgements in terms of their role in reasoning, and conativist versions of anti-representationalism, which characterize these judgements as motivational states. This is where the constructivist’s account of reason judgements differs from the one endorsed by most expressivists.

The aim of this chapter is to raise some serious worries about anti-representationalism: the recently popular view according to which there are no perceptual representations. There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to representationalism, perceptual states are representations: they represent the world as being a certain way. They have content, which may or may not be different from the content of beliefs. They represent objects as having properties, sometimes veridically, sometimes not. According to anti-representationalism (which comes in various forms, as relationalism or as enactivism), perceptual states are not representations. Although anti-representationalism is more and more popular, the chapter argues that there are strong empirical reasons for mistrusting it. More specifically, it argues that it is inconsistent with some important empirical findings about dorsal perception and about the multimodality of perception.

If we want to account for mental representations (MRs) as being used in scientific explanations and realized by neural correlates in biological systems, then we have to give up the traditional Fodorian view of rigid symbolic MRs. However, we do not have to throw out the baby with the bathwater and accept anti-representationalism. Instead this chapter offers a new account of mental representations as real, nonstable, use-dependent, and situated. As such, they can be pivotal constituents of scientific explanations. The chapter demonstrates the empirical adequacy of this account by discussing cases of birds and rats relying on what-where-when memory. It argues that we need to involve nonlinguistic MRs to adequately account for their abilities. In this way, the alternative theory presented here provides a detailed description of situated mental representations: it combines a functionalist account of MR with a relational dimension that can vary with the situation type and that allows for nonstatic constructions of MRs in specific contexts.