Anne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
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What is the main argument of Jacobson’s “Keeping the World in Mind”?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese of Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide variety of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Anne Japp Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy at Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston. Her new book, Keeping the World in Mind, Mental Representations and the Sciences of the Mind, is just out from Palgrave Macmillan. Some theorists and the cognitive scientists have argued that the notion of that minds represent the world gets our relationship to the world wrong, and that the sciences of the mind don't need or use a concept of mental representation.
In her new book, Jacobson argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion of representation is actually used in cognitive neuroscience. On her view, mental items do not represent or stand in intentional relations to the world. Instead, they are samples or instances of the same kinds as captured by common mathematical descriptions. This display or sampling model has its roots in Aristotle's theory of perception, but is found in contemporary theories of brain function as well, such as when seeing a particular action causes the neural pattern for doing that action to be activated. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Anjap Jacobson.
Hi, Karen. Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you,
and thank you for asking me to do this interview. I think this is a wonderful project you all are embarked upon, and I'm very, very pleased to be part of it.
Well, I'm happy to be talking with you about your new book, Keeping the World in Mind, Mental Representations and the Sciences of the Mind. And you are giving there basically a defense of an alternative view of mental representation that, on your view, is more appropriate for its uses, or at least some uses. in cognitive neuroscience in particular. So to start off the book, the interview, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what led you to write this book and how it connects with your previous work that is directly connected to this particular book.
Absolutely. Let me say that, really, I started on this project but didn't realize it quite some time ago, probably in the 1970s. I, at that time, was an Oxford, and the paradigm of philosophy of mind really was stuff like Kenny's Action, Emotion, and Will, which I found a sort of delightful collection of intuitions, but not something I myself could undertake.
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