Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
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What is the mysterious ability of the mind to think about distant or non‑existent things?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figtor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talice and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Francis Egan, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her new book Deflating Mental Representation. is just out from the MIT Press and is available open access through the MIT Press website. The human mind has the curious and even mysterious or spooky ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact.
such as when we think about yesterday's tennis final, or about Aristotle, or about unicorns. Naturalizing mental content has usually meant explaining how this is possible in terms that eliminate the mystery while retaining commitment to a substantive relationship between mind and world that undergirds this ability. In deflating mental representation, Egan argues that we should give up this commitment in favor of a naturalistic account that relegates attributions of content to abstract glosses of neural mechanisms. According to Egan, Representational glosses play inelimitable roles in common sense psychology and in our explanations of human behavior. But they should not be taken literally. She forcefully challenges many leading theories of mental representation.
Making her book a must read for those interested in the concept of mental representation is In the cognitive sciences. Let's turn to the interview. Ah hello Frances Egan. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hi
Carrie, thank you for inviting me.
Um, I am super excited to be talking about deflating mental representation. Um, and I know that this book has been a long time. Incoming, uh, which makes it even more exciting to see. all the work that you've been working on for you know for a for a long time in mental representation kind of coming together and and being properly sort of presented as a whole and defended. Um so before we get begin looking at the book itself. Um, maybe you could say a bit about yourself, you know, how you became a philosopher. uh and how this book came about.
Yeah, so um I was interested in political philosophy in high school and so I always knew that I I wanted a major in philosophy when I got to college. Um but when I did get there and I went to the the local university, the University of Manitoba in Canada. When I got there I I took a wide range of courses and I I found myself most interested in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Um, Pat and Paul Churchland uh were there at the time and they were both wonderful teachers. So famously the the famously the Churchlands are eliminativist. Uh for sure about uh folks psychology, but also about intentional psychology in general. Um, I've never been an eliminativeist, so I didn't take that on, but I did inherit from them a preference for desert landscapes, as Klein put it.
So I I think that probably explains my interest in deflating mental representation, um, as the book's called. Well, the book itself is based on it, as you say, it's a sort of the culmination of of work that I've been doing over a long time. Um, but it's it's based on directly on the Jean Nicot lectures that I gave in Paris in twenty twenty one. Okay.
Right. Okay, so I guess the lectures kind of forced you to pull everything together in a way. Um So uh you know, just basics. Like wha what is you so you mentioned you're not an eliminativist, you're a deflationist about content. Um so maybe we can unpack that claim a bit. You know, what what exactly is the problem that you are addressing, you know, in philosophy of mind? And how again broadly are you responding to that problem?
Yeah. So the the topic is uh is mental representation. And you know, that's broadly the capacity of some of our mental states to represent.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the mysterious ability of the mind to think about distant or non‑existent things?
0:01–8:47
2
How did Frances Egan become interested in philosophy of mind and what led to her book?
8:47–16:18
3
What problem does ‘deflating mental representation’ aim to solve in the philosophy of mind?
16:18–23:34
4
How does Egan’s deflationary account replace the traditional representation‑relation?
23:34–31:14
5
What is an intentional gloss and why does it matter for evaluating mental states?
31:14–38:15
6
How do the frog‑fly and nutrition examples illustrate pragmatic choices in content attribution?
38:15–43:39
7
Why does Egan argue that pragmatic considerations should replace the naturalization project?
43:39–51:45
8
What are the next steps for Egan’s research on beliefs, desires, animal minds and AI?
51:45–59:53
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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