Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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What is the central problem that Representation in Cognitive Science aims to solve?
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, 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 Nicholas Shea, Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. His new book, Representation in Cognitive Science, is just out from Oxford University Press. In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits mental representations, typically states of the brain, that carry information about the world and are used by the system to guide its behavior.
Theories of representation provide explanations of what information or or content these neural states carry, and how they come to have the contents that they do. In his new book, Shea approaches the problem from the perspective of the role that content plays in explanations of a system's behavior. He synthesizes his writings in the theory of content into a unified theory that integrates two main components, task functions and exploitable relations, into a pluralist view he calls very telling Semantics. He presents and defends his account and considers how it fares in relation to competitor theories. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Nicholas Shea. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi, nice to talk to you.
I'm very pleased to have you here to talk about representation in cognitive science, um, which kind of pulls together a lot of what you been writing in response to other people for a number of years and now you sort of put together your own view, fairy tale semantics. So before we get into the actual mechanics of the book itself, um maybe you could say a bit about yourself, your background in in philosophy, and then how you came to write this book?
So I came to philosophy um study it formally quite late, having um studied math as an undergraduate. And then uh trained as a lawyer and worked as a lawyer for a few years. Um but all the time in parallel with that, right back to my undergrad days, I was reading bits of philosophy and bits of um popular psychology. So um people like Dan Dennett were people that was reading and uh so I had this kind of parallel side interest in issues about the mind and how it works. And then at some point uh I got the chance to study that in a bit more depth in a sabbatical from Uh my day job and that turned out to be a in in retrospect turned out to be a career change. And it was pretty early on. So I was it was always questions about the mind that drew me into philosophy.
And it was pretty early on in studying that. those those sets of issues at Burtbeck at the University of London. Um, but I came to think, well, consciousness is interesting, um and metaphysics of mind is interesting, but actually there's this other issue which isn't so obvious. Um, but once you get your head round it, it's probably just as fundamental and very, very interesting and has some prospect of progress and that's intentionality or the nature of representation. And um And I was very impressed by Yeah. kind of conceptual and empirical progress that's been made on that issue in recent times, so in the last fifty or seventy years. So it seems like there are things that have been done in psychology and the cognitive sciences and in logic and in computing that really gives the philosopher new materials to work with.
So it's a very exciting area. to be in. Um and early on in that in reading into that, um, I wrote to Ruth Milliken at um uh University of Connecticut 'cause it seemed to me that her approach was a very promising one. And uh she invited me there as a distinct scholar, so I ended up talking to her quite a bit. even before starting my PhD. And then I did my PhD with David Papineau, who's another person that approaches these issues about naturalising.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem that Representation in Cognitive Science aims to solve?
0:07–7:28
2
How did Nicholas Shea’s personal and academic background shape his view on mental representation?
7:28–15:32
3
What is the role of content in explaining behavior according to Shea’s theory?
15:32–22:34
4
How do task functions and exploitable relations form the core of Varitel Semantics?
22:34–29:54
5
Why does Shea argue that traditional producer‑consumer models are too limited for cognitive science?
29:54–37:49
6
In what way does Shea distinguish between descriptive and normative aspects of representation?
37:49–44:38
7
Does Shea think the content of sub‑personal states can ever be fully determinate?
44:38–51:45
8
What are Shea’s next research directions after the book, especially regarding concepts?
51:45–59:13
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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