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A Role for Representation in Cognitive Neurobiology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jacqueline Anne Sullivan
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Abstract

What role does the concept of representation play in the contexts of experimentation and explanation in cognitive neurobiology? In this article, a distinction is drawn between minimal and substantive roles for representation. It is argued by appeal to a case study that representation currently plays a role in cognitive neurobiology somewhere in between minimal and substantive and that this is problematic given the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive neurobiological research. It is suggested that what is needed is for representation to instead play a substantive role.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 2010 , pp. 875 - 887
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

The author would like to thank Gualtiero Piccinini for organizing the Neural Computation and Representation workshop, of which this article was a part, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks also to members of the audience at the Minds, Brains, and Multiplicity workshop held at the University of Cincinnati in October 2008, including Ken Aizawa, John Bickle, Carl Carver, Carrie Figdor, Carl Gillett, Tom Polger, and Larry Shapiro for helpful comments during the discussion period.

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