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2 results

Mental Content

Mental Content
  • Peter Schulte
  • Published online:
    12 August 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • This Element provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary theories of mental content. After clarifying central concepts and identifying the questions that dominate the current debate, it presents and discusses the principal accounts of the nature of mental content (or mental representation), which include causal, informational, teleological and structuralist approaches, alongside the phenomenal intentionality approach and the intentional stance theory. Additionally, it examines anti-representationalist accounts which question either the existence or the explanatory relevance of mental content. Finally, the Element concludes by considering some recent developments in the debate about mental content, specifically the “explanatory turn” and its implications for questions about representations in basic cognitive systems and the representational character of current empirical theories of cognition.

  • 7 - From Prediction to Imagination

  • from Part I - Theoretical Perspectives on the Imagination
  • Edited by Anna Abraham, University of Georgia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination
    Published online:
    26 May 2020
    Print publication:
    18 June 2020, pp 94-110

  • Summary

    This contribution explores how the predictive processing framework could be employed to explain imagination. At first sight, this framework seems well suited to explaining imagination, since a wide range of mental processes, such as perception and action, are seen as employing imagination-like generative processes. However, it faces problems with explaining distinctively deliberate, voluntary, and purposeful acts of imagination in which agents aim to generate content that departs from immediate reality. In order to explain imagination of this kind, more work is needed. We suggest that one clue might lie in understanding the role language plays in shaping and cueing imaginative episodes.