Professor Jose Zalabardo Inaugural Lecture

Representing Representation

The representation of the world provided by the natural sciences leaves mental phenomena out of the picture. A comprehensive representation of the world would have to overcome this limitation. This requires, among other things, explaining mental representation — our ability to represent things in consciousness as being a certain way. When this is achieved, our representation of the world will represent itself. The standard approach to this task is to find a place in the natural order for relations between mental items and things in the extra-mental world. This approach is doomed to failure. The only viable approach to explaining mental representation is to describe our cognitive activity involving the conscious episodes in which we see ourselves as representing the world. The consequences of this approach are not well understood.