INTRODUCING THE REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND

Pete Mandik

This brief essay concerns the age-old view that the mind is fundamentally of system of representations. According to the representational theory of mind, all of the various kinds of mental states and activities involve mental representations: knowledge, perception, memory, dreams, hopes, and fears (to name a few) all involve mentally representing something or other. The philosopher Franz Brentano thought that the mind's ability to represent things showed that the mind stood apart from the physical and natural order. He boggled at the suggestion that a mere physical object or process could mentally represent anything. Contemporary philosophical orthodoxy is materialist and many contemporary philosophers have had a keen interest in spelling out, in materialist terms, what it takes for something to be a mental representation.

1. THE REPRESENTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND

Right now you are having a perceptual experience: you are having an experience of words on a white background. You experience the blackness of the ink and the whiteness of the paper it is printed on. The experience itself, however, is neither black nor white. The experience itself is a state of your brain that represents the page, and represents it as having black words on a white page. Later, when you put the book down to do something else, you may conjure up a memory of the page-memories of what the page looked like, where you left off, etc. Like the percept, the memory is not the page itself, but a mental representation of the page.

In the history of philosophy the idea that the mind is in the business of mentally representing arises most acutely in considerations of perception and perceptual error. When you pause to think about what perception is, it might not immediately occur to you that a representation of the thing perceived is involved in the process: there is just you and the thing perceived. It may seem that a representation need no more get in between you and the coffee mug that you see than a representation get in between your foot and the sock that it wears: there is just a direct, unmediated relation between you and the thing. But when we pause to reflect on the ways in which our senses may deceive us, the suggestion that perception involves mental representation becomes a more natural suggestion.
Look at figure 1. Grey streets separate black blocks with white dots at the intersections. But your perception is systematically erroneous when you look at the figure, isn't it? You are seeing things that aren't really there--little spots that dance before your eyes. You will notice immediately that when you focus on any one of the white intersections, the adjacent intersections appear occupied by gray spots.

Figure 1. How much of what you see is really there? How much of what you see depends on mental representation?

Shift your focus from one intersection to the others, and these gray spots elude your focus, flashing on and off in the process. At least part of what you perceive, then, is not really there on the printed page, but is supplied by the mind's representation of the external world.

Philosophical reflection on the nature of perceptual error has led many philosophers to the conclusion that all of what you perceive is due to mental representation. Descartes famously made much of the possibility of wholesale perceptual error--the possibility that everything you take yourself to be perceiving right now might be an illusion. How so? You could be dreaming. Dreams can be so vivid that you take yourself to be perceiving something that later, when you wake, you realize isn't really there. In a dream you stand before a waterfall, and see in exquisite detail the light reflecting off the spray, feel the moisture splashing on your face, and smell the clean freshness of the air. But you are not really interacting with an actual waterfall. You are tucked safe and sound in the coziness of your bed, where, I hope, you are warm and dry--not being sprayed by a mighty waterfall. Your dream of the waterfall was a mental representation of the waterfall. Dreams can be indistinguishable from perception of the real thing. This indistnguishability has led philosophers to the view that all of perception is a representational affair.

That all of mentality, not just perception, might involve mental representation, becomes apparent in consideration of what philosophers call the "propositional attitudes". In consideration of a wide variety of mental phenomena, philosophers have noted that so many of them involve an attitude toward a proposition. You open your refrigerator this morning and perceive that you are out of orange juice. Note what comes before and after the "that" in the previous sentence. Before the "that" is a word picking out a mental state: a state of perception. After the "that" is a propositional clause: a clause that by itself forms a complete proposition or declarative sentence. We can generate many more examples beyond those of perception. Here are a few:

· Mary believes that the world is round.
· Allen hopes that he gets paid today.
· Snoopy fears that he is out of puppy chow
· Vivian remembers that St. Louis is not the capitol of Missouri
· Everyone thinks that Professor Pete is handsome

Many mental states, not just perception, can be thought of as propositional attitudes. And just as perceptions may portray things contrary to reality, so may other propositional attitudes. If you desire that tomorrow you win the lottery, the desire is about something that has not yet actually taken place. Someone may believe that the world is flat even though it is round. A drugged or drunk person may hallucinate that they are talking to a pink elephant when they are really just talking to a coat rack. The propositional clauses in the above descriptions are not picking out some actual states of affairs that the people are related to, but instead some non-actual states of affairs that they are mentally representing. The hallucinator is not relating to an actual elephant, pink or otherwise, but mentally representing the presence of a pink elephant. The representational theory of mind gives us a powerful philosophical grasp on these otherwise puzzling situations.

Not all propositional attitudes are about non-actual states of affairs like chocolate mountains and pink elephants. But the point of focusing on the non-actual cases is the way that it highlights the representational character of mentality. The fact that we get things wrong or contrary to fact makes apparent that what we are doing is representing. But sometimes we get it right too. If it is really the case that Jane knows that snow is white, then snow is white. Here, the propositional attitude of knowledge involves representing correctly the way things are: snow is white.
The representational theory of the mind is the view that mentality is fundamentally a representational affair: having a mental state involves having a mental representation, a representation that either accurately or inaccurately depicts the way things are.