86 - Frances Egan: Mental Representation and Psychological Explanation

Frances Egan is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, where she works on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and the foundations of cognitive science. Recently she has been researching computational models of cognition and how they relate to representation. Robinson and Frankie talk about the foundations of cognitive science and the nature of mental representations before discussing psychological explanation, different ways of conceiving the mind’s boundaries, and how it interfaces with the rest of the body and environment.

Frankie’s Website: https://frances-egan.org/index.html

Mental Representation: https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/mental-representation/

OUTLINE

00:00 In This Episode…

01:21 Introduction

07:10 Frankie and the Philosophy of Mind

11:04 The Foundations of Cognitive Science

13:20 What are Mental Representations?

26:49 Eliminativism and Representations

32:33 A Deflationary Account

40:51 Naturalism and Cognitive Science

55:39 Psychological Explanation

01:03:02 The Extended Mind and Embodied Cognition 

01:21:14 The New Mechanists

Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.