New Books in Psychology Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
Aug 10, 2025
Frances Egan, an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, challenges conventional theories of mental representation in her latest work. She advocates for a naturalistic account that views representational glosses as abstract interpretations of neural mechanisms. Egan explores the implications of this shift in understanding cognition, highlighting the importance of commonsense psychology. She also discusses the relevance of beliefs and desires in both AI and non-human animals, pushing the boundaries of how we think about mental content and its role in explaining behavior.
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Formative Training With The Churchlands
- Frances Egan studied under Pat and Paul Churchland and absorbed their desert-landscape approach.
- This early training shaped her interest in deflating mental representation.
Three Pillars Of Deflationary Representation
- Frances Egan claims representing a state requires no special substantive relation and content isn't essential.
- She also says content attributions are always pragmatically motivated.
Drop The Traditional Naturalization Project
- Drop the search for reductive non-intentional conditions for content.
- Focus on computational cognitive science to explain mechanisms and avoid spooky appeals.
