Belief and behavior

Belief and behavior

1. representationalist

   • fodor
     • mental representations are sentences in an internal language of thought.
   • millikan
     • 1984
     • 1993
   • dreske
     • representational systems are systems worth the function of tracking features in the real world. organisms need to be able to track features of the real world in order to be evolutionarily successful. In general, on Dretske's view, an organism can be said to represent P just in case that organism contains a subsystem whose function it is to enter state A only if P holds, and that subsystem is in state A.
   • cummins
   • burge
   • language of thought
     • According to the language of thought hypothesis (see the entry on the language of thought hypothesis), our cognition proceeds rather like such a robot's. The formulae we manipulate are not in “machine language”, of course, but rather in a species-wide “language of thought”. A sentence in the language of thought with some particular propositional content P is a “representation” of P. On this view, a subject believes that P just in case she has a representation of P that plays the right kind of role—a “belief-like” role—in her cognition.  the representation must not be somewhere instantiated in the mind, but something that is apt to be deployed.