Dress Rehearsals, Previews, and Encores: A New Account of Mental Representation

One of the central debates in cognitive science is the dispute over the role of representation in cognition: on computational/representational accounts, representations are theoretically central; on dynamic systems approaches in which cognition is investigated as a particular sort of physical process, representations play either no role, or, at best, a derivative one. But these two perspectives lead to a deeply unsatisfying theoretical divide: accounts situated in the representational camp are plagued by the inscrutable problem of intentionality, while those hedging towards anti‐representationalism seem incapable of saying anything theoretically interesting about high‐level cognition. This unhelpful polarization is due in part, at least, to a muddy debate; while some take representationalism to be a commitment to the necessity of conceptual representations for cognition, representations the having of which require certain conceptual capacities, others do not. Recently, there has been a surge of work on non‐conceptual representation. This article aims to add to this movement by suggesting a particular cognitive mechanism for non‐conceptual representations, one that plays a pivotal role in making conceptual representations possible. One of the central consequences of this new view of representation is the possibility of a non‐question‐begging naturalistic account of intentionality.