28 - 29 November 2019, Mental Representations in a Mechanical World, Bochum, Germany

The concept of representation is ubiquitous in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind. Neural representations are postulated by neuroscientists to explain sub-personal phenomena such as the processing of visual information in the brain, while mental representations are taken to explain person-level phenomena, such as imagination, or consciousness. But non-representationalists contend that postulating representations of any sort is unnecessary or problematic. This workshop investigates the status of representations in a mechanical account of the mind and cognition. One core question will be whether the status of neural and mental representation is equally problematic. A second core question concerns the relationship between neural and mental representations.

Speakers: Joe Dewhurst (LMU), Carrie Figdor (Iowa), Jolien Francken (Amsterdam), Matej Kohar (RUB), Beate Krickel (RUB), Marcin Milkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Karina Vold (Cambridge).