ABSTRACT
The Churchlands are well-known as eliminativists, but they accept that there are mental representations, denying only the existence of the mental representations countenanced by folk psychology. The thin notion of representation is strong enough to push some versions of behaviourism out of the representationalist realm. The thin notion of representation also classifies as anti-representationalists those Wittgensteinians who maintain that it is a mistake to speak of semantic properties pertaining to subpersonal states. To generate an even more restrictive notion of representation, the Mr Potato Head argument may be applied for one more iteration, producing the view that true representations must possess syntactic structure. The issue with respect to mental representation is whether different types of mental representations are explicit or implicit. In the psychological literature, representations are often assumed to have the role of “classifiers,” with the role of assimilating a number of environmental signals.
