ABSTRACT
A friend remarked that calling this book The Mechanical Mind is a bit like calling a murder mystery The Butler Did It. It would be a shame if the title did have this connotation, because the aim of the book is essentially to raise and examine problems rather than solve them. In broad outline, I try to do two things in this book: fi rst, to explain the philosophical problem of mental representation; and, second, to examine the questions about the mind which arise when attempting to solve this problem in the light of dominant philosophical assumptions. Central among these assumptions is the view I call ‘the mechanical mind’. Roughly, this is the view that the mind should be thought of as a kind of causal mechanism, a natural phenomenon which behaves in a regular, systematic way, like the liver or the heart.
