The project is about two things. The first is the nature of representational content in some simple systems that make use of representations. Here the focus is largely on representations invoked in information processing explanations in cognitive science. For example, in cognitive science we explain a person’s rapid choices between options partly in terms of the way structures in their brain keep track of the reward they receive for each choice. This is the ‘meaning for the brain’ in the project title. The first question is: what is this kind of meaning and how does it arise in a naturally occurring system like the brain?
The second question concerns the nature of the representations that we are familiar with in our ordinary lives: beliefs, desires, intentions, visual experiences, conscious feelings, and so on. These have meaning for the (whole) person – the second part of project title.
Understanding the nature of meaning or representational content has long been a central issue in philosophy of mind. Much progress has been made, no compelling solution has yet been forthcoming. It now seems likely that the question is much more difficult when it comes to representations that have meaning for the whole person than it is for some of the representations in the brain relied on by scientists to explain behaviour.
By leaving aside the harder cases of mental representation we hope it will be possible to produce a well-justified account of how representation works in the simpler cases: of meaning for the brain.
For the harder cases – meaning for the person – our aim is more modest: to give a preliminary characterisation of some of the ways these less simple representations are different – ways that make a difference to why they have the meaning or content they do. We use the label ‘personal level’ representations for these cases, and ‘subpersonal’ for the simpler ones.
