REPRESENTATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

The chapters in Part Two have laid the foundation for a general externalist view of cognition and the mind. For the most part, the concepts of realization, representation, and computation have been developed and deployed within individualistic frameworks. In broadening and refashioning these concepts I have created a space for an externalist psychology, and illustrated ways in which some of that space has already been occupied within computational cognitive science.

The most important of these concepts for cognitive psychology is that of representation. Cognitive psychology explores the nature and structure of mental representations and how they are processed: how they are stored, retrieved, transformed, and related to one another. In the last chapter we saw that a representational view of cognition need not be individualistic. In this chapter, I move beyond foundation laying for externalism to show the place that exploitative representation has within cognitive psychology. I shall focus on areas of psychology in which representation has played a central role – on memory (section 4), developmental psychology (section 5), and folk psychology and the theory of mind (section 6).

Representation is not simply a form of encoding but more generally a form of informational exploitation of which encoding is a special case. Representations need not be thought of as internal copies of or codes for worldly structures. Rather, representation is an activity that individuals perform in extracting and deploying information that is used in their further actions.