2016-10-03
19 分钟Do we map the world in our minds? Does that imply that we have a little inner map-reader in our heads interpreting mental representations? Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses these issues with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. This episode is is part of a short series Mind Bites made in association with Nicholas Shea's AHRC-funded Meaning for the Brain and Meaning for the Person project.
This is mind Bytes, a series for philosophy bytes.
With me, David Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
How does the mind represent the world?
Should we see the mind as somehow mapping the world?
For example, if I want to take a familiar path from home to the supermarket, does my mind contain something like a chart of this route?
Is that how I'm able to navigate my way around?
On the face of it, that seems pretty plausible, but it raises a further doesn't a map require a map reader?
And if so, would we then have to hypothesize a sort of tiny person, a homunculus, who's lodged in our minds and who interprets the maps?
Here's Peter Godfrey Smith.
Peter Godfrey Smith, welcome to Mindbytes.
Pleasure to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is mental representations.
Can we just begin by getting clear what a representation is?
Well, the natural way to start is by thinking about the most familiar cases of external public representations, things like maps, which I think are a good paradigm here.
If you follow that road, then it seems that a representation is something that stands for something else, something that can be interpreted as saying how some other thing is, and can hence be a guide to dealing with the other thing.
That's interesting.
So I've got a map of London.
It pictures, to some degree, the layout of the streets, and it allows me to move through those streets.
Right.
I think those are the cases that are both very familiar to us and also quite helpful for getting us a way in to start thinking about the mental case.