New Books in Neuroscience · New Books Network

Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)

August 10, 2025·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Frances Egan argues mental representation lacks a substantive relation, reshaping how we think about the mind.

Frances Egan discusses her book 'Deflating Mental Representation,' arguing against traditional naturalistic accounts of mental content. She proposes a deflationary view where representation is a pragmatic gloss on causal processes, using examples like the frog-fly case and analogies to measurement. The conversation explores implications for cognitive science, folk psychology, and future work on AI and animal minds.

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