Frances Egan is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, where she works on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and the foundations of cognitive science. Recently she has been researching computational models of cognition and how they relate to representation. Robinson and Frankie talk about the foundations of cognitive science and the nature of mental representations before discussing psychological explanation, different ways of conceiving the mind’s boundaries, and how it interfaces with the rest of the body and environment.
Frankie’s Website: https://frances-egan.org/index.html
Mental Representation: https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/mental-representation/
OUTLINE
00:00 In This Episode…
01:21 Introduction
07:10 Frankie and the Philosophy of Mind
11:04 The Foundations of Cognitive Science
13:20 What are Mental Representations?
26:49 Eliminativism and Representations
32:33 A Deflationary Account
40:51 Naturalism and Cognitive Science
55:39 Psychological Explanation
01:03:02 The Extended Mind and Embodied Cognition
01:21:14 The New Mechanists
Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com
Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.