What Minds Can Do

This 1997 book explores the representational powers of a person's mind.

What Minds Can Do, first published in 1997, has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. It addresses issues that are central to contemporary philosophical debate.Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. In the process, this 1997 book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.