Abstrakt:
Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has – at
least according to some – a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind,
not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it
also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive
phenomenon meet to count as a (truly, genuinely, nontrivially, etc.) represen-
tational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose
a solution to this latter problem. I will assume that representational explanations
should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by
proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance
condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the
error-detection condition.
