A review of Frances Egan's book argues that mental representation should be understood in a deflationary way: ascriptions of content to mental states are pragmatic tools that aid explanation, not claims about substantive representational relations. Egan contends that content attribution functions as a "gloss" across scientific, everyday, and philosophical contexts, avoiding metaphysical commitments. The review notes that while this approach resolves longstanding debates, it faces tensions regarding how to individuate mental states and the role of the external environment. The book's originality and its contributions to cognitive science and philosophy of mind are highlighted.
Knowing the phenomenal character of one's own experience—qualia—does not require inner perception or justification by further beliefs. A reworking of Dretske's displaced perception model, guided by Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, rejects representationalism and any metaphysical commitments about qualia. Introspection is epistemically reliable because it dispenses with justification of any beliefs, and automatic because it dispenses with reflexive connecting beliefs. For instance, nonconceptual awareness of the color blue directly yields the belief that phenomenal blue is the conscious character of one's experience of the sky, simply by employing the concept BLUE.