Mentale Repräsentationen in der Kognitionswissenschaft

Abstract

The decline of behaviourism in psychology marked the triumphant advance of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary, primarily empirical investigation of mental phenomena. A core concept in this multidisciplinary research program is that of a mental representation, with which all mental phenomena are to be explained. Cognitive processes are to be understood in terms of information processing in the sense that they should be calculations or computational processes of mental representations in the brain. Challenges for this position are questions such as the following: How can this explanans of a representation be justified as a theoretical postulate and be integrated into a naturalistic worldview? How can the content of such representations be determined to explain behaviour? Alternative approaches to explaining cognitive phenomena present a further challenge; in recent decades, an opposition to mental representations has developed under the collective name of “enactivism” or “situated cognition”. Such views emphasise the embodiment and situated embeddedness of cognitive phenomena and acts into the environment. This article provides a concise introduction to contemporary debates on the nature of mental representations.