Minimizing Cognitive Representation

One of the most debated issues in the philosophy of cognitive science is whether a scientific account of the faculties that characterize a cognitive system should adopt the hypothesis of cognitive representationalism. This central debate opened at the turn of this century a specific discussion about the possibility of opting for a minimal type of cognitive representationalism, based on the idea that the property of representation can be made minimal. The present study attempts a clarifying reconstruction of the seminal phase of this somewhat intricate contoversy, based on a preliminary theoretical analysis of the issue of the degree of representationalism that it is intended to solve. It also criticizes it for being based on an insufficient analysis of the general nature of the property of representation, with the result that it stays in particular prisonner of a long standing prejudice to the effect that to represent is necessarily to represent by means of a symbolic tool.