Object representation : content and conditions

In philosophy of mind, we often talk about a person having a mental representation of aspects of reality. In philosophy of perception, we discuss how it is possible for an external reality to have a causal role in creating representations. Many cognitive psychologists who study human and animal perception see the object as the primary unit of perception. My project is to give an account of what the conditions are for the representation of an object. I begin by discussing representation in fairly general\ud terms and then discuss several ways of thinking about the content of representations. Next I give an account of the general conditions for representation. Then, I discuss some\ud areas of research from cognitive science which focus on the object as a primary unit of\ud perception. I argue that in order to represent an object as an object (as opposed to an\ud object as a particular kind of object), one need not be able to have a representation of an\ud object in terms propositions or concepts