Representational Kinds

International audienceMany debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions, and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). This chapter outlines a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. It argues that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive science, suggests that representational kinds are multilevel. This is to say that representational kinds’ properties cluster at different levels of explanation and allow for intra- and interlevel projections