Commentary: Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences

This commentary concerns an assumption in Favela & Machery's "Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences," about the role of concepts in scientific cognition. That paper draws strong conclusions from interesting but incomplete information, arguing that because the concept of representation doesn't provide a clear taxonomy of neural activity (into the categories representational and non-representational), it has no legitimate role in the brain sciences. This commentary shows that the conclusion is premature, because scientific concepts do more than taxonomize. I discuss some other functions of scientific concepts, along with existing work that can be brought to bear on the study of those concepts. And I show how Favela & Machery's paper provides a starting-point for important work on the concept of representation, as long as we drop the mistaken assumption and the more ambitious conclusions