CFP: Mind without Inner Representation?

CFP: Mind without Inner Representation?

Psychological Discourse, Rationality, and Mental Anti-Representationalism

Special Issue of Journal of Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (JCCP)

Guest Editor: Rusong Huang

Contact: rusongh@gmail.com

Submission deadline: March 1, 2027

Topic areas: Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Language; Metaphysics; Normativity; Philosophy of Psychology

Description

When we attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, fears, memories, imaginings, sensations, or experiences to someone, what are we doing?

Much of modern philosophy of mind has assumed that psychological sentences are representational: they describe mental states, properties, events, or processes belonging to a subject. This assumption generates familiar metaphysical pressures. If psychological sentences represent mental facts, then we must explain how such facts fit into the physical world. This gives rise to what has been variously called the location problem, the placement problem, the accommodation problem, or the problem of how mind can be at home in nature.

This special issue invites papers that examine whether the representational assumption about psychological discourse should be rejected, revised, or defended. It focuses on a family of views that challenge, in different ways, the idea that psychological sentences primarily function to represent inner mental facts. These include fictionalism, eliminativism, error theory, illusionism, and mental anti-representationalism — what we may call, for convenience, the FEEL theories and MAR. The issue welcomes both sympathetic and critical treatments of these views, as well as papers that defend more traditional representationalist approaches.

A central aim of the issue is to explore the relations among these positions. Are the FEEL theories and MAR competing alternatives, or can they be combined? Does MAR collapse into one of the FEEL theories, or does it offer a distinct way of rejecting inner-fact representationalism? Can these approaches preserve the explanatory, rational, and normative roles of psychological discourse while avoiding the metaphysical burdens of inner-object models of mind?

Possible topics

Submissions may address, but are not limited to:

• the semantics of psychological sentences;
• belief, desire, intention, memory, imagination, pain, or experience as mentality attributions;
• rationality and normativity in psychological explanation;
• whether psychological discourse represents inner mental facts;
• the relation between Mental Anti-Representationalism and fictionalism, eliminativism, error theory, or illusionism;
• whether anti-representationalism collapses into non-realism about the mental;
• psychological explanation without inner mental objects;
• anti-representationalism and physicalism;
• consciousness, introspection, and illusionism;
• Sellarsian, Wittgensteinian, Rylean, Davidsonian, Dennettian, McDowellian, Brandomian, expressivist, or pragmatist approaches to mind;
• implications for artificial intelligence or machine mentality.

Papers may be sympathetic, critical, historical, systematic, or comparative.

Submission instructions

Submissions should be original articles not currently under consideration elsewhere.

Manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review and should not exceed 10,000 words, including quotations and footnotes but excluding reference lists.

Please submit manuscripts in the Editorial Manager for JCCP:  https://www.editorialmanager.com/jccp/default.aspx 

You may see submission instructions here.

Please indicate that the paper is intended for the special issue “Mind without Inner Representation? Psychological Discourse, Rationality, and Mental Anti-Representationalism.”

Submission deadline: March 1, 2027

Expected publication: Fall 2027 / early 2028