This is Mind Bites, a series for philosophy bites with me David Edmonds.

And me Nigel Woberton.

How does the mind represent the world?

Should we see the mind as somehow mapping the world? For example, if I want to take

a familiar path from home to the supermarket, does my mind contain something like a chart of

this route? Is that how I'm able to navigate my way around?

On the face of it, that seems pretty plausible. But it raises a further question.

Doesn't a map require a map reader?

And if so, would we then have to hypothesise a sort of tiny person,

a homunculus who's lodged in our minds and who interprets the maps?

Here's Peter Godfrey Smith.

Peter Godfrey Smith, welcome to Mind Bites.

Pleasure to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is mental representations. Can we just begin by getting clear what a

representation is? Well the natural way to start is by thinking about the most

familiar cases of external public representations, things like maps which I think are a good paradigm here.

If you follow that road, then it seems that a representation is something that stands for something else, something that can be interpreted as saying how some other thing is and can

hence be a guide to dealing with the other thing.

That's interesting.

So I've got a map of London. It pictures to some

degree the layout of the streets and it allows me to move through those streets.

Right, I think those are the cases that are both very familiar to us and also quite helpful for

...