ABSTRACT
Mental representation is one of the key explanatory concepts in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. The idea that mental states are contentful plays a crucial role in how we explain behavior and understand. The problem of content determination should be kept separate from what he calls the “job description” challenge of specifying what it means for something to function as a representation. The language of thought hypothesis derived theoretical support from Fodor's argument that it best explains the compositionality of both language and thought. An important feature of thoughts is that they are composed of concepts that can be recombined to produce other thoughts systematically. The claim that representations possess a language-like structure that should be conceived of as symbols with separable syntactic and semantic properties has been subject to intense debate. Explanations making use of mental representations can be cast on different levels.
