Misrepresenting the mind

This dissertation examines the relationship between a set of folk concepts of the mind and the scientific study of non-human psychologies. Specifically, I examine the role played in scientific psychology by folk-psychological concepts of belief, desire, and "aboutness", and the quasi-technical concept of mental representation.;I argue that the concepts of belief and desire are poorly suited to the project of understanding non-human minds, and that despite that fact they play a significant role in guiding scientific research. Unlike eliminativists, whose position is superficially similar, I do not think folk-psychological concepts have determinate semantic content; rather, they are template concepts whose content varies according to the context and aims of attribution. Despite this, their use tends to enable standard patterns of inference that are not helpful in understanding non-human minds. This is because those inferences are good ones only when a collection of distinct cognitive features coincide, as they often do in the human case but typically do not among non-humans. Similarly, I argue that the folk concept of aboutness encourages users to blur the distinction between different sorts of relations between mind and world.;This prepares the ground for my appraisal of the concept of representation. I argue that, like its folk forebears, the concept of representation is somewhat schizophrenic. It does not occupy a well-defined theoretical niche, but instead is used to pick out a range of distinct properties of internal psychological complexity, and a range of distinct mind-world connection properties. This multiplicity of uses can cause trouble, as even individual theorists can use the concept in inconsistent ways. Finally, I assess the scientific utility of a body of philosophical literature on "naturalizing representation"---seeking to understand representational mind-world connections in naturalistic terms. I argue that the philosophical literature focuses on features that do not play an obvious role in the science. Those features concern the capacity to misrepresent. The philosophers in question think those features significant because of their significance in a strand of folk theory. I argue that representation, so conceived, may not have any genuine scientific work to do.