A Philosophical Understanding of Representation for Neuroscience

Understand

Neuroscientists often describe neural activity as a representation of something, or claim to have found evidence for a neural representation.

• But what do these statements mean? The reasons to call some neural activity a representation and the assumptions that come with this term are not generally made clear from its common uses in neuroscience.
• Representation is a central concept in philosophy of mind, with a rich history going back to the ancient period.
• In order to clarify its usage in neuroscience, here we advance a link between the connotations of this term across these disciplines.