Abstract

This essay attempts to show how a particular view of the self and the mind has ignored its Other-related, world-related and thus embodied character. This view, whose origins in the history of ideas can be traced back to René Descartes, has led to important theories of mind and language. It has also generated a certain hegemony of binaries, such as the inner and the outer, the mind and the world, the self and the other, the subjective and the objective, or the intrinsic and the extrinsic. This picture of the self and the mind thus portrayed as epistemologically insulated entities has begotten serious problems in the philosophies of mind and language as well as in the cognitive sciences. It is a view that has pervaded many recent developments in these fields and bears the name of Representationalism. The essay therefore starts with a critique of the Cartesian conception of the mind and the ensuing inner/outer or self/other dualities that it creates, then turns to Representationalism as found in the analytical philosophical tradition.