Assessing the landscape of representational concepts: Commentary on Favela and Machery

On the basis of a series of surveys targeting neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, Favela and Machery raise concerns about the conceptual messiness around what counts as a representation . I propose some alternative explanations for the pattern of responses elicited by the surveys, arguing that the way “representation” is used in the wild may turn out to be more disciplined than it initially appears—and then offer a brief catalog of these uses, as a step towards a fuller picture of what work (if any) the concept of representation is doing in different contexts.