Minds and Objects

This short article is intended to be comprehensible to an interested general audience, and considers some different ways in which philosophers have attempted to answer the question ‘What is it to have a mind?’ Some problems with what is now a popular strategy, making use of the notion of representational content, are raised, focusing particularly on Tyler Burge’s attempt to utilise facts gleaned from perceptual (and in particular visual) psychology in order to make tractable the question which animals, exactly, may be said to have states which possess such content. I suggest, in brief outline, an alternative approach, based rather on the suggestion that animals which can track objects visually are creatures which can bear the relation of seeing to those objects – and that this is already enough to separate out such creatures from mere sentients, but without the need to import a full-blown notion of representational content.