The Inflationary Commitments of a Deflationary Theory of Representation

Frances Egan's deflationary theory of mental representation aims to secure a naturalistic basis for computational explanation in cognitive science—the “theory proper”—by treating representational talk as a merely pragmatic “gloss” rather than as part of the theory proper itself. I argue that this division ultimately collapses. The indeterminacy argument motivating the turn to pragmatism fails, the alleged divide between mathematical and cognitive content is unstable, and the naturalistic theory proper is itself built upon the intentional resources it is meant to exclude. Without the gloss, there is no principled way to specify the theory's explanandum as genuinely cognitive; with it, the theory incurs the very inflationary commitments it was meant to avoid.