Representation and Conceptual Change

Abstract

This paper¹ suffers from a disconcerting generality. I need an excuse for wandering from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to Picasso’s drawing of a Weeping Woman, via the philosophy of science and the theory of sense data. The thesis of the paper is that I have such an excuse. These are all areas where the concept of representation either exists in its own right, or has been found to be illuminating by philosophers. An important question is whether it could be the same concept in all these cases. I wish to claim that there is an illuminating common concept, even though to find it may require some fairly drastic modifications of some of the philosophical theses that are involved.