Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition

Offers a new understanding of representational cognition that synthesizes postwar philosophical approaches to the question of objective knowledge This study develops a novel account of representational cognition, explaining how cognitive systems progressively come to map the structure of their worlds. Daniel Sacilotto offers a constructive response to the critique of representation formulated throughout the post-Kantian philosophical tradition. Rather than a skepticism or idealism whereby thinking can grasp appearances but never the real, representation, Sacilotto shows, is a constitutive dimension of cognitive systems’ creative capacity to know and intervene in the world of which they are part. Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition integrates various lines in contemporary philosophy, including those often seen as incommensurable or in irresolvable tension with one another. Sacilotto thus advances a productive synthesis of a materialist ambition to provide a creative and historical understanding of cognition with a structural realist account of representation. He shows how the different forms of sensory, discursive, and theoretical mediation that characterize human cognition are conducive to a realist epistemological framework that explains how the possibility of knowledge about a mind-independent reality is conceivable.