Slide 9 of 37
Notes:
All science rests on inferences that have at best only limited justification (see, e.g., Lakatos & Musgrave, 1971). When a cat comes running to its bowl at the sound of a can opener, it is difficult to doubt that, for the cat, the sound of the opener is a signal for the impending delivery of food to its bowl. The cat has this information; the information is part of the cat's cognitive content. When we say that the cat has certain information we need not be claiming anything more than that the cat's behavior is contingent on the signal. We need not make any special claims about the format, or code of the cat's representation.
What we cannot know is what the cat experiences when it hears the can opener. What mental states exist in the cat? I am trying to express a difficult distinction. I used the term "cognitive content" to characterize the information available to the cat (what it knows or should know), and "mental content" to describe its mental states. I am using cognitive content to refer to the knowledge that the animal has and mental content to refer to its conscious attitude toward that knowledge (in the jargon of technical philosophy, examples of this latter kind of representation are called qualia). The cat could know, for example, that the can opener signals food and can respond to it, even without having any awareness or experience of responding to the can.
The goal of psychology is to explain cognitive content. Mental content is at best secondary.
