This is a precis of Deflating Mental Representation, which is unfortunately behind a paywall on MIT Press. That said, this short article gives us a good sense of what I think is really the right way to think of (what people call) mental representations. There are three major elements: first, we should not suppose there is a special relationship between the brain (or mental) state and what the representation is about; second, the same mental state may have different 'content', or none at all; and third, we attribute 'content' to mental states for purely pragmatic purposes. In other words, we can talk about mental states as though they represent the real world, but we should make the mistake of actually asserting that. It's just a gloss (see the comment on the meanings of 'gloss'). Though credited to Dan Burnston on the blog post, I'm going to assume this is written by Frances (Frankie) Egan.
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