Memory and content

The paper argues that any theory of content has to adopt a “functionalistic core” to concord with the cognitive sciences. This functionalistic core requires that representations are defined as substitutes in functions that describe the flexible behavior to be explained by the representation. The content of a representation can thus only be determined if the representation is “in use”, i.e. if it is an argument in such a function. The stored entities in memory are not in use while they are stored, and hence cannot be assigned a specific content. The term “template” is introduced to describe stored entities in memory. The discussion of some implications of this result show that some deep philosophical problems follow from this argument as well as consequences for empirical research on memory.