Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or nonsemantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behavior. In the process, the book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.

Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or nonsemantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behavior. In the process, the book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.