Anti-cartesian representation and Heidegger's analysis of spatiality

Representations are freely postulated in todays philosophy of mind and cognitive science. They are ubiquitous in many kinds of philosophical theories about the mind and in scientific theories about a very large number of mental processes. It is fair to say that the presence of connectionist approaches to cognitive phenomena has not put a halt on their use, nor does the dispute around connectionism mean an immediate threat to a realist view of the mind. This pervasive presence of representations makes that the neo-Cartesian view of the mind -as some philosophers call it (e.g. García-Carpintero 1995) on account of its realism- corrects in important ways the classical Cartesian picture, since the representations involved are representations of discrete items that are seen by many as independent from the mind and in this sense objective. In the central cases, they are also external to the body of the cognizer, and for the most part they are so that the subject has no conscious access to what the representations represent, and in any case, conscious awareness is not necessary. All these features of representations make it rather obvious to call them anti-Cartesian representations. We could then say that -even if there are of course disenting voices- much of present day opinion about the mind has it that corrections to Cartesian ontology which are nowadays perceived as necessary do not at all jeopardize the possibilities of a science of the mind.