Abstract

It is a common experience of mental life that we come to articulate meanings which we had initially grasped in only a sketchy way. In this paper, I consider how this idea of an initially unarticulated meaning may fit in a general theory of mental representation. I propose to identify unarticulated meanings with what I callspecific concepts, which are quite similar to Rosch's categories of basic objects and are distinct both from images and generic concepts (which come to articulate meanings). I argue that unarticulated meaning is non-representational in an important respect, a claim which relies on a distinction amonglevels of representation.