Gerard O’Brien’s paper “How does mind matter?—Solving the content causation problem” (this collection) is situated at the border of philosophy and cognitive science. The subject matter, as announced by the title, is the causal efficacy of mental content, especially of representational content. O’Brien approaches this subject in three argumentative steps: first he introduces us to a problem called the content causation problem, then he proposes a conception of representation that he calls the triadic conception of representation, and, third, he enriches this concept by proposing a second-order similarity theory of content determination.
In this commentary I will try to reconstruct how these three points relate to each other, focusing in particular on the role that the content causation problem plays in the other two argumentative steps. O’Brien’s theory of representational content and its causal efficacy is doubtlessly interesting even when considered in isolation, as I will briefly outline in section 2. In section 3, I will try to show that the content causation problem demands us to be more specific than when just investigating the question of how mind matters. In section 4, I will try to show how O’Brien’s account of the relational character of mental content, which is at the core of his argumentation, gains its philosophical relevance from implicit assumptions that form the conceptual foundations of the content causation problem as here formulated. In an attempt to assess whether his account must really be regarded as solving the content causation problem, I will highlight in section 5 how important it is to be specific about what we really mean if we suppose that representation is somehow relational in character.