Maze.html Representationism, Realism and the Redundancy of 'Mentalese' J.R. Maze Department of Psychology University of Sydney, Australia Representationism as a theory of knowledge cannot avoid collapsing into solipsism, cannot distinguish between true and false beliefs without contradicting its own basic premise and cannot give any objective ground for inference. His arguments for its necessity for natural language learning are problematic. Direct realism avoids these unnecessary difficulties by postulating a native perceptual ability to identify kinds of complex object, and finds the grounds of inference in the perceived structure of the world.
Cognitive science can have useful applications if freed of representationism.