Mental or Neural Representations: Justifying the terminology used in cognitive neuroscience

In this paper we investigate whether one of the most common uses of the concept of representation is justifiable by suggesting the conditions under which it can be accepted and how it can be related to mental states. We present mental states in terms of private experiences and public events. We argue that a representation is a relation involving three main elements as well as the user of the representation, and defend that the conditions in which we can conceive neural activity as representational are set by the context of observing a correlation between public events and patterns of neural activity. We aim at demonstrating that neural activity can be seen as both representational and non-representational - but rather constitutive - depending upon if we are considering public events under the perspective of the observer, or if we are considering private experiences under the subjective perspective.