Directive representation and the Job Description Challenge

Philosophical work on representation has largely focused on descriptive content, which concerns what the world is like . Neuroscientists and psychologists regularly make other sorts of content ascriptions, however, including to forward models, motor commands, and error signals. Here I focus on directive states – states that shape what a system does – in relation to the question: what makes a directive state a representation? I begin by recharacterizing Ramsey’s (2007) Job Description Challenge (