Dr Peter West: 'Anton Wilhelm Amo on Ideas and Mental Representation'

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According to a commonly held view amongst the Early Moderns, we gain knowledge of external objects via ideas in the mind which represent them. This raises the question of how an idea is meant to represent its object. A survey of Early Modern views yields two prominent answers which, albeit somewhat anachronistically, can be characterised as ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’. Early Modern internalists hold that ideas represent by means of resemblance, while externalists maintain that representation is grounded on a causal relation between idea and object.  

Anton Wilhelm Amo (a Ghanaian thinker working in the 1730s) characterises an idea as something that exists in the mind and represents sensations in the body. However, it is unclear how Amo thinks ideas can represent sensations, since he thinks the mind and the bodily are heterogeneous and that the body cannot causally interact with the mind. Amo is also committed to the Peripatetic principle that there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses which rules out the possibility that ideas are innate. I argue that, in light of these commitments, Amo develops a 'functionalist' account of mental representation that requires neither causation nor resemblance. Instead, for Amo, ideas play a specific functional role in the mind, analogous to the role played by sensations in the body. It is in virtue of serving this function that ideas represent – that is, stand in for – their objects.