Abstract

Nick Shea’s Representation in Cognitive Science (OUP 2018) places a broadly teleosemantic account of mental representation on a realist footing by stressing the need to explain *how* a representational system tracks information, with different formats exploiting structural correspondences between vehicles and contents in different ways. I explore how representational realism interacts with ecumenicalism about format, and more specifically how different representational systems distribute the burden of representation between systemic and local levels. Variations in systematicity and structure matter functionally, by affecting systems’ representational capacities and vulnerabilities. And they matter theoretically, by affecting where and how we posit and test for representational mechanisms.