Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which re- searchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to take a god's-eye view when describing dynamical relationships be- tween entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept *types*, such as *the belief that cats are silly*, and *the concept CAT*, while preserving belief and concept *tokens* in individual cognizers' minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly.