It is much harder to understand how concepts as patterns of neural activation can play the explanatory role required by the view that a crucial role of concepts like drunk is their contribution
to causal explanations. Perhaps the brain manages to use concepts in explanations by embedding them in rules, such as: If X is drunk, then X stumbles. But what is the neural representation of the connection between the concepts drunk and stumbles? This structure requires also some kind of neural representation of if-then, which in this explanatory context involves some understanding of causality: drunkenness causes stumbling. I will deal with the representation of causality later in this chapter, but for now the main concern is to try to see how the brain could use neural populations to represent that there is a relation between the concepts of drunk and stumbles.