Time Structure and the Structure of Perception

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 2003

Philosophical Studies, 2016

This paper tries to meet the three basic constraints in the metaphysics of perception-that, following Schellenberg (Philos Stud 149:19-48, 2010), I call here the particularity constraint, the indistinguishable constraint, and the phenomenological constraint-by putting forward a new combination of the two well-known contradictory views in this field: the relational view and the content view. Following other compatibilists (such as Schellenberg in Philos Stud 149:19-48, 2010), I do think that it is possible to reconcile the two views, recognizing that experience has both a relational and a representational dimension. However, in opposition to the current ways of combining these two views, I reject the idea of gappy contents. Instead, my proposal is builds on Lewis's famous semantic (Philosophy and grammar, Riedel, Dordrecht, 1980b), according to which the content of sentences is best modeled as complex functions from context-index pairs to truth-values. In conformity with the content view, I want to suggest that perceptual experiences do represent complex properties or complex functions (e.g., being a yellow-cubestraight-ahead) that are either veridical or falsidical of particulars in contexts and indexes. In this relativist framework, I can also accommodate the relational claim that our experience of particulars must be understood as a fundamental cognitive relation rather than as a representation. In this way, particulars also play a key role in individuating perceptual experiences. Two token experiences, e and e 0 , are different when one of the following conditions is met: first, if two different particulars, a and a 0 , are causally responsible for the token experiences e and e 0 , respectively, regardless of the time and location in which the perceptual experiences take place; second, if the same particular a, which is causally responsible for both e and e 0 , is either located in a different place or is in the same location but at a different time.

2002

In this paper two questions are raised: 1) Under which conditions may we say that an entity is a representation of something else? and, in particular, 2) what is the guarantee that our (mental or internal) representations correspond to or are in accord with external objects? In Hume's opinion, three answers to the second question are possible: There is a causal relationship between represented objects and representations; representations are freely created by the mind; and God guarantees the connection between representation and represented things and events. A short historical examination of these ideas is proposed. In cognitive sciences the two questions are strictly related. In particular, Dretske, Lloyd, and Perner's positions are presented (the causal explanation is here combined with the individuation of intrinsic features in representations that allow a medium to be a representation as such) and criticized. A fourth position is also mentioned (it was historically supported by Leibniz and presently by Jackendoff): Representation is a homomorphism. Finally, a way to solve the problem is proposed: Representations depend on the intentional act that establishes a connection between a physical or mental entity and a referent.

Information, 2011

Semiotics is widely applied in theories of information. Following the original triadic characterization of reality by Peirce, the linguistic processes involved in information-production, transmission, reception, and understanding-would all appear to be interpretable in terms of signs and their relations to their objects. Perhaps the most important of these relations is that of the representation-one, entity, standing for or representing some other. For example, an index-one of the three major kinds of signs-is said to represent something by being directly related to its object. My position, however, is that the concept of symbolic representations having such roles in information, as intermediaries, is fraught with the same difficulties as in representational theories of mind. I have proposed an extension of logic to complex real phenomena, including mind and information (Logic in Reality; LIR), most recently at the 4th International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science (Beijing, August, 2010). LIR provides explanations for the evolution of complex processes, including information, that do not require any entities other than the processes themselves. In this paper, I discuss the limitations of the standard relation of representation. I argue that more realistic pictures of informational systems can be provided by reference to information as an energetic process, following the categorial ontology of LIR. This approach enables naïve, anti-realist conceptions of anti-representationalism to be avoided, and enables an approach to both information and meaning in the same novel logical framework.

The current essay introduces the guidance theory of representation, according to which the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. The guidance theory offers a way of fixing representational content that gives the causal and evolutionary history of the subject only an indirect (non-necessary) role, and an account of representational error, based on failure of action, that does not rely on any such notions as proper functions, ideal conditions, or normal circumstances. Moreover, because the notion of error is defined in terms of failure of action, the guidance theory meets the "meta-epistemological requirement" that representational error should be potentially detectable by the representing system itself. In this essay, we offer a brief account of the biological origins of representation, a formal characterization of the guidance theory, some examples of its use, and show how the guidance theory handles some traditional problem cases for representation: the representation of fictional and abstract entities. Being both representational and actiongrounded, the guidance theory may provide some common ground between embodied and cognitivist approaches to the study of the mind.

2012

There is evidence in the psychological literature for representations of objects (Pylyshyn's visual indexes) that refer to and track, not properties, but what in our sort of world typically turn out to be individual physical objects. I am concerned with how such representations acquire their content. Two strategies for accounting for the content of representations are a) representations of particulars refer to the entity that caused them; and b) representations of particulars refer to the entity whose properties are represented by the visual system. The first strategy faces the "which link" problem: since any one of the links in the causal chain leading to the token representation counts as a cause of the token representation, no particular link is individuated as the referent. I examine a recent proposed solution to this problem (Fodor's counterfactual triangulation) and conclude that it fails to determine whether the referent of a visual index is an object, as opposed to a state of affairs, or an event. The problems with the first strategy are a reason to explore the second strategy: representations of objects refer to the entity whose properties are represented by the visual system. I adopt Fodor's asymmetric dependency account (ADA) of intentionality to account for how representations of properties get their content. Fodor's account is chosen not because it is free of problems, but because it has the structure of a theory that promises to deal with many of the classic problems that befall informational semantics (e.g. the disjunction problem). Since ADA is designed to work for causal relations between properties and not for causal relations between particulars, it cannot, by itself, account for how representations of particulars get their content. So I suggest that ADA be supplemented with conceptual role semantics to account for the logico-syntactic roles of representations of particulars. In particular, I suggest that to represent objects the visual system requires the capacity to form and store in memory definite descriptions containing: a) predicates referring to spatio-temporal relations; and b) temporal indexicals.

Synthese, 2001

The actual approaches of Cognitive Science offer a partial explanation of cognition. In this paper, our main point is to catch some key elements from these approaches, that can be taken together in a future perspective for a better explanation of cognition. The key elements (levels of analysis, primitives, processes, structures, threshold, self-organisation, bidirectionality, emergency, habituation, tasks, the interaction between levels and also the interactions between the elements of the cognitive system and the environment) help us to stress the need of the representations. Then, we are discussing the following dichotomies: procedural-declarative, consciousness-unconsciousness, implicitexplicit. Finally, we will try to motivate the necessity of an abstract theory of representation in Cognitive Science.

Representation is a central part of models in cognitive science, but recently this idea has come under attack. Researchers advocating perceptual symbol systems, situated action, embodied cognition, and dynamical systems have argued against central assumptions of the classical representational approach to mind. We review the core assumptions of the dominant view of representation and the four suggested alternatives. We argue that representation should remain a core part of cognitive science, but that the insights from these alternative approaches must be incorporated into models of cognitive processing.

This paper deals begins stating the importance of representation to metabolism and its relations to the second law of thermodynamics. From this, we argue that we cannot understand the brain as a Turing machine, dealing only with information, because the complexity of living beings and the environments in which they are nested is inexhaustible, leading to a infinite amount of information for each being in the terms of the mathematical theory of communication. To be able to act upon this infinite complexity, the brain contracts information into feeling, making it possible for a person to analyze and decide in which way to act, based primarily on feeling and only then on the amount information they can process. The content of representation is, therefore, feeling and information.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1977

TOWARD A CAUSAL THEORY OF LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION' DENNIS W. STAMPE 1 CAUSAL theories have recently been in vogue. We have causal theories, or intimations of causal theories, of knowledge and memory, of belief, of evidence, of proper and common names, and of reference. If all or several of these various phenomena should turn out to have causal analyses, it will be no mere coincidence. Only their having something in common would make it so. And all these phenomena apparently do have in common the fact that they involve a relation to an "object," of one kind or another. It is, after all, this relation, this "involvement of an object," that we are tempted to understand as some kind of causal relation. Further, the entities that share this property of involving an object, may be conceived as sharing a common nature, for in each case, that which stands in that relation may b e conceived as being a representation, or a psychological state of representational character, their various "objects" being what they variously represent. If this is so, the thought suggests itself that the truth underlying our attraction to causal theories is that representation is an essentially causal phenomenon. In what follows, I develop this thought, sketching the outlines of a causal theory of representation in general. 2. Where Russell held that we may make a judgment or supposition only about things with which we are acquainted, or as h e also put it, things that are presented to US,^ I shall suggest that we can make a judgment or supposition about such things as are represented to us, or of which we can form a representation, but only of such things. It may be that an object is represented to us only uia representations of representations of representations. The thing may then be at an indefinitely distant remove from our representation of it, and we may b e far from being immediately acquainted with it. But if, even at such a remove, it is represented to us, no matter how wildly inaccurate our representations of it may be, then the thing may figure as an object of our psychological states, and of our linguistic expressions of those states. A thing's being somehow represented