Problems of representation I: nature and role

in Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology, 2009

There are some exceptions, which we shall see below, but virtually all theories in psychology and cognitive science make use of the notion of representation. Arguably, folk psychology also traffics in representations, or is at least strongly suggestive of their existence. There are many different types of things discussed in the psychological and philosophical literature that are candidates for representation-hood. First, there are the propositional attitudes -beliefs, judgments, desires, hopes etc. (see Chapters 9 and 17 of this volume). If the propositional attitudes are representations, they are person-level representations -the judgment that the sun is bright pertains to John, not a subpersonal part of John. By contrast, the representations of edges in V1 of the cerebral cortex that neuroscientists talk about and David Marr's symbolic representations of "zero-crossings" in early vision are at the "sub-personal" level -they apply to parts or states of a person (e.g. neural parts or computational states of the visual system). Another important distinction is often made among perceptual, cognitive, and action-oriented representations (e.g. motor commands). Another contrast lies between "stored representations" (e.g. memories) and "active representations" (e.g. a current perceptual state). Related to this is the distinction between "dispositional representations" and "occurrent representations." Beliefs that are not currently being entertained are dispositional, e.g. your belief that the United States is in North America -no doubt you had this belief two minutes ago, but you were not consciously accessing it until you read this sentence. Occurrent representations, by contrast, are active, conscious thoughts or perceptions. Which leads us to another important distinction:

This paper addresses the issue of what it means for something to be identifiable as an internal representation. The inquiry will proceed in a number of steps. First, it will be pointed out how, in the literature, we find a tendency to conflate the idea that something can be seen as a representation with the idea that something is, as a matter of fact, identifiable as a representation. Second, it will be argued that the notion of an internal representation cannot, and should not be divorced from an understanding of what it means for an external object to qualify as a representation. The third step follows from this: as a case in point, I will look at the external representational devices known as scientific representations, and I will draw insights from current discussions within philosophy of science concerning the representational nature of these objects. In a fourth and final step, it will be argued that all representation involves a socio-normative or prescriptive element, and that factual identification of an object as a representation is impossible outside this prescriptive context. The conclusion argues that we should therefore give up on the idea that we can discover structures in the brain that can be identified as representations.

Computer-Based Diagnostics and Systematic Analysis of Knowledge, 2009

1993

... distinguish appearance from reality. Introducing basic distinctions in philosophy ofmind for characterizing the mental, Perner discusses differences in how commonsense and cognitive psychology view the mind. Tracing the onset of ...

Philosophical Explorations, 2018

This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of mental representations in contemporary cognitive scientific modeling.

Situation theorists such as John Barwise, John Etchemendy, John Perry and François Recanati have put forward the hypothesis that linguistic representations are situated in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations which are not explicitly represented as such. Following Recanati's lead, I explore this hypothesis with respect to mental representations. First, I introduce the notion of unarticulated constituent, due to John Perry. I suggest that the question of whether there really are such constituents should divide in two issues, one concerning language and the other concerning thought (§1). Then I formulate a dilemma that any friend of cognitive unarticulated constituents must face: alleged unarticulated constituents seem to be either articulated or non-constituents after all (§2). The dilemma is strengthened by the fact that unarticulated constituents cannot be inferentially relevant (§3). In §4, three constraints on entertaining situated represe...

Computational Intelligence, 2007

In addressing the question “Do representations need reality?”, this paper attempts to show that a principled understanding of representations requires that they have objective, systematic content.It is claimed that there is an interesting form of nonconceptual, intentionality which is processed by non-systematic connectionist networks and has its correctness conditions provided by a modest biosemantics; but this type of content is not properly representational. Finally, I consider the consequences that such a verdict has on eliminativist views that look to connectionism as a means of radically reconceiving our understanding of cognition.

Journal of Consciousness Studies