Representation in Neuroscience

A summarizing English version on “Theory of Innovation and the Evolution of General Human Capabilities, such as Cognition-based Empathy” is included in the download. Den biologisch modernen Menschentyp charakterisieren sehr allgemeine Fähigkeiten, wie begriffliche Sprache, strategisches Denken und kognitionsgestützte Empathie. Neurobiologisch kann Empathiefähigkeit als eine Verbindung von Repräsentationen von Mitmenschen mit dem je eigenen Gefühlszentren im Gehirn angesehen werden. In Grundzügen ist sie vor vielleicht 100 000 Jahren als Folge von Mutationen der Erbsubstanz DNA entstanden. Für solche genetische Innovationen spielten (...) wohl nicht nur lokale Veränderungen des Genoms eine Rolle, sondern auch seltene größere Umordnungen, besonders neue Zufallskombinationen von Regelbereichen in der DNA. Dies könnte in seltenen Einzelfällen eine Art Weichenstellung für eine neue Richtung der Evolution bewirken, die dann in vielen kleinen Schritten ausgeprägt wurde. Interessant ist die Analogie solcher biologischer mit technischer Innovation: Auch in ihr, Beispiel Dampfschiff, spielt die (seltene) Neukombination von Grundfähigkeiten eine Initialrolle für die Ausbreitung einer Innovation. (shrink)

It’s often claimed in the philosophical and scientific literature on temporal representation that there is no such thing as a genuine sensory system for time. In this paper, I argue for the opposite—many animals, including all mammals, possess a genuine sensory system for time based in the circadian system. In arguing for this conclusion, I develop a semantics and meta-semantics for explaining how the endogenous rhythms of the circadian system provide organisms with a direct information link to the temporal structure (...) of their environment. In doing so, I highlight the role of sensory systems in an information processing architecture. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that human memories are stored not between neurons as synaptic weights, but within individual neurons themselves. This opens the possibility to replace the dominant paradigm of brain function – neural networks – with a new one. In this article, I explore how “identified neurons” could explain how memories are stored, and how human traits are implemented in the brain.

I believe that the Buddhist paradigm of the phenomenal world—particularly, the Buddhist assertion that the phenomenal world is not as it appears—is supported by a scientific analysis of perception. When we consider carefully the basics of human perception, as understood by modern science, it becomes clear that phenomenal events are not represented as they truly are. This infidelity of information transfer from external phenomena to personal experience is consistent with the Buddhist view of the world as 'illusory'. Further, I would (...) argue that the creation of an illusory external world by our sensory instrumentation is compatible with the Buddhist doctrine of the non-duality of perception and perceiver. (shrink)

A network of gene regulation organized in a hierarchical and combinatorial manner is crucially involved in the development of the neural network, and has to be considered one of the main substrates of genetic change in its evolution. Though qualitative features may emerge by way of the accumulation of rather unspecific quantitative changes, it is reasonable to assume that at least in some cases specific combinations of regulatory parts of the genome initiated new directions of evolution, leading to novel capabilities (...) of the brain. These notions are applied, in this paper, to the evolution of the capability of cognition-based human empa­thy. It is suggested that it has evolved as a secondary effect of the evolution of strategic thought. Development of strategies depends on abstract representations of one’s own pos­sible future states in one’s own brain to allow assessment of their emotional desirability, but also on the representation and emotional evaluation of possible states of others, allowing anticipation of their behaviour. This is best achieved if representations of others are con­nected to one’s own emotional centres in a manner similar to self-representations. For this reason, the evolution of the human brain is assumed to have established representations with such linkages. No group selection is involved, because the quality of strategic thought affects the fitness of the individual. A secondary effect of this linkage is that both the actual states and the future perspectives of others elicit vicarious emotions, which may contribute to the motivations of altruistic behaviour. (shrink)

The goal of this short chapter, aimed at philosophers, is to provide an overview and brief explanation of some central concepts involved in predictive processing (PP). Even those who consider themselves experts on the topic may find it helpful to see how the central terms are used in this collection. To keep things simple, we will first informally define a set of features important to predictive processing, supplemented by some short explanations and an alphabetic glossary. -/- The features described here (...) are not shared in all PP accounts. Some may not be necessary for an individual model; others may be contested. Indeed, not even all authors of this collection will accept all of them. To make this transparent, we have encouraged contributors to indicate briefly which of the features are necessary to support the arguments they provide, and which (if any) are incompatible with their account. For the sake of clarity, we provide the complete list here, very roughly ordered by how central we take them to be for “Vanilla PP” (i.e., a formulation of predictive processing that will probably be accepted by most researchers working on this topic). More detailed explanations will be given below. Note that these features do not specify individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of “predictive processing”. All we currently have is a semantic cluster, with perhaps some overlapping sets of jointly sufficient criteria. The framework is still developing, and it is difficult, maybe impossible, to provide theory-neutral explanations of all PP ideas without already introducing strong background assumptions. (shrink)

Physiologie und Struktur komplexer Gehirne lassen sich durch Betrachtung evolutions- und entwicklungsbiologischer Abläufe analysieren, was der Hirnforschung tiefe Einblicke bis zur molekularen Ebene erlaubt. In knappster Form werden grundlegende Aspekte der Stammes- und Individualentwicklung (Phylo- und Ontogenese) von Gehirnen im Tierreich beschrieben, bis hin zum menschlichen Gehirn, dessen Grobgliederung skizziert wird. Das Lernvermögen insbesondere von Kleinkindern ist aufgrund postnataler Hirnplastizität erklärbar. Systematische Unterschiede zwischen einzelnen Zellen und Neuronenverbänden sind für selbstorganisierende Bewußtseinsprozesse bedeutsam. Am Beispiel der stufenweisen visuellen Signalverarbeitung wird die (...) mögliche Wahrnehmung von Bildern diskutiert, um danach gängige Theorien zur Bewußtseinsfrage einander gegenüber zu stellen. Schließlich wird auf das Qualia-Problem eingegangen, was vom Autor als Unerklärbarkeit des Bewußtseinsinhalts und als Urfrage des Leib-Seele-Problems verstanden wird. Sie kann wohl auch durch modernste biologische Forschung nicht beantwortet werden. (shrink)

In recent decades, investigation of brain injuries associated with amnesia allowed progress in the philosophy and science of memory, but it also paved the way for the hubris of assuming that memory is an exclusively neural phenomenon. Nonetheless, there are methodological and conceptual reasons preventing a reduction of the ecological and contextual phenomenon of memory to a neural phenomenon, since memory is the observed action of an individual before being the simple output of a brain (or, at least, so we (...) will argue), and there is no good reason to suppose that it is necessary to postulate a more basic reality to memory lying behind the mere individual actions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop and defend an Attentional View of bodily awareness, on which attention is necessary for bodily awareness. The original formulation of the Attentional View is due to Marcel Kinsbourne. First, I will show that the Attentional View of bodily awareness as formulated by Kinsbourne is superior to other accounts in the literature for characterizing the relationship between attention and bodily awareness. Kinsbourne’s account is the only account in the literature so far which can (...) accommodate key neurological diseases such as personal neglect. Second, when I consider Kinsbourne’s view in more detail, I will argue that Kinsbourne’s Attentional View faces problems because it is too reductive. Kinsbourne deviates from the standard taxonomy on which there is a body schema and a body image. Instead he reduces the body image to the neural representation of the body in the somatosensory cortex, the body schema and attentional shifts. I will present two challenges to Kinsbourne’s view which demonstrate that Kinsbourne’s reduction of the body image is unsuccessful. Finally, I will present a revised version of the Attentional View that is both empirically adequate and philosophically satisfactory. (shrink)

The nature of human mind has been an open question for more than 2000 years and it is still today a mystery. There has been during the last 30 years a renewed interest from science and philosophy on that subject. Among the existing research domains is neurophilosophy, an interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy looking at neuronal aspects of access consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness and at functional aspects of consciousness. We propose here to look if self-consciousness could have a place (...) in neurophilosophy by using an existing evolutionary scenario that can introduce possible links between neural processing and some aspects of self-consciousness. The scenario is about an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness where evolutions of inter-subjectivity and meaningful representations may have led our ancestors to identify with their conspecifics. The scenario proposes that this process has brought our pre-human ancestors to represent themselves as existing entities like the conspecifics they identified with were represented. Such a representation of oneself as an existing entity may have created an elementary version of self-consciousness that we name “ancestral self-consciousness”. But identification with suffering or endangered conspecifics has also produced an important anxiety increase. To limit that anxiety our ancestors have developed mental states and behaviors like caring, imitation communication and simulation. These performances have introduced evolutionary advantages leading to an evolutionary engine that has favored the development of ancestral self-consciousness toward our human self-consciousness. We begin by presenting a model for the generation of meaningful information based on a system submitted to an internal constraint (the Meaning Generator System). We use that model to introduce meaningful representations as networks of meaningful information. We then present the evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness that uses meaningful representations and the performance of inter-subjectivity. The scenario leads to propose two links between self-consciousness and neural processes: mirror-neurons as neural introduction to inter-subjectivity and self-consciousness as neural computation on meaningful representations. Possible continuations are highlighted. (shrink)

Perception is a first-person internal sensation induced within the nervous system at the time of arrival of sensory stimuli from objects in the environment. Lack of access to the first-person properties has limited viewing perception as an emergent property and it is currently being studied using third-person observed findings from various levels. One feasible approach to understand its mechanism is to build a hypothesis for the specific conditions and required circuit features of the nodal points where the mechanistic operation of (...) perception take place for one type of sensation in one species and to verify it for the presence of comparable circuit properties for perceiving a different sensation in a different species. The present work explains visual perception in mammalian nervous system from a first-person frame of reference and provides explanations for the homogeneity of perception of visual stimuli above flicker fusion frequency, the perception of objects at locations different from their actual position, the smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements, the perception of object borders, and perception of pressure phosphenes. Using results from temporal resolution studies and the known details of visual cortical circuitry, explanations are provided for (a) the perception of rapidly changing visual stimuli, (b) how the perception of objects occurs in the correct orientation even though, according to the third-person view, activity from the visual stimulus reaches the cortices in an inverted manner and (c) the functional significance of well-conserved columnar organization of the visual cortex. A comparable circuitry detected in a different nervous system in a remote species-the olfactory circuitry of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-provides an opportunity to explore circuit functions using genetic manipulations, which, along with high-resolution microscopic techniques and lipid membrane interaction studies, will be able to verify the structure-function details of the presented mechanism of perception. (shrink)

Review of Joseph LeDoux: Das Netz der Persönlichkeit. Wie unser Selbst entsteht. Walter Verlag, Düsseldorf 2003. 510 Seiten (mit Abbildungen), 39,90 Euro. - Der eine Mensch ist mißtrauisch, der nächste leichtgläubig, diese ist warmherzig, jene kaltschnäuzig. Viele haben Charakter, manche sogar Persönlichkeit. Wie kommt es dazu? In seinem neuen Buch untersucht der Neurowissenschaftler Joseph LeDoux wie unser Selbst entsteht. In dem sehr lesbaren und angenehm übersetzten Werk wird anschaulich und detailliert berichtet, wie sich in unserem Gehirn die Charakteristika eines Individuums (...) ausbilden. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the use of scientific models that attribute intentional content to complex systems bears a striking similarity to the way in which statistical descriptions are used. To demonstrate this, I compare and contrast an intentional model with a statistical model, and argue that key similarities between the two give us compelling reasons to consider both as a type of phenomenological model. I then demonstrate how intentional descriptions play an important role in scientific methodology as a (...) type of phenomenal model, and argue that this makes them as essential as any other model of this type. (shrink)

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition , brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in (...) the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a general mechanistic framework for analyzing causal representational claims, and offer a way to distinguish genuinely representational explanations from those that invoke representations for honorific purposes. It is usually agreed that rats are capable of navigation because they maintain a cognitive map of their environment. Exactly how and why their neural states give rise to mental representations is a matter of an ongoing debate. I will show that anticipatory mechanisms involved in rats’ (...) evaluation of possible routes give rise to satisfaction conditions of contents, and this is why they are representationally relevant for explaining and predicting rats’ behavior. I argue that a naturalistic account of satisfaction conditions of contents answers the most important objections of antirepresentationalists. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to critically examine what I call Action-Centric Theories of Representation (ACToRs). I include in this category theories of representation that (1) reject construing representation in terms of a relation that holds between representation itself (the representational vehicle) and what is represented, and instead (2) try to bring the function that representations play for cognitive systems to the center stage. Roughly speaking, according to proponents of ACToRs, what makes a representation (that is, what is constitutive (...) of it being a representation) is its being functionally involved in preselecting or guiding the actions of cognitive systems. I intend to argue that while definitely valuable, ACToRs are underconstrained and thus not entirely satisfying, since there exist structures that would count as representations according to ACToRs, but which do not play functional roles that could be nontrivially or in an explanatorily valuable way classified as representing something for a cognitive system. I outline a remedy for this theoretical situation by postulating that a fully satisfying theory of representation in cognitive science should have two factors; i.e., it should combine the pragmatic, action-oriented aspect present in ACToRs with an element that emphasizes the importance of the relation holding between a representational vehicle and what is represented. (shrink)

Good old-fashioned cognitive science characterizes human thinking as symbol manipulation qua computation and therefore emphasizes the processing of symbolic representations as a necessary if not sufficient condition for “general intelligent action.” Recent alternative conceptions of human thinking tend to deemphasize if not altogether eschew the notion of representation. The present paper shows how classical American pragmatist conceptions of human thinking can successfully avoid either of these extremes, replacing old-fashioned conceptions of representation with one that characterizes both representatum and representans in (...) externalist terms. (shrink)

Albert Einstein once made the following remark about "the world of our sense experiences": "the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." (1936, p. 351) A few decades later, another physicist, Eugene Wigner, wondered about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, concluding his classic article thus: "the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve" (1960, p. 14). (...) At least three factors are involved in Einstein's and Wigner's miracles: the physical world, mathematics, and human cognition. One way to relate these factors is to ask how the universe could possibly be structured in such a way that mathematics would be applicable to it, and we would be able to understand that application. This is roughly Wigner's question. Alternatively, the way of the mathematical naturalist is to argue that we abstract certain properties from the world, perhaps using our bodies and physical tools, thereby articulating basic mathematical concepts, which we continue building into the complex formal structures of mathematics. John Stuart Mill, Penelope Maddy, and Rafael Nuñez teach this strategy of cognitive abstraction, in very different manners. But what if the very concepts and basic principles of mathematics were built into our cognitive structure itself? Given such a cognitive a priori mathematical endowment, would the miracles of the link between world and cognition (Einstein) and mathematics and world (Wigner) not vanish, or at least significantly diminish? This is the stance of Stanislas Deheane and Elizabeth Brannon's 2011 anthology, following a venerable rationalist tradition including Plato and Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

An exciting theory in neuroscience is that the brain is an organ for prediction error minimization (PEM). This theory is rapidly gaining influence and is set to dominate the science of mind and brain in the years to come. PEM has extreme explanatory ambition, and profound philosophical implications. Here, I assume the theory, briefly explain it, and then I argue that PEM implies that the brain is essentially self-evidencing. This means it is imperative to identify an evidentiary boundary between the (...) brain and its environment. This boundary defines the mind-world relation, opens the door to skepticism, and makes the mind transpire as more inferentially secluded and neurocentrically skull-bound than many would nowadays think. Therefore, PEM somewhat deflates contemporary hypotheses that cognition is extended, embodied and enactive; however, it can nevertheless accommodate the kinds of cases that fuel these hypotheses. (shrink)

The first use of the term "information" to describe the content of nervous impulse occurs 20 years prior to Shannon`s (1948) work, in Edgar Adrian`s The Basis of Sensation (1928). Although, at least throughout the 1920s and early 30s, the term "information" does not appear in Adrian`s scientific writings to describe the content of nervous impulse, the notion that the structure of nervous impulse constitutes a type of message subject to certain constraints plays an important role in all of his (...) writings throughout the period. The appearance of the concept of information in Adrian`s work raises at least two important questions: (i) what were the relevant factors that motivated Adrian`s use of the concept of information? (ii) What concept of information does Adrian appeal to, and how can it be situated in relation to contemporary philosophical accounts of the notion of information in biology? The first question involves an account of the application of communications technology in neurobiology as well as the historical and scientific background of Adrian`s major scientific achievement, which was the recording of the action potential of a single sensory neuron. The response to the second question involves an explication of Adrian`s concept of information and an evaluation of how it may be situated in relation to more contemporary philosophical explications of a semantic concept of information. I suggest that Adrian`s concept of information places limitations on the sorts of systems that are referred to as information carriers by causal and functional accounts of information. (shrink)

Philosophers have been talking about brain states for almost 50 years and as of yet no one has articulated a theoretical account of what one is. In fact this issue has received almost no attention and cognitive scientists still use meaningless phrases like 'C-fiber firing' and 'neuronal activity' when theorizing about the relation of the mind to the brain. To date when theorists do discuss brain states they usually do so in the context of making some other argument with the (...) result being that any discussion of what brain states are has a distinct en passant flavor. In light of this it is a goal of mine to make brain states the center of attention by providing some general discussion of them. I briefly look at the argument of Bechtel and Mundale, as I think that they expose a common misconception philosophers had about brain states early on. I then turn to briefly examining Polger's argument, as I think he offers an intuitive account of what we expect brain states to be as well as a convincing argument against a common candidate for knowledge about brain states that is currently "on the scene." I then introduce a distinction between brain states and states of the brain: Particular brain states occur against background states of the brain. I argue that brain states are patterns of synchronous neural firing, which reflects the electrical face of the brain; states of the brain are the gating and modulating of neural activity and reflect the chemical face of the brain. (shrink)

We propose that Saussure’s signifiers must be processed in the left brain hemisphere (in right handed people) and the signified may be processed in the right. This proposition has consequences for understanding human cognitive phenomena and their pathologies, and can also be related to the passive and active process of thinking, as described by Karl Jaspers. Saussure studied signifiers and their relationships. He left the signified to be studied by psychologists, but there is no consensus about it. According to some (...) linguists, the signified, or the meaning, is the specific activity or succession of bodily states related to each signifier. Learning is the process of linking a signifier (a represented object) to a signified or meaning (a specific activity). However, human beings can represent signifiers autonomously because words and drawings are easily produced with small movements and have syntactic, referential and logical rules of combination. If they are processed in the left hemisphere, the meaning (the signified) is only found when the right hemisphere is reached. The right hemisphere can also work independently, as for instance, when we imagine a story which has to find the words in the left hemisphere. The complex relationship between the hemispheres through the corpus callosum is decisive for telling stories and having self-consciousness. (shrink)

A formalism is introduced to represent the connective organization of an evolving neuronal network and the effects of environment on this organization by stabilization or degeneration of labile synapses associated with functioning. Learning, or the acquisition of an associative property, is related to a characteristic variability of the connective organization: the interaction of the environment with the genetic program is printed as a particular pattern of such organization through neuronal functioning. An application of the theory to the development of the (...) neuromuscular junction is proposed and the basic selective aspect of learning emphasized. (shrink)

Introduction 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 (Marr 1982) 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: 1 between conscious and non-conscious mental representations, once a bizarre-sounding distinction that has become familiar since Freud (see Chapter 4 of this volume). I mention these distinctions at the outset to give you some idea of the range of phenomena we will be considering, and to set the stage for our central “problem of representation”: what is a mental representation, exactly, and how do we go about deciding whether there are any? We know there are public representations of various kinds: words, maps, and pictures, among others.. (shrink)

The central idea is that the cerebral cortex is a model building machine, where regularities in the world serve as templates for the models it builds. First it is shown how this idea can be naturalized, and how the representational contents of our internal models depend upon the evolutionarily endowed design principles of our model building machine. Current neuroscience suggests a powerful form that these design principles may take, allowing our brains to uncover deep structures of the world hidden behind (...) surface sensory stimulation, the individuals, kinds, and properties that form the objects of human perception and thought. It is then shown how this account solves various problems that arose for previous attempts at naturalizing intentionality, and also how it supports rather than undermines folk psychology. As in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the seemingly unrelated pieces of earlier theories (information, causation, isomorphism, success, and teleology) emerge as different aspects of the evolved model-building mechanism that explains the intentional features of our kind of mind. (shrink)

Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. In this paper, I will suggest a particular teleosemantic strategy to solve this problem, grounded in the neurocomputational details of the cerebral cortex. It is a strategy with some parallels to one that Ruth Millikan has suggested, but to which insufficient attention has been paid. This lack of attention is perhaps due to a lack of appreciation for the severity of (...) the problem, so I begin by explaining why the situation is indeed a dire one. One of the main tasks for a naturalistic psychosemantic theory is to describe how the extensions of mental representations are determined. (Such a theory may also attempt to account for other aspects of the “meaning” of mental representations, if there are any.) Some mental representations, e.g. the concept of water, denote kinds (I shall be assuming this is non-negotiable). How is this possible? Unfortunately, I haven’t the space to canvass all the theories out there and show that each one fails to accommodate the representation of kinds, but I will point out the major types of problems that arise for the kinds of theories that, judging by the literature, are considered viable contenders.1 In general, the theories either attempt and fail to account for the representation of kinds, or they fall back on something like an intention to refer to a kind – not exactly the most auspicious move for a reductive theory. There are a number of problems that prevent non-teleosemantic theories from explaining how it is possible to represent kinds. A concept of a kind K must.. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

What role does the concept of representation play in the contexts of experimentation and explanation in cognitive neurobiology? In this article, a distinction is drawn between minimal and substantive roles for representation. It is argued by appeal to a case study that representation currently plays a role in cognitive neurobiology somewhere in between minimal and substantive and that this is problematic given the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive neurobiological research. It is suggested that what is needed is for representation to (...) instead play a more substantive role. (shrink)

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)