The Concept of Representation

Primatology tells that about seven million years ago a split began in primate evolution, a split that led to chimpanzee and human lineages (the pan-homo split). During these millions of years our human lineage has developed performances that our chimpanzee cousins do not possess, like reflective self-consciousness and language. We present here an evolutionary scenario that proposes a rationale for the pan-homo split. It is based on a pre-human anxiety that may have barred access to self-consciousness for the chimpanzee lineage. (...) The starting point of the scenario is the capability that had our pre-human ancestors for an elementary identification with conspecifics. We consider that the evolution of that capability has led to self-consciousness when identifications with conspecifics brought our ancestors to represent their own entity as existing, like conspecifics were represented. But the same identification process also took place with endangered and dying conspecifics. And this has produced a huge anxiety increase, source of important mental sufferings that our ancestors had to limit. Our hypothesis is that different modes of anxiety limitation have led to the pan-homo split. On one side the chimpanzee lineage would have limited an unbearable mental suffering by stopping the development of identifications with conspecifics, and by this also stopping a possible evolution toward self-consciousness. Such anxiety limitation process has led to today chimpanzees which possess a very limited consciousness of themselves. On the other side, our human lineage would have successfully developed anxiety limitation tools like caring, pleasure, anticipation, communication and imitation. With these tools accelerating the evolution of our lineage toward our human mind. The proposed pan/homo split process complements an existing evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness that has positioned anxiety management as a key contributor to the build-up of our human minds. Such overall perspective makes anxiety management a major source to many of our motivations and mental states, much more than assumed so far. Continuations are proposed for a better understanding about our modes of anxiety limitation (including evil behaviors), and also to introduce a possible evolutionary nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

This article brings to the forefront Timothy Brennan’s emphasis on Edward Said’s engagement with philosophy. An attempt is made to reconstruct some of Brennan’s claims about Said’s views on the relationship between mental representations and the external world. It is shown that Said rejected naïve or direct realism in favor of representationalism. It is also argued that, despite being seen as a post-modern thinker, Said subscribed to a version of the correspondence theory of truth. Said embraced some form of standpoint (...) epistemology, but he did not think that this had any direct bearing on how we should think about what makes a given claim true. Finally, an attempt is made to understand the relationship between Said’s project and the classical Marxist project of ideology critique, as well as contemporary attempts to develop an epistemology of ignorance. (shrink)

Book Review of What are Mental Representations.

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that the neurocomputational framework of predictive processing entails a globally inferentialist and representationalist view of cognition. Here, I contend that this is not correct. I argue that, given the theoretical commitments these philosophers endorse, no structure within predictive processing systems can be rightfully identified as a representational vehicle. To do so, I first examine some of the theoretical commitments these philosophers share, and show that these commitments provide a set of necessary conditions the satisfaction of which allows (...) us to identify representational vehicles. Having done so, I introduce a predictive processing system capable of active inference, in the form of a simple robotic “brain”. I examine it thoroughly, and show that, given the necessary conditions highlighted above, none of its components qualifies as a representational vehicle. I then consider and allay some worries my claim could raise. I consider whether the anti-representationalist verdict thus obtained could be generalized, and provide some reasons favoring a positive answer. I further consider whether my arguments here could be blocked by allowing the same representational vehicle to possess multiple contents, and whether my arguments entail some extreme form of revisionism, answering in the negative in both cases. A quick conclusion follows. (shrink)

Mental content normativists hold that the mind’s conceptual contents are essentially normative. Many hold the view because they think that facts of the form “subject S possesses concept c” imply that S is enjoined by rules concerning the application of c in theoretical judgments. Some opponents independently raise an intuitive objection: even if there are such rules, S’s possession of the concept is not the source of the enjoinment. Hence, these rules do not support mental content normativism. Call this the (...) “Source Objection.” This paper refutes the Source Objection, outlining a key strand of the relationship between judgments and their contents in the process. Theoretical judgment and mental conceptual content are equally the source of enjoinment; norms for judging with contents do not derive from one at the expense of the other. (shrink)

Representationalists have routinely expressed skepticism about the idea that inflexible responses to stimuli are to be explained in representational terms. Representations are supposed to be more than just causal mediators in the chain of events stretching from stimulus to response, and it is difficult to see how the sensory states driving reflexes are doing more than playing the role of causal intermediaries. One popular strategy for distinguishing representations from mere causal mediators is to require that representations are decoupled from specific (...) stimulus conditions. I believe this requirement on representation is mistaken and at odds with explanatory practices in sensory ecology. Even when sensory states have the job of coordinating a specific output with a specific input, we can still find them doing the work of representations, carrying information needed for organisms to respond successfully to environmental conditions. We can uncover information at work by intervening specifically on the information conveyed by sensory states, leaving their causal role undisturbed. (shrink)

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about (...) representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations. (shrink)

I use the distinction between sentience and sapience to reconstruct the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell. I argue that Dreyfus's critique of McDowell's conceptualism relies on conflating detached contemplation with conceptual activity as such. I then argue that McDowell's conceptualism can be enriched and brought into deeper conversation with pragmatism and phenomenology if we take reasons to be a special kind of affordance. Contra Dreyfus, reasons need not disrupt affordances but do so only in specific contexts. I conclude (...) with a suggestion about how to understand the emergence of rational animality within the hominid lineage. (shrink)

The line connecting everything to everything is both diameter and circumference of a circle. Thus, complementarity is the basis for identity (duplicity is the basis for a unit). See, also, The Singularity and Obejct-Oriented Reality (also on PhilPapers).

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)

In this paper, I argue that even if the Hard Problem of Content, as identified by Hutto and Myin, is important, it was already solved in natu- ralized semantics, and satisfactory solutions to the problem do not rely merely on the notion of information as covariance. I point out that Hutto and Myin have double standards for linguistic and mental representation, which leads to a peculiar inconsistency. Were they to apply the same standards to basic and linguistic minds, they would (...) either have to embrace representationalism or turn to semantic nihilism, which is, as I argue, an unstable and unattractive position. Hence, I conclude, their book does not offer an alternative to representation- alism. At the same time, it reminds us that representational talk in cognitive science cannot be taken for granted and that information is different from men- tal representation. Although this claim is not new, Hutto and Myin defend it forcefully and elegantly. (shrink)

A straightforward way of thinking about perception is in terms of perceptual representation. Perception is the construction of perceptual representations that represent the world correctly or incorrectly. This way of thinking about perception has been questioned recently by those who deny that there are perceptual representations. This article examines some reasons for and against the concept of perceptual representation and explores some potential ways of resolving this debate. Then it analyzes what perceptual representations may be: if they attribute properties to (...) entities, what are these attributed properties, and what are the entities they are attributed to. (shrink)

The idea that there are representations with a double direction of fit has acquired a pride of place in contemporary debates on the ontology of institutions. This paper will argue against the very idea of anything at all having both directions of fit. There is a simple problem which has thus far gone unnoticed. The suggestion that there are representations with both directions of fit amounts to a suggestion that, in cases of discrepancy between a representation and the world, both (...) should change—the representation and the world. But that would merely amount to another discrepancy, and so both should change again, ad infinitum. The paper will first elucidate the notion of a “direction of fit” and clarify how the criticism to be presented here differs from earlier criticisms (Section 1).The next section sheds some light on why and how acts and attitudes with both directions of fit have seemed to play a part in explaining the existence of institutional reality (Section 2). The next sections present the argument against any representations with both directions of fit, relying on a normative understanding of the distinction. The argument will have three steps (Sections 3, 4, and 5). The section that follows shows that the criticism also applies to the dispositional understanding of the notion of a direction of fit (Section 6), and then the paper asks whether a third kind of reading would be available (Section 7) and whether the infallibility of the relevant representations would be of help (Section 8). Finally, the paper assesses briefly the consequences of dropping the notion of two directions of fit (Section 9). (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to raise some serious worries about anti-representationalism: the recently popular view according to which there are no perceptual representations. Although anti-representationalism is more and more popular, I will argue that we have strong empirical reasons for mistrusting it. More specifically, I will argue that it is inconsistent with some important empirical findings about dorsal perception and about the multimodality of perception.

The main thesis of this paper is twofold. In the first half of the paper, (§§1-2), I argue that there are two notions of mental representation, which I call objective and subjective. In the second part (§§3-7), I argue that this casts familiar tracking theories of mental representation as incomplete: while it is clear how they might account for objective representation, they at least require supplementation to account for subjective representation.

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these (...) norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection. (shrink)

The article elucidates and assesses the Marburg School’s account of the cognition. The characteristic feature of epistemology from this School is the rejection of the mirroring and acceptance of the cognitive transformation. The criticism of the mirroring theory is implicitly contained in Paul Natorp’s and Hermann Cohen’s cognitive relationism. Ernst Cassirer articulated this critical epistemology in his philosophy of the symbolic form and his conception of the symbolic representation. The historical bases of this criticism has been reconstructed as a main (...) purpose of this article. (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)

In his 1903 Syllabus, Charles S. Peirce makes a distinction between icons and iconic signs, or hypoicons, and briefly introduces a division of the latter into images, diagrams, and metaphors. Peirce scholars have tried to make better sense of those concepts by understanding iconic signs in the context of the ten classes of signs described in the same Syllabus. We will argue, however, that the three kinds of hypoicons can better be understood in the context of Peirce's sixty-six classes of (...) signs. We analyze examples of hypoicons taken from the field of information design, describing them in the framework of the sixty-six classes, and discuss the consequences of those descriptions to the debate about the order of determination of the 10 trichotomies that form those classes. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this work (...) is to summarize a systematic analysis of the variety of emergence theories and concepts, elaborated by Achim Stephan. Along the summary of this analysis, we pose fundamental questions that have to be answered in order to ascribe a precise meaning to the term "emergence" in the context of an understanding of semiosis. After discussing a model for explaining emergence based on Salthe's hierarchical structuralism, which considers three levels at a time in a semiotic system, we present some tentative answers to those questions. (shrink)

James Prosek paints flora and fauna, but first became known for his paintings of trout. This essay situates Prosek's paintings, especially those at the Lowe Museum exhibit, within the long tradition of the depiction of nature. The essay comments on the relationship between the representation of nature and the nature of representation.

The notions of information, representation and enaction entertain historical and complex relations with cognition. Historical relations because representational structures belong to the central hypothesis of cognitive sciences. Complex relations because cognitive sciences apply the notion of representation to animals, humans and robots, and also because the enactive approach tends to disregard the GOFAI type of representations. In this wide horizon of relations, we propose to look at a systemic approach that could bring up a common denominator for information and representations (...) in the build up of cognition, and also keep a link with the enactive approach. Our purpose is to show that systems submitted to constraints can generate meaningful information to maintain their natures, and consequently build up meaningful representations that have some compatibility with the enactive approach. Such a systemic approach to the notion of meaningful information could then make available a link between enaction and meaningful representations. The first part of the presentation is about reminding that cognition does not exist per se, but is related to the system that builds it. We look at cognition as constituted by dynamic meaningful representations built up by systems that have constraints to satisfy in their environments. Cognition is considered here at the level of the system that builds it and uses it in order to maintain its nature in its environment. Such a systemic approach fits with evolution. Organisms build representations to cope with survival constraints (frogs build representations of moving black dots in order to satisfy food constraints). Humans build representations and cognition to satisfy constraints that are conscious and unconscious. Artificial systems can use representations and cognition to run activities related to constraints implemented by the designers or coming from the environment (a goal to reach being considered as a constraint to satisfy). In the second part of the presentation we define what are a meaningful information and a representation for a system submitted to a constraint in its environment, and we link these to the enactive approach. We define a meaningful information (a meaning) as an information generated by a system submitted to a constraint when it receives an external information that has a connection with the constraint. The meaning is precisely that connection. The meaning belongs to the interactions that link the system to its environment. The function of the meaning is to participate to the determination of an action that will be implemented in order to satisfy the constraint. (Menant, 2003). The satisfaction of the constraint goes with maintaining the nature of the system in its environment. A Meaning Generator System (MGS) is defined correspondingly. It is a building block for higher level systems. We present some characteristics of the MGS (groundings of a meaning, domain of efficiency and transfer of meanings, networking of meanings, evolutionary usage). The MGS approach is close to a simplified version of the Peircean triadic theory of signs (Menant, 2003, 2005 ). We define the representation of an item for a system as being the dynamic set of meaningful information corresponding to the item for the system in its environments (an elementary representation being made of a single meaningful information). These representations link the system to its environment by their meaningful components related to the nature of the system. These representations are different from the GOFAI ones. The possibilities for linking these notions of meaning and representation with the enactive approach come from the structure of the MGS: the need for an action is the cause of the meaning generation by and for the system. The action on the environment is for the system to maintain its nature (its identity). The MGS links together the generation of meaningful representations, the nature of the system, and the interactions with the environment. This can be considered as close to enacting a world by meaning generation (Di Paolo and all 2007), and to the enactive concept of sense making (De Jaegher, Di Paolo 2007). We propose that basing the definition of a representation on the notion of meaningful information generated by a system submitted to a constraint can open a way for making the notion of representation compatible with the enactive approach. In the third part of the presentation, we consider some cases of meaningful information and representations for organisms and for robots. Regarding organisms, the MGS can be used in an evolutionary context by looking at the evolution of the systems and of the constraints. Purpose is to modelize the generation of meanings and of representations in order to make available a tool usable for different levels of evolution, as evolution has a place in cognitive sciences (Proust, 2007). Constraints for basic life are survival constraints (individual and species). Group life constraints are also to be considered. Reaching the level of humans in evolution brings in new constraints that cannot be clearly identified as they have to take into account human consciousness which is today a mystery (the “hard problem”). On an evolutionary standpoint, human constraints come in addition to the ones existing for non human organisms. We can make some hypothesis on the nature of human constraints (Maslow pyramid based constraints, anxiety limitation…). For robots, the MGS is initially based on the design of the robot. The meaning generated within a robot is initially derived from the constraints implemented by the designer and from the environment. But some non calculable or non predictable evolutions of the robot can introduce meanings that look proper to the robot. This last point can be linked to the notion of autonomy in robots. In such examples, the dynamic management of meanings thru the MGSs in their environments keeps the link with the enactive approach. We finish the presentation by summarising the points addressed and by proposing several continuations. (shrink)