Abstract
One of the problems that are often indicated as a criticism of different forms of
representationalism is the difficulty to find definitions that are neither semantic
nor realist in a simple sense. The present work tackles this class of critiques from
a contextualist point of view, assuming those semantic aspects that are
necessary for a concept of representation, but showing that semantic relations of
representation should neither be static, nor referential in a classical and strictly
realist sense. Two distinctions are crucial for our proposal: On the one hand, we
have the distinction between closed and open systems; on the other, a tripartite
distinction between structural, informational and semantic representations.
On this basis, we understand representations in terms of asymmetric variations
between contextual models