It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I challenge these assumptions by articulating a different (...) conception of the function of color vision, according to which color vision serves to partition object surfaces into discrimination classes. (shrink)

Not long ago the standard view in cognitive science was that representations are symbols in an internal representational system or language of thought and that psychological processes are computations defined over such representations. This orthodoxy has been challenged by adherents of functional analysis and by connectionists. Functional analysis as practiced by Marr is consistent with an analysis of representation that grants primacy to a stands for conception of representation. Connectionism is also compatible with this notion of representation; when conjoined with (...) functional analysis, it provides a means of analyzing psychological systems in term of rules and representations without becoming committed to symbolism. Direct theorists, who rejected the orthodox symbolist conception of representation because it violated their strictures against cognitive mediational mechanisms, should find it possible to accept rules-and-representations and information-processing analyses of the mechanisms of information pickup couched in terms of functional analysis. (shrink)