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- Fred A. Keijzer (1998). Doing Without Representations Which Specify What to Do. Philosophical Psychology 11 (3):269-302.A discussion is going on in cognitive science about the use of representations to explain how intelligent behavior is generated. In the traditional view, an organism is thought to incorporate representations. These provide an internal model that is used by the organism to instruct the motor apparatus so that the adaptive and anticipatory characteristics of behavior come about. So-called interactionists claim that this representational specification of behavior raises more problems than it solves. In their view, the notion of internal representational models is to be dispensed with. Instead, behavior is to be explained as the intricate interaction between an embodied organism and the specific make up of an environment. The problem with a non-representational interactive account is that it has severe difficulties with anticipatory, future oriented behavior. The present paper extends the interactionist conceptual framework by drawing on ideas derived from the study of morphogenesis. This extended interactionist framework is based on an analysis of anticipatory behavior as a process which involves multiple spatio-temporal scales of neural, bodily and environmental dynamics. This extended conceptual framework provides the outlines for an explanation of anticipatory behavior without involving a representational specification of future goal states.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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This paper challenges arguments that systematic patterns of intelligent behavior license the claim that representations must play a role in the cognitive system analogous to that played by syntactical structures in a computer program. In place of traditional computational models, I argue that research inspired by Dynamical Systems theory can support an alternative view of representations. My suggestion is that we treat linguistic and representational structures as providing complex multi-dimensional targets for the development of individual brains. This approach acknowledges the indispensability of the intentional or representational idiom in psychological explanation without locating representations in the brains of intelligent agents.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com kluweronline.com ingentaconnect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The theory of the organism-environment system starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Although for practical purposes we do separate organism and environment, this common-sense starting point leads in psychological theory to problems which cannot be solved. Therefore, separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects of organisation of this system. Therefore, mental activity cannot be separated from the nervous system, but the nervous system is only one part of the organismenvironment system. This problem will be dealt with in detail in the second part of the article.
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| | Other links: cogprints.org | Scholar | More options ... This paper aims to do three things: First, to provide a review of John Staddon's book Adaptive dynamics: The theoretical analysis of behavior. Second, to compare Staddon's behaviorist view with current ideas on embodied cognition. Third, to use this comparison to explicate some outlines for a theoretical analysis of behavior that could be useful as a behavioral foundation for cognitive phenomena. Staddon earlier defended a theoretical behaviorism, which allows internal states in its models but keeps these to a minimum while remaining critical of any cognitive interpretation. In his latest book, Adaptive dynamics, he provides an overview and analysis of an extensive number of these current, behaviorist models. Theoretical behaviorism comes close to the view of embodied cognition, which also stresses the importance of behavior in contrast to high-level cognition. A detailed picture of the overlaps and differences between the two approaches will be sketched by comparing the two on four separate issues: the conceptualization of behavior, loopy structures, parsimonious explanations, and cognitive behavior. The paper will stress the need for a structural analysis of behavior to gain a better understanding of both behavior and cognition. However, for this purpose, we will need behavioral science rather than behaviorism.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com rug.nl philosophy.eldoc.ub.rug.nl tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: taylorandfrancis.metapress.com informaworld.com ingentaconnect.com rug.nl philosophy.eldoc.ub.rug.nl tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Contemporary literature distinguishes two ways to defend the claim that cognition is a matter of representations: one, cognition involves representation-hungry tasks; two, cognition involves a complex form of informational covariation between subcomponents of a system with an adaptive function. Each of these conceptions involves a different notion of representation, and promotes a particular view of the architecture of cognition. But despite the differences, each of them aims to support the claim that cognition is a matter of representations on architectural constraints. The objective of this article is twofold: one, it is argued that architectural constraints do not entail either of those two ways to defend the claim that cognition is a matter of representations; two, it is claimed that both notions of representation share an objectionable common element – namely, the idea of a model that grounds the representational reading– that must be abandoned, in favor of a more economical explanation in terms of causal relations, in order to get a clear view of cognition.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this reply we claim that, contra Dreyfus, the kinds of skillful performances Dreyfus discusses _are_ representational. We explain this proposal, and then defend it against an objection to the effect that the representational notion we invoke is a weak one countenancing only some global state of an organism as a representation. According to this objection, such a representation is not a robust, projectible property of an organism, and hence will gain no explana- tory leverage in cognitive scientific explanations. We argue on conceptual and empirical grounds that the representations we have identified are not weak unprojectible global states of organisms, but instead genuinely explanatory representational parts of persons.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Advocates of dynamic systems have suggested that higher mental processes are based on continuous representations. In order to evaluate this claim, we first define the concept of representation, and rigorously distinguish between discrete representations and continuous representations. We also explore two important bases of representational content. Then, we present seven arguments that discrete representations are necessary for any system that must discriminate between two or more states. It follows that higher mental processes require discrete representations. We also argue that discrete representations are more influenced by conceptual role than continuous representations. We end by arguing that the presence of discrete representations in cognitive systems entails that computationalism (i.e., the view that the mind is a computational device) is true, and that cognitive science should embrace representational pluralism.
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| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: psy.utexas.edu blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: psy.utexas.edu blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What is needed today is a biologically grounded explanation of behavior, one that moves beyond the so?called mind?body problem. Yet no solution will be found by philosophers who refuse to learn about how brains and bodies work, or by neuroscientists pursuing experimental research based on outmoded or blatantly anti?biological theories. Churchland's book proposes a solution: to come by a unified theory of the mind?brain philosophers have to work together with neuroscientists. Yet Churchland's vision of a unified theory is based on an assumption that, while widely held, may not adequately reflect brain functioning in the production of behavior, namely, the assumption that brain processes represent. The present paper proposes an alternative view, suggesting that patterns of neural activity do not ?represent? anything, that brains do not ?read? or ?transform? representations, and that brains do not require representations to produce goal?directed behavior. Representations are replaced by self?organizing neural processes that achieve a certain end?state of interaction between the organism and its environment in a flexible and adaptive manner. Some of the implications of this view for neuroscientific research and the philosophy of mind are outlined.
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| | Other links: informaworld.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Humans and other animals are able not only to coordinate their actions with their current sensorimotor state, but also to imagine, plan and act in view of the future, and to realize distal goals. In this paper we discuss whether or not their future-oriented conducts imply (future-oriented) representations. We illustrate the role played by anticipatory mechanisms in natural and artificial agents, and we propose a notion of representation that is grounded in the agent’s predictive capabilities. Therefore, we argue that the ability that characterizes and defines a true cognitive mind, as opposed to a merely adaptive system, is that of building representations of the non-existent, of what is not currently (yet) true or perceivable, of what is desired. A real mental activity begins when the organism is able to endogenously (i.e. not as the consequence of current perceptual stimuli) produce an internal representation of the world in order to select and guide its conduct goal-directed: the mind serves to coordinate with the future.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Representations for Consciousness There are two sorts of representations that figure in AEI—the egocentric and the allocentric—and it is the goal of this and the next chapter to flesh out accounts of these kinds of representation that are consistent with identity theory. One of the main challenges to identity theory that arises as soon as the topic of representation comes up is that representation strikes so many thinkers as requiring a relational analysis, whereby mental representations essentially involve relations between the organism that has the representations and the typically external objects and events which are the things represented. Such a relational account is at odds with the identity theory insofar as the identity theory reduces mental states and properties to wholly internal things in the organism, specifically to things in the organism’s brain.
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| | Scholar | More options ... ?Representation? is a concept which occurs both in cognitive science and philosophy. It has common features in both settings in that it concerns the explanation of behaviour in terms of the way the subject categorizes and systematizes responses to its environment. The prevailing model sees representations as causally structured entities correlated on the one hand with elements in a natural language and on the other with clearly identifiable items in the world. This leads to an analysis of representation and cognition in terms of formal symbols and their relations. But human perception and cognition use multiple informational constraints and deal with unsystematic and messy input in a way best explained by Parallel Distributed Processing models. This undermines the claim that a formal representational theory of mind is ?the only game in town?. In particular it suggests a radically different model of brain function and its relation to epistemology from that found in current representational theories.
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| | Other links: informaworld.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Fred A. Keijzer, Doing without representations which specify what to do
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