Wes, welcome -- I loved Royal Tenebaums (and of course Rushmore was tremendously atmospheric).
1) The distinction here is of course the use-mention distinction -- Quine is helpful on that. 

2) Probably worthwhile checking out the Burge-Egan debate on whether Marr's theory is intentional.

Dr. Hellie,
I appreciate the reply.
1) I was wondering who introduced the distinction in the context of philosophy of mind/cognitive science.  Also, I wonder if the distinction readily applies to mental representations as it does with spoken language or if the distinction is some sort of carry-over from LoT hypotheses.  In other words, I am wondering if this distinction is epistemically/methodologically motivated or whether it is some sort of heuristic in the context of philosophy of mind/cognitive science.
2) Will do.
Thanks again.

I think it's a distinction that crept into the literature rather than one with a locus classicus.  Talk of vehicles (by Dawkins et al) in evolutionary biology was probably an influence.  I think people like Dennett and Millikan were using this way of talking when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it has become more common since then.  It would be interesting to dig through papers and trace the history.

Clearly it's a natural distinction to make if one embraces a language of thought, but connectionists and others have also appealed to the distinction.  In my view it's a very unclear notion, once one moves away from highly specific representational frameworks like these.  E.g. to take an issue of interest to me, people sometimes gloss the extended mind views by saying that the vehicles of representation are external, on this view.  But as far as I can tell the notion of "vehicle" doesn't have a clear enough standard understanding in order to assess whether this is indeed a commitment of the view or not.

Wes,

Dave is right that the work of Dennett and Millikan contains at least precursors to the vehicle / content distinction as it was used in the phil of mind, but the first place I can think of seeing it is in Susan Hurley's Consciousness in Action (1998). If someone knows of earlier instances, post away.

Dawkins was almost certainly an influence on Hurley here, but his distinction was between genes as the replicators in natural selection and organisms (and even groups, in principle) as the vehicles for natural selection. You can find this as early as p.21 in The Selfish Gene. For Dawkins, organisms were mere vehicles, and calling them such was a way of side-lining their role in life's history. For Hurley, by contrast, vehicle externalism (vs content externalism) was where the action was, or was shifting to, in debates over individualism. And she proved to be right, not least of all because of the influence of Clark and Chalmers (1998). The vehicle / content externalism distinction has become a standard way to characterize the extended mind thesis, as you know, even though (as Dave intimates) there are limitations to the idea of a representational vehicle once one moves to non-LOT views of representation.

Of the top of my head, I can't think of any papers that do what you ask about in (2). My "Wide Computationalism" in Mind in 1994 defends the idea that cognitive computational systems need not be restricted to the boundary of the organism, and there's even a discussion of the analogy to Dawkins on replicators and the extended phenotype (pp.74-75 of the version that was reworked in Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds, 1995), but nothing on "representational vehicles", though there is some talk of what it is that instantiates computational systems not being entirely in the head.  There's some discussion of examples of computational psychology there, but nothing with the neurosciency flavour you're seeking.

Hi Wes and Rob,

My former Masters Student, Oliver Granger, wrote an excellent thesis on the vehicle/content distinction in the philosophy of mind. I forget the first usage of the distinction that he found, but it certainly predates Hurley's "Consciousness in Action". One can find it in Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and of course it does a lot of work in Dennett and Kinsbourne's earlier BBS paper "Time and the Observer".  O'Brien and Opie have employed the distinction in a number of places, including their 1999 BBS paper. One can also find a very useful discussion of the distinction in Tim Crane's "The Mechanical Mind" (1st ed 1995). I think Fodor may occasionally talk about representational vehicles in his early work on the LOT, although I'm not exactly sure where.

Hope this helps! - Tim  

It’s surely ancient in the philosophy of mind. The basic idea is there in the case of linguistic vehicles as soon as someone has had a thought about the arbitrary nature of the sign — and that thought is as old as language — bound to be in Aristotle etc — To think it’s something recent is like thinking that ‘ontological realism’ (the view that there are objective answers to the question what exists) is more recent than Thales, who (supposedly) held the view  that everything is made of water …

Descartes is very subtle about representation, and I think notes at one point that something can function better as a representation precisely because it’s not a resemblance

It’s there in Locke all over the place [see e.g. essay 4.5.4]

I think Peter Slezak knows a lot about these things

might also be worth looking at the debate about the incommunicability of content in the 1920s which was one of the main inspirations for Wittgenstein’s views on meaning. [To understand a lot of what Wittgenstein said, ask ‘What moves do you have to make if you think that there is no absolute incommunicability of content?’]

Kant is very suggestive in the Critique of Pure Reason e.g. paragraph from A140/B180 to A142/B181 ... 

 

 

I guess there are at least three separate origin questions floating around in this discussion--the one that Wes asked about uses of the vehicle / content distinction in recent cog sci, esp. in the context of discussions of representation; the one I answered, which I also took to be an answer to Wes's question though it may not be, which is about the use of that distinction in discussions of externalism; and the one that Galen Strawson and others have invoked when they appeal to older views that use something like the idea of a representational vehicle, what I think of as precursors to the distinction appealed to in either of the first two questions. 

On our intellectual ancestors: it’s not as if the distinction between representational vehicles and representational contents is less than fully present in the old views, or present only in an inferior version. My general sense is that the discussion of most of the central topics in the philosophy of mind is in a considerably worse state than it was in the eighteenth century. I’m absolutely serious …. certainly true in case of perception, mind-body problem, e.g.

 As for computation—seems safe to say that the distinction between vehicle and content is already fully given in the very idea that 0s and 1s (or indeed electrical pulses or non-pulses) can represent information other than 0s and 1s (or indeed electrical pulses or non-pulses). I don’t think much more needs to be said. The ‘structuralists’ went on about this— it’s studied under the heading of ‘semiotics’—and there was all that stuff about ‘the map is not the territory’ by Alfred Korzybski in his General Semantics programme.

Galen Strawson is quite right: Contemporary ideas have a long history. In particular, the essentials of the idea of representational vehicle and content are clear in Descartes, who anticipated precisely the modern symbolic, computational conception in his Dioptrics, Treatise of Man and Passions of the Soul.

... all the objects of vision are communicated to us in this way alone ... they locally move the little filaments of the optic nerves at the back of our eyes and then the parts of the brain these nerves come from - I said that they move them in as many different ways as there are diversities they make us see in things, and that it is not the movements occurring in the eye, but those occurring in the brain, that immediately represent those objects to the soul. (Descartes, Passions, Voss trans. 1989, 25,6)

Relatedly, in the Sixth Discourse of his Dioptrics Descartes explains how our eyes might exploit a "natural geometry" or trigonometric reasoning using parallax, anticipating the modern computational conception in which intuitive perceptual judgment "iimplicitly contains a reasoning quite similar to that used by surveyors, when by means of two different stations, they measure inaccessible places."

Indeed, Pasnau (1997) reveals the neglected history of these very concerns even earlier among the medieval scholastics such as Aquinas and his critics.

Yolton (1996) cites Joseph Glanvill who asks "how the pure mind can receive information from that, which is not in the least like it self" - precisely anticipating Searle's 'Chinese Room' conundrum. Glanvill asks: "But how it is, and by what Art doth the soul read that such an image or stroke in matter ... signifies such an object?" Cudworth, too, is concerned precisely to explain how ideas arise from "dumb Signs made in the Brain" (1996, 192).

I think it's worth noting that it's far from clear that there is a single notion of 'vehicle' at play in recent uses of the term in philosophy of mind. Some authors seem to think of vehicles as states that perform a certain kind of explanatory role. Others think of the vehicle of a mental state/event as the state/event itself (and think of the content as the property in the world that that state represents). (And one can probably find examples of vehicle-talk that don't fit either of these usages very well if one looks hard enough...) So although it's not uncommon for people to talk about mental vehicles, I think that the common currency often masks fairly deep differences in the 'metaphysics of mind'. (One can take something to carry content in different senses...) Often one finds oneself talking about neurophysical vehicles of content or consciousness precisely when one wants to avoid/dodge the tricky issues about how the underlying machinery is related to mental states and events themselves.

Tim is surely right about this diversity of use, but what it reveals, I think, is the terminological tragedy of our times, especially in the philosophy of mind, where words are used to mean new things all the time, and failure of mutual understanding has reached unprecedented levels.

Terms have always been subject to different usage, and this, in fact, is one of philosophy's many strange engines of progress. But I think it’s out of control as never before. What happens, it seems to me, is that individuals start using an existing term in a certain new way in a paper, and get used to this use, perhaps individually, or in a discussion group, until the term comes to them to seem to mean just the thing they introduced it to mean — and then they can no longer properly hear what the term used to mean, or, in many cases (as I think one may say without being a prescriptivist about language) what it really means….

 ‘representationalism’ is now being used in two exactly opposite senses…

 I grumble about this in print in paper called ‘Intentionality and experience: terminological preliminaries’…

 It seems to me that ‘vehicle’ is really a very clear and useful idea, whatever account you give of the mhpl nature of the vehicle [state, event, etc]

PS about the poor state of present-day philosophy of mind. There has of course been lots of wonderful scientific progress [filling in Descartes’s details] — but the distinctively philosophical part of the debate [one can distinguish a distinctively philosophical part of the debate without thinking that philosophy and science should be done separately] is in a worse case than before I think. Can anyone point to a distinctively philosophical advance?

Descartes is the grandfather of modern materialism. It’s too little known that his books were banned in eighteenth century France on the grounds that he was a dangerous materialist [no one read the Meditations much]. He was also on the pope’s index of prohibited books — I think even his Meditations were. He went as far as it was possible to go without incurring the wrath of the church. This is a man who went to the butcher’s for animal brains to dissect when he wanted to understand the mind…

 

 

Isn't the vehicle/content distinction also commonly referred to as the "sentence/proposition" distinction?

When Wittgenstein said we should think of language as a tool, and that meaning is the employment of that tool, I think he was making this very distinction.  P.F. Strawson followed suit, though he mostly resisted the term "proposition," and instead distinguished between a sentence and the statement it expressed (eventually he did adopt the term "proposition," incidentally).  The point being that there is a trend in 20th-century philosophy, probably beginning with Wittgenstein, which regards the use--or, we could say, the work done--by a linguistic vehicle as the expressed content.  Wittgenstein's distinction resulted in a major trend in 20th century philosophy which questioned long-held beliefs about the nature of representation. 

Much disagreement in the relatively recent philosophy of mind has concerned whether propositions (contents) share the same formal structure as sentences (vehicles).  Again, this is a matter of how we understand representation.  I think most (though not all) who are more congenial to a scientific approach tend to reject the idea of a shared formal structure, and so embrace a more Wittgensteinian view; but many oppose this view, so you should expect a lot of the literature to resist a simple, unproblematic application to cognitive science.

As far as direct applications to cognitive science, I've seen references to Jacqueline Sachs (1967) in this context, though I have not come across the original material yet.  More generally speaking, there is a strong, important connection between this philosophical distinction and the pragmatic approach to psychology begun by William James, who was an important influence on Wittgenstein.

Dear Tim,
Sorry to resurrect this thread almost four years later, but I've been trundling round the web trying to find a good literature review of the vehicle/content distinction and stumbled on this. I'd be very interested to take a look at Oliver Granger's MA thesis, if you have a copy and he is happy for it to be shared. I googled him, but it is not clear he is still in philosophy.

Thanks in advance,
Clare Mac Cumhaill