Abstract
For the past 40 years, philosophers have generally assumed that a key to understanding mental representation is to develop a naturalistic theory of representational content. This has led to an outlook where the importance of content has been heavily inflated, while the significance of the representational vehicles has been somewhat downplayed. However, the success of this enterprise has been thwarted by a number of mysterious and allegedly non-naturalizable, irreducible dimensions of representational content. The challenge of addressing these difficulties has come to be known as the “hard problem of content” (Hutto & Myin, 2012), and many think it makes an account of representation in the brain impossible. In this essay, I argue that much of this is misguided and based upon the wrong set of priorities. If we focus on the functionality of representational vehicles (as recommended by teleosemanticists) and remind ourselves of the quirks associated with many functional entities, we can see that the allegedly mysterious and intractable aspects of content are really just mundane features associated with many everyday functional kinds. We can also see they have little to do with content and more to do with representation function. Moreover, we can begin to see that our explanatory priorities are backwards: instead of expecting a theory of content to be the key to understanding how a brain state can function as a representation, we should instead expect a theory of neural representation function to serve as the key to understanding how content occurs naturally.
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Notes
There is some need for clarification in the literature regarding how we should understand the term ‘content’ and what a theory of content is about. The term ‘content’ is commonly used to refer to the intentional object of a representation – the thing (or property, abstract entity, etc.) represented. With this usage, the content of a thought about Paris is Paris (or perhaps some proposition associated with Paris). However, this implies that a theory of content is thereby a theory about the things represented, like Paris (or propositions). But theories of content are not about these things. Theories of content are really theories about how mental representations can come to have content – theories about what the having of content amounts to. They are really theories of the intentionality relation between representations and the represented.
Just as cognitive systems possess different levels of sophistication (with the basic minds of animals having fewer capacities than those of intelligent humans), so too, it is not unreasonable to assume that cognitive mechanisms like representations also come with different capabilities. Of course, for something to qualify as a functioning cognitive representation, it will need to do a great deal of what we ordinarily associate with mental representations. But as we’ll see below, some of the features we associate with more advanced, personal-level, conscious reflection should not be expected to apply equally to all sub-personal, low-level representational states and structures.
For more on the ‘vehicle-content’ terminology and how it came about, see the interesting discussions here: https://philosophyofbrains.com/2010/03/16/first-mention-of-contentvehicle-distinction.aspx; also here: https://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=190. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this discussion.
This language-oriented perspective does provide one noteworthy exception to vehicular neglect, at least concerning complex representations of propositions. According to the Language of Thought hypothesis, the vehicles representing full-blown propositions must have a combinatorial structure, such that the content of the molecular representation stems from the content of its atomic parts and their syntactic “arrangement” (Fodor 1975). Still, even on this view the nature of the atomic representations themselves is largely ignored.
It should be noted that in a well-known paper, these considerations did encourage Fodor to promote a sort of “methodological solipsism” in our investigation of computational cognition (Fodor 1980).
Here is how Fodor puts it: “Well, what would it be like to have a serious theory of representation? Here too, there is a consensus to work from. The worry about representation is above all that the semantic (and/or the intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order; for example, that the semantic/intentional properties of things will fail to supervene upon their physical properties. What is required to relieve the worry is therefore, at a minimum, the framing of naturalistic conditions for representation” (1990, p. 32). Fodor goes on to suggest that this project can largely ignore questions about the sort of things that serve as representational vehicles.
It should be noted that Grush (2004) also invokes a (somewhat different) notion of emulation as the basis for his account of representation. Since my aim is to highlight parallels between emulation with regard to camouflage and representational content, it is perhaps unsurprising that such a relation is associated with certain accounts of the latter.
In ethology, biologists do regularly refer to mimicry. However, mimicry (as I understand it) is somewhat different, as it involves cases where a relatively harmless organism imitates a more poisonous or malevolent organism.
It is easy to imagine auditory or olfactory versions of something similar. For example, if a certain predator experiences a hallucinatory tone (similar to ringing in the ears), we can imagine potential prey signaling danger by using a similar frequency, hiding the signal by emulating a non-existent environmental sound.
In his recent book, Matej Kohar (2023) argues that a localist form of neural mechanist explanation of cognition cannot invoke representational content because intentional content extends beyond neural elements and processes. Insofar as his arguments are sound, they would seem to work equally well for a mechanistic explanation of the survival value of camouflage, or any other adaptation that involves organism-world relational properties. This suggests, unsurprisingly, that purely localist mechanistic explanation is insufficient for a complete accounting of behavior and adaptability.
An illustration of the sort of this approach can be found in Keifer and Hohwy (2018), who emphasize a functionalist approach to understanding representation and content in the predictive error minimization framework.
For those committed to embodied and/or embedded cognition, it should be noted that, as Piccinini (2022) points out, a deeper analysis of the functionality of representations reveals that such an agenda is not only compatible with representational theory of mind, but in many ways the two are mutually supportive.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Philosophy Colloquium, March, 2022, University of California, Davis, Philosophy Colloquium, May, 2022, and the Workshop on the Borders of Cognition, Bergamo, Italy, June 2022. Feedback from these audiences was extremely helpful. I am also grateful to Lel Jones and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Ramsey, W.M. The Hard Problem of Content is Neither. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00714-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00714-9