Abstract
The question of whether cognition requires representations has engendered heated discussion during the last two decades. I shall argue that the question is, in all likelihood, a spurious one. There may or may not be a fact of the matter concerning whether a given item qualifies as a representation. However, even if there is, attempts to establish whether cognition requires representation have neither practical nor theoretical utility.
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Notes
That is, actually, two tacit quantifiers.
Clark and Toribio (1994) provide a good example of this position.
And how we understand the relation of representation will, in turn, have implications for a third sub-question: (3) What are the objects of representation? This third question, though important, plays only a minor part in this paper.
A point well made, in conversation, by Shaun Gallagher. Gallagher’s own focus on decouplability is very evident in his (2008), for example.
See Strawson (2006) for lucid discussion.
This point is well made by Fodor (1990). Most of my thoughts about, say, Paris (i.e. thoughts that, let us suppose, involve the activation and deployment of the PARIS representation), are not caused by Paris, but by other things. This point also provides—and this is the way Fodor uses it—an objection to crude informational accounts of representation (which Fodor regards as a species of causal account).
The inspiration is obviously Kripke (1972). But Kripke does not endorse a crude causal theory either.
Locus classicus, Dretske (1981).
See Fodor (1990) for a good discussion of the discussion problem in the context of informational accounts of representation. With regard to the more sophisticated variations, among the more familiar options from which we will have to choose are Dretske (1985, 1988), the Stalnaker (1984) optimal conditions account, various forms of adverbial theories, and perhaps most sophisticated of all, Fodor (1990) asymmetric dependence theory.
See Loewer (1997) for useful discussion.
If, for example, one wants to shout ‘Inscrutability of reference!’ at any point in discussion, then one may well be on to something. For my attempts to deal with these sorts of technical problems, see Rowlands (1997).
All these accounts are far more at home dealing with what they regard as ‘simple’ or ‘basic’ cases of representation, which are usually regarded as demonstrative in character: ‘Fly, there!’ and things of that ilk. When the context becomes more complicated, involving declarative rather than demonstrative thought for example, then you are often likely to be told, as Fodor (1990) notes, that the theory is “out to lunch”.
The renewal of interest in concepts (e.g. Fodor (2008))—even if this interest is largely hostile [e.g. Millikan (2000, 2013)]—among those engaged in the project naturalizing semantics is a reflection of the idea that the project will have to try to say something about the idea of a mode of presentation, even if only to disparage it. The general drift is predictable: either a radical externalist theory of concepts or a deflation. That a view is predictable is, of course, no indication that it is incorrect.
More precisely, it would be relevant only to the extent this etiology impacted on the information the state carries or the causal relations into which it enters. Taken on its own, or in itself, etiology would be irrelevant.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for allowing me to clarify this point.
(Haugeland (1991), p. 62).
This, in effect, is what the development of progressively more sophisticated attempts to naturalize representation was all about. See Sect. 4.
Both examples due to Clark and Toribio (1994). These sorts of cases are examples of what they call ‘representation-hungry domains’.
See Rowlands (2006) for some of these.
See, for example, Byrne (2005).
See Gelder (1990).
See Ramsey et al. (1991) for a good overview.
For example: ‘When we examine very simple level intelligence, we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model\(\ldots \) Representation is the wrong unit of abstraction in building the bulkiest parts of intelligent systems.’ Rodney (Brooks (1991), p. 140).
See condition 3 of his account of representation above.
I am not claiming, of course, that this is the only condition that must be met for BEACH BAR to constitute a sign, merely that it is one of those conditions.
The positive answer, for example, seems to rule out, by diktat, the possibility of pictorial representation—a staple of much cognitive-scientific practice. For my two pennor’th on why the negative answer should be preferred, see my (2006).
See Rowlands (2013) for an argument to this effect.
This is stronger than Haugeland’s notion of ‘standing in’, since there was nothing in that, taken in itself, that required standing in to take place through awareness of the representational item. It may, of course, be that this is what Haugeland had in mind.
See Fodor (1987), chapter 1, for a classic statement of this view.
And, of course, the various forms of instantiation regress suggest strongly that they are not.
I wish to thank a reviewer for Synthese for making this point.
I do not, of course, think of this list as exhaustive, but merely as a sampling of the sorts of things that would constitute a fact of the matter about representation.
I would like to thank a reviewer for Synthese for raising this point.
I would like to thank a reviewer for allowing me to clarify this point.
I would like to thank a reviewer for allowing me to clarify this point.
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I would like to thank two reviewers for Synthese for some very helpful comments.
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Rowlands, M. Arguing about representation. Synthese 194, 4215–4232 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0646-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0646-4