Modern representationalism about consciousness (MR) is often conflated with classical representationalism (CR). This chapter discusses CR first in order to highlight the contrast between old and new representationalism and bring out some of the strengths of the latter. It discerns three key projects related to MR. The first is that of determining whether its defining claim, the exhaustion thesis, is true. The second is that of explicating the fundamental difference between phenomenal and nonphenomenal states. The third (...) project is that of developing a theory of representation strong and stable enough to support MR. MR naturally bifurcates into externalist and internalist versions, depending upon the favored theory of mental representation. Many proponents of MR endorse the externalist view. MR is compatible with a range of theories of introspection. Introspection requires a special and sophisticated way of thinking about conscious experience. (shrink)

Embodied and extended cognition is a relatively new paradigm within cognitive science that challenges the basic tenet of classical cognitive science, viz. cognition consists in building and manipulating internal representations. Some of the pioneers of embodied cognitive science have claimed that this new way of conceptualizing cognition puts pressure on epistemological and ontological realism. In this paper I will argue that such anti-realist conclusions do not follow from the basic assumptions of radical embodied cognitive science. Furthermore I will show (...) that one can develop a form of realism that reflects rather than just accommodates the core principles of non-representationalist embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

In recent years the cognitive science community has witnessed the rise of a new, dynamical approach to cognition. This approach entails a framework in which cognition and behavior are taken to result from complex dynamical interactions between brain, body, and environment. The advent of the dynamical approach is grounded in a dissatisfaction with the classical computational view of cognition. A particularly strong claim has been that cognitive systems do not rely on internal representations and computations. Focusing on this claim, (...) we take as a starting point a question recently raised by Cliff and Noble: " if evolution did produce a design that used internal representations, how would we recognize it?" (Knowledge-based vision and simple visual machines, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 352 , 1165-1175, 1997). We will argue that cognitive science lacks a proper operationalization of the notion of representation, and therefore is unable to fruitfully discuss whether a particular system has representations or not. A basic method to detect representations in a physical system, grounded in isomorphism, turns out to be quite unconstrained. We will look at a practical example of this problem by examining the debate on whether or not van Gelder's (What might cognition be, if not computation? Journal of Philosophy, 92 , 345-381, 1995) controversial example of the Watt Governor is representational. We will conclude that cognitive science, as of yet, has no empirically applicable means to answer Cliff and Noble's question unequivocally. This makes the recent representationalism vs. anti-representationalism debate a debate for the sake of appearance. (shrink)

This essay surveys representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness as well as the major arguments for them. It also takes up two major objections. The essay is divided into five sections. Section I offers some introductory remarks on phenomenal consciousness. Section II presents the classic view of phenomenal consciousness to which representationalists are opposed. Section III canvasses various versions of representationalism about consciousness. Section IV lays out the main arguments for the representationalist stance. The final section addresses the two objections.

The knowledge argument aims to refute physicalism, the view that the world is entirely physical. The argument first establishes the existence of facts about consciousness that are not a priori deducible from the complete physical truth, and then infers the falsity of physicalism from this lack of deducibility. Frank Jackson gave the argument its classic formulation. But now he rejects the argument . On his view, it relies on a false conception of sensory experience, which should be replaced with (...) class='Hi'>representationalism , the view that phenomenal states are just representational states. And he argues that mental representation is physically explicable. (shrink)

I defend the “settist” view that set theory can be done consistently without any form of distinction between sets and “classes” (by whatever name), if we think clearly about belief and the expression of belief—and this, furthermore, entirely within classical logic. Standard arguments against settism in classical logic are seen to fail because they assume, falsely, that expressing commitment to a set theory is something that must be done in a meaningful language, the semantics of which requires, on (...) pain of Russellian paradox, a more powerful set theory. I explore the consequences of this response to the standard argument against “classical logic settism” for our notion of belief, and argue that what is revealed is that representationalist theories of belief cannot be right as long as it is possible to believe that every set is self-identical. (shrink)

The knowledge argument aims to refute physicalism, the view that the world is entirely physical. The argument first establishes the existence of facts (or truths or information) about consciousness that are not a priori deducible from the complete physical truth, and then infers the falsity of physicalism from this lack of deducibility. Frank Jackson (1982, 1986) gave the argument its classic formulation. But now he rejects the argument (Jackson 1998b, 2003, chapter 3 of this volume). On his view, it relies (...) on a false conception of sensory experience, which should be replaced with representationalism (also known as intentionalism), the view that phenomenal states are just representational states. And he argues that mental representation is physically explicable. (shrink)

The circularity problem states that the representationalist about phenomenal consciousness gives a circular explanation if she adopts the classic view about secondary qualities, such as colours, that characterises them as dispositions to produce experiences with a specifi c phenomenal character. Since colour primitivism faces severe diffi culties, it seems that colour physicalism is the only viable option for the representationalist. I will argue that the representationalist is not committed to colour physicalism because she can adopt an anti-realist theory of colour. (...) My diagnosis is that the alleged commitment to colour physicalism rests upon the acceptance of colour realism which is due to the approval of externalist versions of representationalism, such as tracking representationalism. I will argue that the representationalist can deal with the circularity problem by adopting figurative projectivism, which holds that colours are contingently non-instantiated properties that only figure in the representational contents of colour experiences. (shrink)

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

In the first part, the paper describes in detail the classical conception of intentionality which was expounded in its most sophisticated form by Edmund Husserl. This conception is today largely eclipsed in the philosophy of mind by the functionalist and by the representationalist account of intentionality, the former adopted by Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, the latter by John Searle and Fred Dretske. The very considerable differences between the classical and the modern conceptions are pointed out, and it (...) is argued that the classical conception is more satisfactory than the two modern ones, not only regarding phenomenal adequacy, but also on the grounds of epistemological considerations. In the second part, the paper argues that classical intentionality is not naturalizable, that is, physicalizable. Since classical intentionality exists (in the experiences that display it), the non-naturalizability of classical intentionality implies psychophysical dualism. (shrink)

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

My main purpose in this article is to explore the connections between views of concepts and of philosophy of mind. My analysis focuses on recent work on concepts and on the conceptual-non conceptual distinction by French philosopher Jocelyn Benoist (Benoist 2005, 2010, 2011). While tracing back Benoist’s contextualist counterproposal to representationalism in the philosophy of mind to converging influences ranging from phenomenology (Husserl 1994) to philosophy of language (Travis 2008), I spell out some of the problems posed by viewing (...) concepts as representations in a mental repository (a conception which has survived all attacks to the classic necessary and sufficient conditions view in the last half century (Murphy 2002, Prinz 2002)). (shrink)

The dissertation falls into two sections. Part I deals with classical pragmatist arguments against the correspondence theory of truth; Part II , with neo-pragmatist arguments against the possibility of a substantive theory of knowledge. The goal of Part I is to reconstruct and evaluate the main anti-correspondence arguments employed by the classical pragmatists and contemporary neo-pragmatists . Here we offer detailed critical and historical discussions of two arguments in particular: the comparison objection, which claims that the idea that (...) truth is a matter of correspondence with the facts leads directly to skepticism; and the constructivist or anti-realist objection, according to which the correspondence theory is tenable only if realism is defensible, and thus cannot survive the latter position's fall from grace. After considering these objections, we address what James and Dewey had to say about the nature of the correspondence relation itself, and urge that their position has been badly misunderstood by foes and friends alike. Part II deals with the misgivings neo-pragmatists have about the very idea of a philosophical "theory of knowledge." Within analytic philosophy, the most familiar and aggressive expression of this anti-epistemology attitude is Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. However, Rorty is far from alone in declaring epistemology moribund: philosophers in both the Anglo-American and Continental traditions have been busy composing obituaries for some time now. Our primary aim in Part II is to refute two main arguments central to the neo-pragmatist anti-epistemology case: the arguments against "foundations", a heterogeneous family of four objections to the idea of epistemology as 'foundational'; and the anti-representationalist argument, according to which skepticism and epistemology itself are said to rest on an untenable representationalist conception of thought or language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, (...) with all of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)

Criticisms and rejections of representationalism are increasingly popular in 4E cognitive science, and especially in radical enactivism. But by overfocusing our attention on the debate between radical enactivism and classical representationalism, we might miss the woods for the trees, in at least two respects: first, by neglecting the relevance of other theoretical alternatives about representationalism in cognitive science; and second by not seeing how much REC and classical representationalism are in agreement concerning basic and (...) problematic issues dealing with mental content and intentionality. In order to expand and exemplify these ideas, this paper presents two heterodox positions on intentionality and on the relations between content and representation. Special attention is paid to the way REC is rejecting these positions: I argue that this rejection reveals common assumptions with classical representationalism, but also undermines the coherence of REC’s conception of intentionality. (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses the “which-is-which content of handedness,” the meaning of left as left and right as right, as a possible candidate for the idea of a genuine embodied cognitive content. After showing that the Ozma barrier, the non-transferability of the meaning of left and right, provides a kind of proof of the non-descriptive, indexical nature of the which-is-which content of handedness, arguments are presented which suggest that the classical representationalist account of cognition faces a perplexing problem (...) of underdetermination of reference of left and right in the which-is-which sense. By way of contrast, no such problems occur in a framework were embodied contents are not mediated by some extra body model which carries the representational power, but are instead directly represented. (shrink)

Intermodal representationalism is a popular theory of consciousness. This paper argues that intermodal representationalism is false, or at least likely so. The argument turns on two forms of exceptional episodic memory: hyperthymesia and prodigious visual memory in savant syndrome. Emerging from this argument is a broader lesson about the relationship between memory and perception; that it may be possible to entertain in memory the very same content as in a corresponding perceptual experience, and that the ‘overflow’ interpretation of (...) the classic Sperling paradigm experiments may not fully generalize. (shrink)

Michael Tye’s considered position on visual experience combines representationalism with externalism about color, so when considering spectrum inversion, he needs a principled reason to claim that a person with inverted color vision is seeing things incorrectly. Tye’s responses to the problem of the inverted spectrum ( 2000 , in: Consciousness, color, and content, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and 2002a , in: Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford) rely on a teleological (...) approach to the evolution of vision to secure the grounds upon which people with normal color vision can be justly called ‘right’ and those with inverted color vision can be called ‘wrong’. I demonstrate that since the inverted spectrum thought experiment requires that both sorts of vision be behaviorally indistinguishable, no biologically acceptable concept of teleology will allow Tye to draw the distinction he needs. (shrink)

While classical phenomenology, as represented by Edmund Husserl’s work, resists certain forms of representationalism about perception, I argue that in its theory of horizons, it posits representations in the sense of content-bearing vehicles. As part of a phenomenological theory, this means that on the Husserlian view such representations are part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I believe that, although the intuitions supporting this idea are correct, it is a mistake to maintain that there are such representations (...) defining the phenomenal character of low-level perception. What these representations are called on to explain, i.e., the phenomenal character of perceiving objects in their full presence, can be more parsimoniously explained by appealing to certain affective states or affect schemas that shape the intentional directedness of low-level perceptual experience and define its phenomenal character in a non-representational way. This revision of the Husserlian view, it is shown, also helps us understand the normative character of perception. (shrink)

_Abstract_: In this paper we carve out a _reformist_ agenda within the debate on the foundations of cognitive science, incorporating some important ideas from the 4E cognition literature into the computational-representational framework. We are deeply sympathetic to this reformist program since we think that, despite strong criticism of the concept of computation and the related notion of representation, computational models should still be at the core of the study of mind. At the same time, we recognize the need for a (...) liberalization of the computational and representational framework that can address deep dissatisfaction with the anti-biologism and radical internalism of classical cognitive science. However, reform is a difficult task, so in this article we focus on two open questions within the reformist agenda. The first concerns the possibility of combining mechanistic-computational and dynamical explanations. The second concerns related changes in the notion of representation and its use (with special attention to Andy Clark’s radical predictive processing). _Keywords_: Continuum of Representational Genera;_ _Enactivism; Predictive Processing; Radical Embodied Cognition Thesis; Representationalism _ Due problemi aperti nell’agenda riformista della filosofia della scienza cognitiva _ _Riassunto_: In questo lavoro identifichiamo un’agenda _riformista_ nel dibattito sui fondamenti della scienza cognitiva che incorpora alcune idee centrali provenienti dalla letteratura sulla cognizione 4E all’interno di una cornice computazionalista e rappresentazionalista. Tale agenda considera il quadro computazionalista e rappresentazionalista ancora imprescindibile ai fini dello studio integrato della mente e del cervello, ma ne persegue una liberalizzazione nell’intento di renderlo idoneo ad accogliere alcuni importanti spunti emersi dalla letteratura sulla cognizione delle 4E. Tuttavia, riformare è un compito difficile. In questo articolo ci concentriamo su due problemi aperti nell’agenda riformista. Il primo riguarda la possibilità di mettere assieme le spiegazioni meccaniciste e computazionaliste con quelle dinamiche. Il secondo riguarda i cambiamenti relativi alla nozione di rappresentazione e al suo impiego (con particolare attenzione all’elaborazione predittiva radicale di Andy Clark). _Parole chiave_: Continuum dei generi rappresentazionali;_ _Elaborazione predittiva; Enattivismo; Tesi della cognizione incarnata radicale; Rappresentazionalismo. (shrink)

The classical conception of rhetoric as the method of reasoned political judgment survived into the Renaissance but was reduced to academic critiques of style and "empty" public rhetoric with the rise of modern science and its representationalist theories of language. Recently, however, rhetoric, textuality, and the "linguistic turn" generally, have become central metaphors in the human sciences. This renewed rhetorical perspective not only fosters a critique of positive philosophy and of scientism in public discourse, it also offers affirmative methods (...) by which persons can construct their civic lives. (shrink)

Starting from Brentano’s classical characterization of intentionality, we review the radical enactivist proposal about basic cognition and show that the underlying assumption that stripping teleosemantics of its representationalist commitments results in no explanatory loss is unwarranted. Significant features of basic cognition are lost, or so we argue, with the RECtification of teleosemantics that are retrieved by means of an alternative dubbed metaphysically non-committal content-ascriptivism.

The extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998; Clark 2008) is an influential hypothesis in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that the extended mind hypothesis is born to be wild. It has undeniable and irrepressible tendencies of flouting grounding assumptions of the traditional information-processing paradigm. I present case-studies from social cognition which not only support the extended mind proposal but also bring out its inherent wildness. In particular, I focus on cases of action-understanding and (...) discuss the role of embodied intentionality in the extended mind project. I discuss two theories of action-understanding for exploring the support for the extended mind hypothesis in embodied intersubjective interaction, namely, simulation theory and a non-simulationist perceptual account. I argue that, if the extended mind adopts a simulation theory of action-understanding, it rejects representationalism. If it adopts a non-simulationist perceptual account of action-understanding, it rejects the classical sandwich view of the mind. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation (...) of mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

This article reviews eight proposed strategies for solving the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP), which was given its classic formulation in Harnad (1990). After a concise introduction, we provide an analysis of the requirement that must be satisfied by any hypothesis seeking to solve the SGP, the zero semantical commitment condition. We then use it to assess the eight strategies, which are organised into three main approaches: representationalism, semi-representationalism and non-representationalism. The conclusion is that all the strategies are (...) semantically committed and hence that none of them provides a valid solution to the SGP, which remains an open problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThough the perennial problem of consciousness has outlasted the idealists, the reductivist turn in contemporary naturalistic philosophy of mind and the non-reductivist reactions to it provoke us to re-think post-Kantian idealism. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre makes for a classical case of non-reductivist approach to mind and his critique of ‘dogmatism’ is all the more relevant in this context. This article contains four sections. The first section is an introduction that explains why post-Kantian idealism is relevant to contemporary philosophy of mind. The (...) second section pinpoints the placement issue that confronts not only current philosophers but also partially motivated Fichte's own philosophy. The third section is a short but essential remark about the normative and practical valence of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’ in Fichte's traditional understanding of them. In the fourth section, I provide a reconstructive analysis of Fichte's understanding and critique of physicalism. Fichte's argument can be analyzed into two horns with each targeting reductivism and epiphenomenalism respectively. The final section is a brief but positive exposition on a necessary feature, namely reflexivity, of mind and the first-person perspective. Fichte's appropriation of intellectual intuition exemplifies a non-representationalist picture that connects content transparency with the active nature of mind. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content as an (...) ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

Part 1: Metaphysics and Conceptual Analysis 1. Analysis, description and the a priori?, Simon Blackburn 2. Physicalism, conceptual analysis and acts of faith, Jennifer Hornsby 3. Serious metaphysics: Frank Jackson’s defense of conceptual analysis, William G. Lycan 4. Jackson’s classical model of meaning, Laura Schroeter & John Bigelow 5. The semantic foundations of metaphysics, Huw Price 6. The folk theory of colours and the causes of colour experience, Peter Menzies Part 2: The Knowledge Argument 7. Consciousness and the frustrations (...) of physicalism, Philip Pettit 8. Jackson’s change of mind: representationalism, a priorism and the knowledge argument, Robert Van Gulick Part 3: Ethics 9. Analytic moral functionalism meets moral twin earth, Terrence Horgan & Mark Timmons 10. Consequentialism and the nearest and dearest objection, Michael Smith 11. The ’actual’ in actualism, Julia Driver Part 4: Conditionals and the Purposes of Arguing 12. Conditionals, truth and assertion, Dorothy Edgington 13. Conditionals: A debate with Jackson, Graham Priest 14. Two purposes of arguing and two epistemic projects, Martin Davies Replies to my critics, Frank Jackson. (shrink)

Context: The dominant approach to the study of perception is representational/computational, with an emphasis on the achievements of the brain and the nervous system, which are taken to construct internal models of the world. Alternatives include ecological, embedded, embodied, and enactivist approaches, all of which emphasize the centrality of action in understanding perception. Problem: Despite sharing many theoretical commitments that lead to a rejection of the classical approach, the alternatives are characterized by important contrasts and points of divergence. Here (...) we focus on the enactive and ecological approaches, in particular, on how they construe the status of the environment and the content of perception. Method: We begin with a review of James Gibson’s ecological psychology, highlighting it as a psychology for all organisms not just humans. Against this backdrop, we consider enactivist arguments against direct perception - a central assertion of the ecological approach - and in favor of interpreting the activity of perceptual agents as a kind of construction of a perceptually meaningful world. Results: We assess the merits of this interpretation and we conclude that it cannot be grounded on fundamental principles such as thermodynamics and organism-environment mutuality. Implications: As a consequence, enactivism remains close to representationalism and entails a form of dualism. Constructivist content: We advance a criticism of the constructivist foundations of the enactive approach to perception. Perception-action mutuality at the heart of enactivism does not require mental construction; indeed, perception-action mutuality obviates construction. (shrink)

Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that (...) cognitive science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field called embodied or enactive cognitive science. Whereas traditional representationalism rests on a fixed inside–outside distinction, the embodied cognition perspective views mind and brain as a biological system that is rooted in body experience and interaction with other individuals. Embodiment refers to both the embedding of cognitive processes in brain circuitry and to the origin of these processes in an organism’s sensory–motor experience. Thus, action and perception are no longer (...) interpreted in terms of the classic physical–mental dichotomy, but rather as closely interlinked. This paper describes the cycles of brain–organism interaction, of sensory–motor interaction with the environment and of embodied interaction with others. The brain is then interpreted as an organ of modulation and transformation that mediates the cycles of organism–environment interaction. Finally, consequences of the embodied and enactive approach for psychiatry are pointed out, in particular for a circular concept of mental illness. (shrink)

Context: Challenges by embodied, enactive, extended and ecological approaches to cognition have provided good reasons to shift away from neurocentric theories. Problem: Classic cognitivist accounts tend towards internalism, representationalism and methodological individualism. Such accounts not only picture the brain as the central and almost exclusive mechanism of cognition, they also conceive of brain function in terms that ignore the dynamical relations among brain, body and environment. Method: I review four areas of research where enactivist accounts have shown alternative ways (...) of thinking about the brain. Results: Taken together, such analyses form a comprehensive alternative to the classic conceptions of cognitivist, computational neuroscience. Implications: Such considerations motivate the need to re-think our understanding of how the brain itself works. They suggest that the best explanation of brain function may be found in the mixed vocabularies of embodied and situated cognition, developmental psychology, ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, applied linguistics, the theory of affordances and material engagement, rather than the narrow vocabulary of computational neuroscience. Constructivist content: This account is consistent with an enactivist-constructivist approach to cognition. (shrink)

It has become customary to locate the origins of modern measurement theory in the works of Helmholtz and Hölder. If by ‘modern measurement theory’ is meant the representational theory, then this may not be an accurate assessment. Both Helmholtz and Hölder present theories of measurement which are closely related to the classical conception of measurement. Indeed, Hölder can be interpreted as bringing this conception to fulfilment in a synthesis of Euclid, Newton, and Dedekind. The first explicitly representational theory appears (...) to have been Russell's. He rejected the traditional concept of quantity and its connection to number, making the use of number in quantitative science problematical. He solved the problem via representationalism. (shrink)

The traditional approach in cognitive sciences holds that cognition is a matter of manipulating abstract symbols followingcertain rules. According to this view, the body is merely an input/output device, which allows the computationalsystem—the brain—to acquire new input data by means of the senses and to act in the environment following its com-mands. In opposition to this classical view, defenders of embodied cognition (EC) stress the relevance of the body inwhich the cognitive agent is embedded in their explanation of cognitive (...) processes. From a representationalist frameworkregarding our conscious experience, in this article, I will offer a novel argument in favor of EC and show that cognitionconstitutively—and no merely causally—depends upon body activity beyond that in the brain. In particular, I will arguethat in order to solve the problem derived from the empirical evidence in favor of the possibility of shifted spectrum,representationalist should endorse the view that experiences concern its subject: the content of experience isde se.Ishow that this claim perfectly matches the phenomenological observation and helps explaining the subjective characterof the experience. Furthermore, I argue that entertaining this kind of representation constitutively depends on bodilyactivity. Consequently, insofar as cognition depends on consciousness, it is embodied. (shrink)

Enaction, as put forward by Varela and defended by other thinkers (notably Alva Noë, 2004; Susan Hurley, 2006; and Kevin O’Regan, 1992), departs from traditional accounts that treat mental processes (like perception, reasoning, and action) as discrete, independent processes that are causally related in a sequen- tial fashion. According to the main claim of the enactive approach, which Thompson seems to fully endorse, perceptual awareness is taken to be a skill-based activity. Our perceptual contact with the world, according to the (...) enactionists, is not mediated by representations but is enacted, and the notion of representation, belonging to the classic computational paradigm, has no place in this alternative approach. Though Thompson does not pronounce directly on the issue of representationalism, he is most definitely keeping the company of anti-representationalists, and in that context it is not unreasonable to take his silence for consent. In this paper, we will argue that the enactive approach to imagery is unworkable unless it makes appeal to representations, understood in a particular way. Not understood as pictures, to be sure. Or sentences for that matter. But those aren’t the only options. (shrink)

The pragmatist turn in Philosophy in the late XIX century and XX century was a serious attempt to refuse the privilege of the representational elements of the conscious- ness in the production of knowledge. Such privilege has its roots in Ancient Philosophy, in some consequences of the Platonic heritage, but was toughened by Modern philosophers of empiricist or aprioristic lineages within the modern concepts of Experience and Truth. With these last concepts of Experience and Truth I’m referring to the objectivising (...) tendency that leads to identify experience with the final object resulting from the judicative fixation of relations. Due to the fixation of some basic relations the object of experience was identified and conceived with such and such characteristics as something independent of the mental or judicative activity. Such method of fixation and objectivising of relations is also present in the common-sense ideas of Reality, Experience and Truth. In the field of the theory of signs the reputation of the modern concept of representation was so vast that despite the progress in the discovery of the differential character of the linguistic units, Saussure’s well-known notion of sign and the division between “signifiant” and “signifié” still kept the reference to the double across the body/mind polarity and to the “mental image” of the sign, Vorstellung, concept or “signifié,” as the core of meaning. If Peirce and James agree in the refusal of the classical theory of representation, their rejection came from different horizons and their critiques don’t mean the same. I’ll try to show that James’s and Peirce’s attempts are not disjunctive, although they are not members of a simple addition. In the writings of the Tartu School and in T. Sebeok’s reassessment to Peircean semeiosis one finds interesting tools to reconsider the relation to the World of the “field of consciousness” and semeiosic cycles, beyond representationalism, such as the concepts of environment and primary, secondary and tertiary modelling systems. Starting with these insights I’ll propose at the end of the essay the notion of a double environment between psychic systems and systems based on communication. (shrink)

In recent work, David Chalmers argues that “Edenic shapes”—roughly, the shape properties phenomenally presented in spatial experience—are not instantiated in our world. His reasons come largely from the theory of Special Relativity. Although Edenic shapes might have been instantiated in a classical Newtonian world, he maintains that they could not be instantiated in a relativistic world like our own. In this essay, I defend realism about Edenic shape, the thesis that Edenic shapes are instantiated in our world, against Chalmers’s (...) challenge from Special Relativity. I begin by clarifying the notion of an Edenic shape by reference to Chalmers’s notion of the “Edenic” content of perceptual experience. I then reconstruct Chalmers’s argument that Edenic shapes could not be instantiated in a relativistic world. His reasoning proceeds from two assumptions. The first is that the only shape properties instantiated in a relativistic world are those which somehow involve relations to frames of reference. This is thought to follow from the phenomenon of Lorentz contraction, a consequence of Special Relativity. The second assumption is that Edenic shapes do not involve relations to frames of reference. One reason to accept the second assumption is that it seems that Edenic shapes could be instantiated in a classical Newtonian world, where the notion of a frame-relative shape has no meaningful application. I then proceed to defend RES against Chalmers’s argument by arguing that Special Relativity, properly understood, provides no support for Chalmers’s first assumption. More generally, I argue, by way of a careful analysis of the geometric structure of Minkowski space–time and Galilean space–time Newtonian physics), that Edenic shapes are no less at home in a relativistic world than in a classical Newtonian world. (shrink)

The present article is the second part of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In Part I (Picazo 2021), the discussion was set out by examining a number of typical traces of Platonism in semantic theory since Frege. In a subsequent paper that shall be published elsewere, additional illustrations of such traces will be provided, taken from a collection of classic texts in the philosophy of language, also from Frege (...) onwards (Baghramian 1998). Then, the present paper is devoted to providing yet additional illustrations of those traces, but this time taken from a collection of recent commissioned essays on the subject: the book Prospects for Meaning, edited by Richard Schantz in 2012. We shall, thus, describe a considerable number of examples in which the influence of semantic Platonism on these essays can be felt. Prominent among these examples are the adhesion to pseudo-Platonism in the form of semantic mentalism; the typical limitations of avoidant and trivializing semantic accounts; the confinement to logico-philosophical analysis as the only methodology for semantic research; the excesses committed by some radical semantic anti-representationalists and some radical semantic biologists; and the adhesion to hardcore semantic Platonism itself. (shrink)

In the current debate, very few people have penetrated as deeply into the self-model theory of subjectivity and have developed such a scholarly expertise on the project as a whole as Dorothée Legrand has done. In the last sentence of her commentary, Legrand alludes to the ugly consequences I have to face after calling the book Being No One: I am suddenly confronted with people from all over the world who are stomping their feet on the ground like stubborn children, (...) claiming that they definitely are someone, and that they definitely have a self. In 1993, I published a German precursor to BNO, titled Subject and Self-Model—The Perspectivalness of Phenomenal Consciousness Against the Background of a Naturalist Theory of Mental Representation. From this title alone, it can be seen that I was not interested in demolishing classical theories of the self as a metaphysical substance, but rather in an empirically informed representationalist approach to the phenomenal self. In particular, I wanted to get a grip on the relationship between the epistemic subject and the phenomenal self it uses in the attempt to gain self-knowledge. The mistake I made, and to which Legrand alludes at the end of her brilliant commentary, was assuming that for a predominately American readership, such a title would be much too “wordy.” Now I am paying the price – the price for having diverted many of my readers’ attention to discussions about how our folk-phenomenological intuitions about selfhood can somehow be rescued. The title Being No One has distracted a lot of attention that would probably be better focused on the subtle and difficult issues associated with the attempt to construct a tenable theory about the interaction between self-knowledge and self-experience. But Dorothée Legrand cannot be distracted. (shrink)

According to Ramsey (Representation reconsidered, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007 ), only classical cognitive science, with the related notions of input–output and structural representations, meets the job description challenge (the challenge to show that a certain structure or process serves a representational role at the subpersonal level). By contrast, connectionism and other nonclassical models, insofar as they exploit receptor and tacit notions of representation, are not genuinely representational. As a result, Ramsey submits, cognitive science is taking a U-turn (...) from representationalism back to behaviourism, thus presupposing that (1) the emergence of cognitivism capitalized on the concept of representation, and that (2) the materialization of nonclassical cognitive science involves a return to some form of pre-cognitivist behaviourism. We argue against both (1) and (2), by questioning Ramsey’s divide between classical and representational, versus nonclassical and nonrepresentational, cognitive models. For, firstly, connectionist and other nonclassical accounts have the resources to exploit the notion of a structural isomorphism, like classical accounts (the beefing-up strategy); and, secondly, insofar as input–output and structural representations refer to a cognitive agent, classical explanations fail to meet the job description challenge (the deflationary strategy). Both strategies work independently of each other: if the deflationary strategy succeeds, contra (1), cognitivism has failed to capitalize on the relevant concept of representation; if the beefing-up strategy is sound, contra (2), the return to a pre-cognitivist era cancels out. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Varela and EmbodimentElena PasquinelliFrancisco Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Chile and in the United States with neurobiologist Humberto Maturana, with whom he developed the theory of autopoiesis. According to this theory, the minimal form of autonomy that defines biological life is autopoiesis or self-production, which has the aspect of a reaction network, operationally closed and membrane bound. The theory of autopoiesis suggests that the nervous system cannot be considered (...) as an input-output information processing system. After some years spent in the United States, Varela moved to Paris, France, where he addressed two main directions of research: the experimental study of brain activity—in particular as regards the neuronal integration during the performance of cognitive tasks—and the phenomenological investigation of human consciousness. Within this second direction of philosophical studies, Varela developed an original and controversial approach to cognition.1This approach, which has came to be called the enactive view, is aimed at overcoming the mind/world dichotomy felt by many to be a hindrance to the development of a mature psychology. In Varela's enactive view, the world and the cognitive organism determine each other: the organism selects relevant properties of the physical world, and the world selects the structure of the organism, during their respective co-evolutionary history.An important tenet of the enactive approach is in fact that cognition is embodied. This claim represents a crucial step toward the development of a new trend of research in cognitive sciences, where the cognitive process is investigated without abstracting from the conditions in which it takes place. In fact, the statement that "the body matters" for cognition brings forth relevant consequences for the conception of the body and the mind and contains indications for research on the loop between perception, cognition, and action. The statement that "the body matters" for cognition is indeed quite widespread in circles that oppose the classical computationalist-representationalist approach to cognition. But in what way does the body play a constitutive role in cognition? And what should we mean by the term "body"?The claim about embodiment in cognition can be understood as a statement relative to the role played by the physical structure of the body in cognitive, perceptual, and motor performances and acquisitions. However, the conception of the body as simply a physical entity is only one step toward a [End Page 33] theory of the co-determination of the organism and the world that is proposed by Varela. As a medium of the interaction with the world, Varela conceives the body as a structured set of behavioral repertories, of motor and perceptual capabilities and activities. Embodiment goes beyond the physical structure of the organism since it is principally characterized by the sensorimotor structure of the animal: body-scaling, sensory-motor capacities. "The actions of an animal and the world in which it performs these actions are inseparably connected. Going through life as a small fly makes a cup of tea appear like an ocean of liquid; an elephant, however, will see the same amount of tea as an insignificant drop, tiny and barely noticeable. What is perceived appears inseparably connected with the actions and the way of life of an organism."2Sensorimotor capacities, or the activity of the animal, are then crucial in the mutual enactment of the world and mind. As the world selects the sensorimotor capacities of the animals that are valid for life and adaptation, animals select the properties of the world that are relevant for their structure: "the structure of the perceiving animal, understood as the kinds of self-organizing neuronal networks that couple sensory and motor surfaces, which determine both how the animal can be modulated by the environmental events and how sensory-motor activity participates in animal-environment codetermination." 3 As a consequence, "animals with different sensory-motor capacity would segment the world in different ways. As a corollary, we claim that the prespecified world we find... is actually the world as described in relation to the sensory-motor capacities of the higher primates."4The assertion of embodiment as relevant for the proper motor-perceptual activities of the organism is strictly connected to the idea that action and... (shrink)

In this broad interview Robert Brandom talks about many themes concerning his work and about his career and education. Brandom reconstructs the main debts that he owes to colleagues and teachers, especially Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, and David Lewis, and talks about the projects he’s currently working on. He also talks about contemporary and classical pragmatism, and of the importance of classical thinkers like Kant and Hegel for contemporary debates. Other themes go deeper into the principal topics of (...) his theoretical work – in particular, his later understanding of expressivism, his take on the debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists in semantics, the main open problems for his wide inferentialist project, and his methodological preference for the normative vocabulary in his account of discursive practice. Finally, Brandom touches on the epistemic role of perception and on his views about the importance of the phenomenological aspects of perceptual experience. (shrink)

The present article discusses shared epistemological characteristics of two distinct areas of research: the field of first-person inquiry and the field of quantum mechanics. We outline certain philosophical challenges that arise in each of the two lines of inquiry, and point towards the central similarity of their observational situation: the impossibility of disregarding the interrelatedness of the observed phenomena with the act of observation. We argue that this observational feature delineates a specific category of research that we call the non-trivial (...) domain. Unlike the trivial domain, non-trivial research cannot assume the view from nowhere on which the observed phenomena could be regarded as existing independently of the process of observation. Presenting first-person inquiry and quantum mechanics as two of its examples, we show that non-trivial research violates several fundamental observational presuppositions of the trivial domain, exemplified in the principles of classical physics. Drawing on Niels Bohr’s philosophy of quantum mechanics and the constructivist notion of enaction, we stress the constructive, participatory, and irreversible nature of observation in the non-trivial domain. We discuss the possibility of developing a non-representationalist epistemology of the non-trivial, and consider the implications of our discussion for research in the non-trivial domain, as well as for the general understanding of the scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Representationalist theories of sensory experience are often thought to be vulnerable to the existence of apparently non-representational differences between experiences in different sensory modalities. Seeing and hearing seem to differ in their qualia, quite apart from what they represent. The origin of this idea is perhaps Grice’s argument, in “Some Remarks on the Senses,” that the senses are distinguished by “introspectible character.” In this chapter I take the Representationalist side by putting forward an account of sense modalities which is consistent (...) with that view and yet pays due regard to the intuition behind Grice’s argument. Employing J.J. Gibson’s distinction between exploratory and performatory behaviour, I point to a proprioceptive element in perceptual experience, and identify this as crucial in any account of what makes a particular way of perceiving a sense modality. (shrink)

Enactivism maintains that the mind is not produced and localized inside the head but is distributed along and through brain-body-environment interactions. This idea of an intrinsic relationship between the agent and the world derives from the classical phenomenological investigations of the body (Merleau-Ponty in particular). This paper discusses similarities and differences between enactivism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is not usually considered as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between phenomenological investigations and enactivism (or 4E theories in general). After (...) a preliminary analysis of the three principal varieties of enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic and radical), I will present Sartre’s account of the body, addressing some key points that can be related to the current enactivist positions: perception-action unity, anti-representationalism, anti-internalism, organism-environment interaction, and sense-making cognition. Despite some basic similarities, enactivism and Sartre’s phenomenology move in different directions as to how these concepts are developed. Nevertheless, I will suggest that Sartre’s phenomenology is useful to the enactivist approaches to provide a broader and more complete analysis of consciousness and cognition, by developing a pluralist account of corporeality, enriching the investigation of the organism-environment coupling through an existentialist perspective, and reincluding the concept of subjectivity without the hypostatisation of an I-subject detached from body and world. (shrink)

Our main considerations take as a starting point the educational policy demand for a model of competence of text comprehension, which should make it possible to measure and systematically increase comprehension accomplishments and competences. The approach of classical cognitive psychology appears particularly suitable for this purpose, which determines comprehension as a rule-guided transfer of a sign complex into a mental representation. However, such representationalism tends to be aporetic in character. A way out of this problem is offered by (...) recent concepts of understanding from the area ofEmbodied Cognition, according to which all mental operations are embedded in physical interaction processes. Comprehension means, in this sense, letting physical primary experiences be reproduced in a trial-action fashion. This approach is, in this paper, reconsidered in relation to the role of subjectivity and affect: Physical experiences are meaning-generating because they exhibit a subjectively perceived affective valence between pleasure and suffering. The beginning of all understanding therefore is to be located within the emotional sphere.Such a conception of understanding is supposed to have a considerable impact upon language- and literature teaching in schools. For example, training of reading skills should always be embedded in body-bound experiences. Moreover, learning and understanding both mean cultivating an alert ear for affective undertones, needs and irritations, which might even lead to drawing the curricular benchmarks and competency targets into question. Finally, as art and literature establish areas of freedom and play, literature teaching, especially, needs to be founded on affective awareness, discursive openness and proceeding voluntariness. (shrink)

Danto was not a fan of Dewey, the pragmatist who dominated Columbia's philosophy department for much of the twentieth century. A broad context for what might at first seem their total clash of philosophical temperaments is Danto's embrace of analytic philosophy in a period when classical pragmatism was evolving into the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty. A more specific context is Danto's preference for Cartesian‐inflected forms of atomistic explanation and representationalism, in contrast to Dewey's anti‐dualist and anti‐representationalist holism. In (...) addition, Dewey's vision of art as embodied in human experiences across the modern institutional spectrum contrasts starkly with Danto's more “compartmental” account of the Artworld. Yet despite these differences, both philosophers were also (in Dewey's case since the turn of the twentieth century, in Danto's case in late career) deeply, if differently, indebted to Hegel, who provided a fertile framework for understanding how human beings can at one and the same time be social, self‐interpreting spiritual beings and also natural beings. This fact provides a basis for thinking that while Danto never renounced his lifelong aversion to pragmatism, a subtler strand of Dewey's pervasive influence is present in his later writings. (shrink)

Markman and Dietrich¹ recently recommended extending our understanding of representation to incorporate insights from some “alternative” theories of cognition: perceptual symbol systems, situated action, embodied cognition, and dynamical systems. In particular, they suggest that allowances be made for new types of representation which had been previously under-emphasized in cognitive science. The amendments they recommend are based upon the assumption that the alternative positions each agree with the classical view that cognition requires representations, internal mediating states that bear information.² In (...) the case of one of the alternatives, dynamical systems³, this is simply false: many dynamically-oriented cognitive scientists are anti-representationalists.^4,5,6. (shrink)