Representation in Cognitive Science

Abstract

The representational theory of mind (RTM) has given us the powerful insight that thinking consists of the processing of mental representations. Behaviour is the result of these cognitive processes and makes sense in the light of their contents. There is no widely accepted account of how representations get their content – of the metaphysics of representational content. That question, usually asked about representations at the personal level like beliefs and conscious states, is equally pressing for the subpersonal representations that pervade our best explanatory theories in cognitive science. This book argues that well-understood naturalistic resources can be combined to provide an account of subpersonal representational content. It shows how contents arise in a series of detailed case studies in cognitive science. The account is pluralistic, allowing that content is constituted differently in different cases. Building on insights from previous theories, especially teleosemantics, the accounts combine an appeal to correlational information and structural correspondence with an expanded notion of etiological function, which captures the kinds of stabilizing processes that give rise to content. The accounts support a distinction between descriptive and directive content. They also allow us to see how representational explanation gets its distinctive explanatory purchase.

The Meta-Dynamic Nature of Consciousness

“…The representation could be of one of the many forms proposed in theories of representation in cognitive science, AI, etc. (see, e.g., [50] for comprehensive survey and discussion of the fundamental space of possibilities). But I argue (see Appendix section A.3) that there is no theory of representation that is completely objective-free of any subjective construal of what is represented by what-and completely pre-reflective.…”

“…As mentioned in Section 2.3, there is, I argue, no theory of representation that is both completely objective and pre-reflective. For instance, in the comprehensive survey of possibilities that Shea [50] goes through in devising a theory of representation, it is possible to discern in every one a point where it either (i) requires something that would be a matter of complex informational structures, or use of concepts, and would therefore go outside pre-reflectivity, or (ii) involves non-objective considerations about what represents what.…”

The Meta-Dynamic Nature of Consciousness

“…The representation could be of one of the many forms proposed in theories of representation in cognitive science, AI, etc. (see, e.g., [51] for comprehensive survey and discussion of the fundamental space of possibilities). But I argue (see Appendix section A.3) that there is no theory of representation that is completely objective-free of any subjective construal of what is represented by what-and completely pre-reflective.…”

“…As mentioned in Section 2.3, there is, I argue, no theory of representation that is both completely objective and pre-reflective. For instance, in the comprehensive survey of possibilities that Shea [51] goes through in devising a theory of representation, it is possible to discern in every one a point where it either (i) requires something that would be a matter of complex informational structures, or use of concepts, and would therefore go outside pre-reflectivity, or (ii) involves non-objective considerations about what represents what.…”

Usefulness Drives Representations to Truth

“…Payoff Sender Act World Figure 1: A sender-receiver pipeline To name but a few of the theorists that have defended versions of this idea, in the teleosemantic approach to the representational-status question (Artiga 2019;Martínez 2013;Millikan 1984;Neander 2017;Papineau 1987;Shea 2018) representations mediate between a producer and a consumer (those are the names senders and receivers go by in teleosemantic quarters), and their semantic properties depend on the way they help fulfill their teleofunctions-i.e., whatever it is that producer and consumer are supposed to achieve. Such teleofunctions are, in turn, tied up with usefulness: the most common, etiological approach to the naturalization of teleofunction (Wright 1994;Millikan 2002) makes them depend on regimes of natural selection, learning, or design.…”