Representations reclaimed

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between concepts and experience seems necessary to specifying the content of experience, yet current theories of concepts do not seem up to the job. With Peter Gärdenfors's conceptual spaces theory as a foundation and with enactivist philosophy as inspiration, we present a proposed extension to conceptual spaces theory and use it to outline a model of the emergence of concepts and experience. We conclude that neither is ultimately primary but each gives rise to the other: i.e., that they co-emerge. Such a model can then serve as the anchor to a theory of concepts more generally. Concepts are most naturally understood in symbolic and representational terms, while much of experience, in contrast, is non-symbolic and non-representational; yet the conflict between the two will, herein, be shown to be more apparent than real. The main contribution of this paper is to argue for, by means of this account of co-emergence, a continuum between "low-level" mental content that is more appropriately understood in highly context-sensitive and directly sensorimotorbased terms, and "high-level" mental content that is more appropriately understood in context-free and representational or symbolic terms. In doing so we conclude that the extreme positions of representationalism and anti-representationalism are fatally flawed.

Consciousness, semiosis, and the unbinding problem

“…Other uses of "internal" and "external" must surely be metaphorical -and should be recognized as such. The assumption of an ontological divide is reflected in the common distinction between the five so-called external senses and the internal senses of interoception and proprioception (to which one might add introspection) -a distinction that enactivists would be inclined to say might best be discarded, preserved only as a useful conceptual shorthand at best 10 . In place of external sensory modalities and internal sensory modalities, one ends up simply with sensory (actually, sensorimotor) experience, 9 If right, this opens the door to the plausibility of a libertarian account of free will.…”

“…Such an assumption I take to be implicit in all but the most strongly reductive if not eliminative theories of consciousness -an assumption that, I think, if one is indeed making, one would be well advised to make explicit. As I argue at length in [10], concepts and experience are locked in a circular causal relationship whereby experience gives rise to concepts, which in turn structure experience, such that it is impossible for the conceptual agent to say how or where the circle begins. way explicit 4 ) experience of cognition.…”

What Makes Any Agent a Moral Agent? Reflections on Machine Consciousness and Moral Agency

“…Remember that we have tied moral agency to the possession and observable appropriate employment of a number of key concepts -or, if one prefers, conceptual abilities. Therefore, it seems fitting that the tools we suggest in place of the Moral Turing Test are taken from the literature on theories of concepts within philosophy of mind: in particular, the conceptual spaces theory of Gärdenfors (2004) and the unified conceptual space extensions to it offered by the first author on this paper ( (Parthemore, 2011a); an earlier version can be found in (Parthemore and Morse, 2010)).…”

Applications of Conceptual Spaces

“…Of the above accounts, only CST has faced any kind of empirical investigation. As an extension of CST explicitly informed by enactive philosophy (see below), the Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST) (Parthemore 2013(Parthemore , 2011aParthemore and Morse 2010) is designed from the ground up to be amenable to empirical investigation.…”