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Representation in Cognitive Science
Representation in
Cognitive Science
Nicholas Shea
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Nicholas Shea 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes,
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Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0
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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence
should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939590
ISBN 978–0–19–881288–3
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To Ellie
Huffing and puffing with correlation and function might give us a good account
of subdoxastic aboutness . . . [but it is unlikely to work for the content of doxastic
states.]*
Martin Davies (pers. comm.), developed in Davies (2005)
* Not that the antecedent is easy. And even for the subpersonal case we may have to puff on a few more
ingredients. But I too am optimistic that we can get a good account. This book aims to show how.
Preface
The book is in three parts: introduction, exposition, and defence. Part I is introductory
and light on argument. Chapter 1 is about others’ views. Chapter 2 is the framework
for my own view. I don’t rehearse well-known arguments but simply gesture at the
literature. The aim is to demarcate the problem and motivate my own approach. Part II
changes gear, into more standard philosophical mode. It aims to state my positive view
precisely and to test it against a series of case studies from cognitive science. Part III
engages more carefully with the existing literature, showing that the account developed
in Part II can deal with important arguments made by previous researchers, and arguing
that the framework put forward in Part I has been vindicated.
There is a paragraph-by-paragraph summary at the end of the book. Readers who
want to go straight to a particular issue may find this a useful guide. It replaces the
chapter summaries often found at the end of each chapter of a monograph. The bibli-
ography lists the pages where I discuss each reference, so acts as a fine-grained index
to particular issues. There is also the usual keyword index at the end.
Contents
Part I
1. Introduction 3
1.1 A Foundational Question 3
1.2 Homing In on the Problem 8
1.3 Existing Approaches 12
1.4 Teleosemantics 15
1.5 Challenges to Teleosemantics 18
2. Framework 25
2.1 Setting Aside Some Harder Cases 25
2.2 What Should Constrain Our Theorizing? 28
2.3 Externalist Explanandum, Externalist Explanans 31
2.4 Representation Without a Homunculus 36
2.5 What Vehicle Realism Buys 37
2.6 Pluralism: Varitel Semantics 41
Part II
3. Functions for Representation 47
3.1 Introduction 47
3.2 A Natural Cluster Underpins a Proprietary Explanatory Role 48
3.3 Robust Outcome Functions 52
3.4 Stabilized Functions: Three Types 56
(a) Consequence etiology in general, and natural selection 56
(b) Persistence of organisms 57
(c) Learning with feedback 59
(d) A ‘very modern history’ theory of functions 62
3.5 Task Functions 64
3.6 How Task Functions Get Explanatory Purchase 67
(a) Illustrated with a toy system 67
(b) Swamp systems 69
3.7 Rival Accounts 72
3.8 Conclusion 74
4. Correlational Information 75
4.1 Introduction 75
(a) Exploitable correlational information 75
(b) Toy example 80
4.2 Unmediated Explanatory Information 83
(a) Explaining task functions 83
(b) Reliance on explanation 88
(c) Evidential test 89
x contents
Part III
6. Standard Objections 147
6.1 Introduction 147
6.2 Indeterminacy 148
(a) Aspects of the problem 148
(b) Determinacy of task functions 150
(c) Correlations that play an unmediated role in explaining task functions 151
(d) UE structural correspondence 154
(e) Natural properties 155
(f) Different contents for different vehicles 156
(g) The appropriate amount of determinacy 157
(h) Comparison to other theories 158
6.3 Compositionality and Non-Conceptual Representation 162
6.4 Objection to Relying on (Historical) Functions 166
(a) Swampman 166
(b) Comparison to Millikan and Papineau 169
contents xi
1
Descartes (1637/1988, p. 44: AT VI 56: CSM I I40), quoted by Stoljar (2001, pp. 405–6).
4 introduction
Lovelace, and others in the nineteenth century saw the possibility of general-purpose
mechanical computation, but it wasn’t until the valve-based, then transistor-based
computers of the twentieth century that it became apparent just how powerful this
idea was.2
This remarkable insight can also answer our question about thinking: the answer
is that thinking is the processing of mental representations. We’re familiar with words
and symbols as representations, from marks made on a wet clay tablet to texts appear-
ing on the latest electronic tablet: they are items with meaning.3 A written sentence is
a representation that takes the form of ink marks on paper: ‘roses are red’. It also has
meaning—it is about flowers and their colour. Mental representations are similar:
I believe that today is Tuesday, see that there is an apple in the bowl, hope that the sun
will come out, and think about an exciting mountain climb. These thoughts are all
mental representations. The core is the same as with words and symbols. Mental repre-
sentations are physical things with meaning. A train of thought is a series of mental
representations. That is the so-called ‘representational theory of mind’.
I say the representational theory of mind is ‘an’ answer to our question about thinking,
not ‘the’ answer, because not everyone agrees it is a good idea to appeal to mental rep-
resentations. Granted, doing physical manipulations on things that have meaning is a
great idea. We count on our fingers to add up. We manipulate symbols on the page to
arrive at a mathematical proof. The physical stuff being manipulated can take many
forms. Babbage’s difference engine uses gears and cogs to do long multiplication (see
Figure 1.1). And now our amazingly powerful computers can do this kind of thing at
inhuman speed on an astonishing scale. They manipulate voltage levels not fingers and
can do a lot more than work out how many eggs will be left after breakfast. But they too
work by performing physical manipulations on representations. The only trouble with
carrying this over to the case of thinking is that we’re not really sure how mental repre-
sentations get their meaning.
For myself, I do think that the idea of mental representation is the answer to the
mystery of thinking. There is very good reason to believe that thinking is the process-
ing of meaningful physical entities, mental representations. That insight is one of the
most important discoveries of the twentieth century—it may turn out to be the most
important. But I have to admit that the question of meaning is a little problem in the
foundations. We’ve done well on the ‘processing’ bit but we’re still a bit iffy about the
‘meaningful’ bit. We know what processing of physical particulars is, and how pro-
cessing can respect the meaning of symbols. For example, we can make a machine
whose manipulations obey logical rules and so preserve truth. But we don’t yet have a
clear idea of how representations could get meanings, when the meaning does not
derive from the understanding of an external interpreter.
2
Developments in logic, notably by Frege, were of course an important intermediate step, on which
Turing, von Neumann, and others built in designing computing machines.
3
We’ll have to stretch the point for some of my son’s texts.
introduction 5
Figure 1.1 Babbage’s difference engine uses cogs and gears to perform physical manipulations
on representations of numbers. It is used to multiply large numbers together. The components
are representations of numbers and the physical manipulations make sense in the light of those
contents—they multiply the numbers (using the method of differences).
So, the question remains: how do mental states4 manage to be about things in the
external world? That mental representations are about things in the world, although
utterly commonplace, is deeply puzzling. How do they get their aboutness? The phys-
ical and biological sciences offer no model of how naturalistically respectable prop-
erties could be like that. This is an undoubted lacuna in our understanding, a void
hidden away in the foundations of the cognitive sciences. We behave in ways that are
suited to our environment. We do so by representing the world and processing those
representations in rational ways—at least, there is strong evidence that we do in very
many cases. Mental representations represent objects and properties in the world: the
4
I use ‘mental’ broadly to cover all aspects of an agent’s psychology, including unconscious and/or
low-level information processing; and ‘state’ loosely, so as to include dynamic states, i.e. events and processes.
‘Mental state’ is a convenient shorthand for entities of all kinds that are psychological and bear content.
6 introduction
shape of a fruit, the movement of an animal, the expression on a face. I work out
how much pasta to cook by thinking about how many people there will be for dinner
and how much each they will eat. ‘Content’ is a useful shorthand for the objects,
properties and conditions that a representation refers to or is about. So, the content
of one of my thoughts about dinner is: each person needs 150g of pasta.
What then is the link between a mental representation and its content? The content
of a representation must depend somehow on the way it is produced in response to
input, the way it interacts with other representations, and the behaviour that results.
How do those processes link a mental representation with the external objects and
properties it refers to? How does the thought in my head connect up with quantities of
pasta? In short: what determines the content of a mental representation? That is the
‘content question’. Surprisingly, there is no agreed answer.
This little foundational worry hasn’t stopped the cognitive sciences getting on and
using the idea of mental representation to great effect. Representational explanation is
the central resource of scientific psychology. Many kinds of behaviour have been con-
vincingly explained in terms of the internal algorithms or heuristics by which they are
generated. Ever since the ‘cognitive revolution’ gave the behavioural sciences the idea
of mental representation, one phenomenon after another has succumbed to represen-
tational explanation, from the trajectories of the limbs when reaching to pick up an
object, to parsing the grammar of a sentence. The recent successes of cognitive neuro-
science depend on the same insight, while also telling us how representations are
realized in the brain, a kind of understanding until recently thought to be fanciful.
Figure 1.2 shows a typical example. The details of this experiment need not detain us
for now (detailed case studies come in Part II). Just focus on the explanatory scheme.
There is a set of interconnected brain areas, plus a computation being performed by
those brain areas (sketched in the lower half of panel (a)). Together that tells us how
participants in the experiment manage to perform their task (inset). So, although we
lack a theory of it, there is little reason to doubt the existence of representational content.
We’re in the position of the academic in the cartoon musing, ‘Well it works in practice,
Bob, but I’m not sure it’s really gonna work in theory.’
The lack of an answer to the content question does arouse suspicion that mental
representation is a dubious concept. Some want to eliminate the notion of representa-
tional content from our theorizing entirely, perhaps replacing it with a purely neural
account of behavioural mechanisms. If that were right, it would radically revise our
conception of ourselves as reason-guided agents since reasons are mental contents.
That conception runs deep in the humanities and social sciences, not to mention
ordinary life. But even neuroscientists should want to hold onto the idea of represen-
tation, because their explanations would be seriously impoverished without it. Even
when the causes of behaviour can be picked out in neural terms, our understanding of
why that pattern of neural activity produces this kind of behaviour depends crucially
on neural activity being about things in the organism’s environment. Figure 1.2 doesn’t
just show neural areas, but also how the activity of those areas should be understood as
introduction 7
(a)
primary secondary
higher
sensory
input 1 E 2 1 E 2
prediction
1 R 2 1 R 2
(b)
3 0
2.5
2 –0.5
1.5 –1
1
0.5 –1.5
0 ITG STG
A/B match non- –2
A/B match non-
match match
sensory FG prediction
V1
input 2
12
1.5
10
8 A B
1
6
4 0.5
2 0
A/B match non- 50% 50%
0
A/B match non- match match non-match
match
50% 50%
Figure 1.2 A figure that illustrates the explanatory scheme typical of cognitive neuroscience
(from Rushworth et al. 2009). There is a computation (sketched in the lower half of panel (a)),
implemented in some interacting brain areas, so as to perform a behavioural task (inset). The
details are not important for present purposes.
representing things about the stimuli presented to the people doing a task. The content
of a neural representation makes an explanatory connection with distal features of
the agent’s environment, features that the agent reacts to and then acts on.
One aspect of the problem is consciousness. I want to set that aside. Consciousness
raises a host of additional difficulties. Furthermore, there are cases of thinking and
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appearance, and with the king’s money in his pocket. The grief and
agony of Jeanie, and of her affectionate parents, were past all
description; and the consideration of her rashness and imprudence
having been the occasion of so much distress to herself and others,
rendered her almost desperate.
Henry was not long in the hands of the drill sergeant till he became
nearly as penitent and full of regrets as his lovely young wife, and he
willingly would, had he been permitted, have returned to a faithful
discharge of the duties of a husband; but the country was at that time
in too great need of men such as Henry, to part with him either for
money or interest. When he began to reap the bitter fruits of his own
folly, his affection for Jeanie, if it ever deserved so sacred a name,
returned with redoubled intensity; and that object, for the
abandonment of which he had plunged himself into the hardships of
which he complained, he thought he could not now live without. He
was shortly to be marched off to his regiment, and poor Jeanie,
whose attachment remained unshaken amidst the severe treatment
she had suffered, determined to follow him through all the casualties
of the military life; and at any rate preferred hardship to the disgrace
which she thought she had brought upon herself by her own
imprudence. She had at this time been a mother for little more than
two months; but even this could not change her resolution to follow
the father of her child, exposed as she must be to all the privations
and hardships of the soldier’s wife. She saw her father and mother on
the morning of her departure, but neither she nor they were able to
exchange words, so full were their hearts; save that the old man said,
“God help and bless you, Jeanie!” Scarcely a dry eye was to be seen in
the village that morning, and a crowd of youths, amidst silent
dejection, saw her far on her way, carrying her baby and her bundle
by turns. The toils through which she passed in following her
husband were too many and too severe to be here related. He was
ultimately one of those who assisted to decide the dreadful conflict at
Waterloo, and received a severe wound when the day was just about
won. In a foreign hospital, though he suffered much, he at length
recovered; but upon returning home, his wounds broke forth afresh,
and at last carried him off. Jeanie was now left quite unfriended. She
had seen her two eldest children laid in the dust, the one in a distant
clime, and the other, though on British soil, yet far from the tomb of
her fathers. She still had three surviving, and her parents being gone
to their long home, her only resource at the time I met her was
dependence on public charity.—“The Athenæum,”—Glasgow
University Annual, 1830.
THE VILLAGERS OF AUCHINCRAIG.
By Daniel Gorrie.
Our Laird was a very young man when his father died, and he gaed
awa to France, and Italy, and Flanders, and Germany, immediately,
and we saw naething o’ him for three years; and my brother, John
Baird, went wi’ him as his own body-servant. When that time was
gane by, our Johnny cam hame and tauld us that Sir Claud wad be
here the next day, an’ that he was bringing hame a foreign lady wi’
him—but they were not married. This news was a sair heart, as ye
may suppose, to a’ that were about the house; and we were just glad
that the auld lady was dead and buried, not to hear of sic doings. But
what could we do? To be sure, the rooms were a’ put in order, and
the best chamber in the hale house was got ready for Sir Claud and
her. John tauld me, when we were alane together that night, that I
wad be surprised wi’ her beauty when she came.
But I never could have believed, till I saw her, that she was sae very
young—such a mere bairn, I may say; I’m sure she was not more than
fifteen. Such a dancing, gleesome bit bird of a lassie was never seen;
and ane could not but pity her mair than blame her for what she had
done, she was sae visibly in the daftness and light-headedness of
youth. Oh, how she sang, and played, and galloped about on the
wildest horses in the stable, as fearlessly as if she had been a man!
The house was full of fun and glee; and Sir Claud and she were both
so young and so comely, that it was enough to break ane’s very heart
to behold their thoughtlessness. She was aye sitting on his knee, wi’
her arm about his neck; and for weeks and months this love and
merriment lasted. The poor body had no airs wi’ her; she was just as
humble in her speech to the like of us, as if she had been a cottar’s
lassie. I believe there was not one of us that could help liking her, for
a’ her faults. She was a glaiket creature; but gentle and tender-
hearted as a perfect lamb, and sae bonny! I never sat eyes upon her
match. She had never any colour but black for her gown, and it was
commonly satin, and aye made in the same fashion; and a’ the
perling about her bosom, and a great gowden chain stuck full of
precious rubies and diamonds. She never put powder on her head
neither; oh proud, proud was she of her hair! I’ve often known her
comb and comb at it for an hour on end; and when it was out of the
buckle, the bonny black curls fell as low as her knee. You never saw
such a head of hair since ye were born. She was the daughter of a rich
auld Jew in Flanders, and ran awa frae the house wi’ Sir Claud, ae
night when there was a great feast gaun on,—the Passover supper, as
John thought,—and out she came by the back-door to Sir Claud,
dressed for supper wi’ a’ her braws.
Weel, this lasted for the maist feck of a year; and Perling Joan (for
that was what the servants used to ca’ her, frae the laces about her
bosom), Mrs Joan lay in and had a lassie.
Sir Claud’s auld uncle, the colonel, was come hame from America
about this time, and he wrote for the laird to gang in to Edinburgh to
see him, and he behoved to do this; and away he went ere the bairn
was mair than a fortnight auld, leaving the lady wi’ us.
I was the maist experienced body about the house, and it was me
that got chief charge of being with her in her recovery. The poor
young thing was quite changed now. Often and often did she greet
herself blind, lamenting to me about Sir Claud’s no marrying her; for
she said she did not take muckle thought about thae things afore; but
that now she had a bairn to Sir Claud, and she could not bear to look
the wee thing in the face, and think a’ body would ca’ it a bastard.
And then she said she was come of as decent folk as any lady in
Scotland, and moaned and sobbit about her auld father and her
sisters.
But the colonel, ye see, had gotten Sir Claud into the town; and we
soon began to hear reports that the colonel had been terribly angry
about Perling Joan, and threatened Sir Claud to leave every penny he
had past him, if he did not put Joan away, and marry a lady like
himself. And what wi’ fleeching, and what wi’ flyting, sae it was that
Sir Claud went away to the north wi’ the colonel, and the marriage
between him and lady Juliana was agreed upon, and everything
settled.
Everybody about the house had heard mair or less about a’ this, or
ever a word of it came her length. But at last, Sir Claud himself writes
a long letter, telling her what a’ was to be; and offering to gie her a
heap o’ siller, and send our John ower the sea wi’ her, to see her safe
back to her friends—her and her baby, if she liked best to take it with
her; but if not, the colonel was to take the bairn hame, and bring her
up a lady, away from the house here, not to breed any dispeace.
This was what our Johnny said was to be proposed; for as to the
letter itself, I saw her get it, and she read it twice ower, and flung it
into the fire before my face. She read it, whatever it was, with a
wonderful composure; but the moment after it was in the fire she
gaed clean aff into a fit, and she was out of one and into anither for
maist part of the forenoon. Oh, what a sight she was! It would have
melted the heart of stone to see her.
The first thing that brought her to herself was the sight of her
bairn. I brought it, and laid it on her knee, thinking it would do her
good if she could give it a suck; and the poor trembling thing did as I
bade her; and the moment the bairn’s mouth was at the breast, she
turned as calm as the baby itsel—the tears rapping ower her cheeks,
to be sure, but not one word more. I never heard her either greet or
sob again a’ that day.
I put her and the bairn to bed that night—but nae combing and
curling o’ the bonnie black hair did I see then. However, she seemed
very calm and composed, and I left them, and gaed to my ain bed,
which was in a little room within hers.
Next morning, the bed was found cauld and empty, and the front
door of the house standing wide open. We dragged the waters, and
sent man and horse every gate, but ne’er a trace of her could we ever
light on, till a letter came twa or three weeks after, addressed to me,
frae hersel. It was just a line or twa, to say that she was well, and
thanking me, poor thing, for having been attentive about her in her
down-lying. It was dated frae London. And she charged me to say
nothing to anybody of having received it. But this was what I could
not do; for everybody had set it down for a certain thing, that the
poor lassie had made away baith wi’ hersel and the bairn.
I dinna weel ken whether it was owing to this or not, but Sir
Claud’s marriage was put aff for twa or three years, and he never cam
near us a’ that while. At length word came that the wedding was to be
put over directly; and painters, and upholsterers, and I know not
what all, came and turned the hale house upside down, to prepare for
my lady’s hame-coming. The only room that they never meddled wi’
was that that had been Mrs Joan’s: and no doubt they had been
ordered what to do.
Weel, the day came, and a braw sunny spring day it was, that Sir
Claud and the bride were to come hame to the Mains. The grass was
a’ new mawn about the policy, and the walks sweepit, and the cloth
laid for dinner, and everybody in their best to give them their
welcoming. John Baird came galloping up the avenue like mad, to
tell us that the coach was amaist within sight, and gar us put oursels
in order afore the ha’ steps. We were a’ standing there in our ranks,
and up came the coach rattling and driving, wi’ I dinna ken how
mony servants riding behind it; and Sir Claud lookit out at the
window, and was waving his handkerchief to us, when, just as fast as
fire ever flew frae flint, a woman in a red cloak rushed out from
among the auld shrubbery at the west end of the house, and flung
herself in among the horses’ feet, and the wheels gaed clean out ower
her breast, and crushed her dead in a single moment. She never
stirred. Poor thing! she was nae Perling Joan then. She was in rags—
perfect rags all below the bit cloak; and we found the bairn, rowed in
a checked apron, lying just behind the hedge. A braw heartsome
welcoming for a pair of young married folk!—The History of
Matthew Wald.
JANET SMITH.