Cognition without Representation?

1997

The computer metaphor of cognitivism that has had such a strong in uence on cognitive science over recent decades seems to be confronted (again) by a competitor: the brain metaphor put forward by connectionism (e.g. Mc-Clelland and). Connectionism assumes that mental phenomena can be explained in terms of the parallel activation and interaction of a large number of units (model neurons). These units are linked by connections (arti cial synapses) which modulate the transmitted activity. Knowledge is represented in these connections between the units and learning takes place by adjusting their strength. An important, and much emphasized, aspect of connectionist models is their emergent behaviour. The massive parallel interaction of a large number of simple units can lead to qualitatively di erent and more interesting forms of behaviour. Successes of this connectionist approach range from models of human memory (e.g. ) to practical applications that can control the navigation of cars ]. An interesting property of these models is their robustness against loss of interconnections. This is interpreted by some as an indication of their biological plausibility (e.g. Hinton et al. 1991]).

Abstract: Taking 'computational neuroscience'to denote theoretical neuroscience, I describe accounts of representation, neural computation, and cognitive function consistent with recent advances in this field. During this discussion I provide an overview of neural coding and survey its possible implications for more traditional theories of the meaning of mental representations.

Psyche, 2006

Current views of consciousness can be divided by whether the theorist accepts or rejects cognitivism about consciousness. Cognitivism as we understand it is the view that consciousness is just a form of representation or an information-processing property of a system that has representations or perhaps both. Anti-cognitivists deny this, appealing to thought experiments about inverted spectra, zombies and the like to argue that consciousness could change while nothing cognitive or representational changes. Nearly everyone agrees, however, that consciousness has a representational base. Whether consciousness simply is representational or cognitive, it at least requires representation (and cognition). In an ecumenical spirit, we will focus on this point of agreement and sketch a theory of what this representational base might be. We hope that the result will be a framework useful for investigating consciousness empirically.

Philosophical Explorations, 2018

This paper engages critically with anti-representationalist arguments pressed by prominent enactivists and their allies. The arguments in question are meant to show that the “as-such” and “job-description” problems constitute insurmountable challenges to causal-informational theories of mental content. In response to these challenges, a positive account of what makes a physical or computational structure a mental representation is proposed; the positive account is inspired partly by Dretske’s views about content and partly by the role of mental representations in contemporary cognitive scientific modeling.

1990

The character of computational modelling of cognition depends on an underlying theory of representation. Classical cognitive science has exploited the syntax/semantics theory of representation that derives from logic. But this has had the consequence that the kind of psychological explanation supported by classical cognitive science is conceptualist: psychological phenomena are modelled in terms of relations that hold between concepts, and between the sensors/effectors and concepts. This kind of explanation is inappropriate for the Proper Treatment of Connectionism . Is there an alternative theory of representation that retains the advantages of classical theory, but which does not force psychological explanation into the conceptualist mould? I outline such an alternative by introducing an experience-based notion of nonconceptual content and by showing how a complex construction out of nonconceptual content can satisfy classical constraints on cognition. The psychologically fundamental structure of cognition is not the structure that holds between concepts, but, rather, the structure within concepts. The theory of the representational structure within concepts allows psychological phenomena to be explained as the progressive emergence of objectivity. This can be modelled computationally by means of the computational processes of a perspective-dependence-reducing transformer. This device may be thought of as a generalisation of a cognitive map, which includes the processes of map-formation and map use. It forms computational structures which take nonconceptual contents as inputs and yield nonconceptual contents as outputs, but do so in a way which makes the resulting capacity of the system less and less dependent on any particular perspectives, yielding satisfactory performance from any point of view.

One of the principal tasks confronting cognitive science is to explain how cognitive systems are capable of representing their environment. It is a commonplace in the philosophy of mind that a theory of mental representation must be naturalistic, in the sense that it must explain mental representation without appealing to properties that are either non-physical or already representational. What is not quite so commonplace is the further injunction that such a theory must explain mental representation in a fashion consistent with its casual role in shaping behaviour. We call this the "causal constraint" on a theory of mental representation. Remarkably, even though the well-known causal, functional, and teleosemantic theories of mental representation are all naturalistic, they all violate the causal constraint. Despite their internal differences, these theories ultimately ground mental content in the behaviour of cognitive systems. And any theory that grounds mental content in behaviour is in principle unable to explain how mental representation is causally responsible for such behaviour. The task we undertake in this paper is to sketch the outlines of a naturalistic theory of mental representation that satisfies the causal constraint. We call this a structuralist theory of mental representation for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed.

2005

Journal of Consciousness Studies

Connection Science, 1992

There is an apparent anomaly in the notion that connectionism, which is fundamentally a new technology, has considerable philosophical significance. Nonetheless, connectionism has been widely viewed as having implications for symbol grounding, notions of structured representation and compositionality, as well as the issue of nativism. In this paper, we consider each of these issues in detail, and find that the current state of connectionism does not warrant the magnitude of many of the philosophical conclusions drawn from it. We argue that connectionist models are no more "grounded" than their classical counterparts. In addition, since connectionist representations typically are ascribed content through semantic interpretation based on correlation, connectionism is prone to a number of well-known philosophical problems facing any kind of correlational semantics. However, we suggest that philosophy may be ill-advised to ignore the development of connectionism, particularly if connectionist systems prove to be able to learn to handle structured representations.