Representation in Psychology and Philosophy

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In his (2009) "Making up the mind", neuropsychologist Chris Frith claims that what we are aware of is a "fantasy which coincides with reality"; that is, our brains construct a model, or representation, of reality, which is the result of a great deal of unconscious inferences, necessary for the interpretation of the raw sensory data. At the same time, in Philosophy of Mind, intentionalists claim that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being such and such, and that the properties we attribute to the outer objects need not be instantiated ones; rather, those properties are merely represented in our experience.
The concept of "representation", I think, has been overloaded with different meanings, and this, in turn, is causing me some troubles in getting a clear grasp of the above mentioned theories. In particular, I find myself facing the following issue: how different is the concept of representation employed by psychology from the one used in philosophy of mind? Is Frith (as well as many others) referring to the same kind of representation intentionalists such as Tye and Dretske refer to when claiming that our experiences represent reality?

I am extremely thankful for any answers or contributions you will provide.

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@tiesti-episteme,

I think a better thing to consider is that any psychological or philosophical considerations about REALITY...are merely considerations. It appears nobody has a corner on KNOWLEDGE and the TRUTH in this area...and your considerations and guesses about the REALITY have essentially the same validity as anyone else's.

There is value in trying to understand other people's considerations, but don't get lost in it.

And good luck with trying to understand the material you brought to the forum here. I hope some of our people offer decent help in that direction.

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@tiesti-episteme,

What you describe sounds like cognitive science (a relatively new area of study that combines philosophy, psychology and neuroscience).

Quote:

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than seventy universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.
--Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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@tiesti-episteme,

The general trend post Wittgenstein, Quine and the demise of representationalist models in cognitive science ( re AI )is to emphasize that perception is both species "hard wired" and also selectively active and adaptive. Thus instead of the word "representation" suggesting some sort of isomorphism with an "independent reality", we might instead split the word into "re-presentation", i.e. a re-living of an inter-actional episode in which observer and observed are deemed "co-existent". (See Heidegger/Dreyfus for the philosophy and Merleau-Ponty/Varela for the psychology. References to the demise of representation are summarised in Rorty's seminal work "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature")

Note that it is second generation cognitive science (post 1990) which encompasses this trend which is essentially a rejection of the psycho-physical parallelism avocated by the originators of "experimental psychology" such as Weber and Fichte.

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@fresco,

Many thanks for your response.
There is still something I am not able to properly grasp.
What do intentionalists such as Tye and Dretske mean exactly by saying that " we REPRESENT the world as being such and such" ?

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@tiesti-episteme,

I am not familiar with these writers, probably because at least one of them (Tye) appears to be a "naive realist". i.e.They believe there is "a world out there independent of observers", and Dretske seems to think that even "the mind" (containing "intentions") is "an object for observation". (check Ryle's "category mistake" on that .) So it appears that by "representation" these two generally think that there are " mappings" (via sensation) between internal (intentions) and external events albeit not necessarily isomorphic (one to one) . But IMO a simple analysis of the questions "what constitutes an event ?" or "what defines information ?" seriously undermines such mapping approaches. The fact that they have (expensively) failed in AI, and have been transcended by "systems theory" (Von Foerster and Maturana), adds weight to the theme I have outlined.

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@tiesti-episteme,

I can recommend this as an introduction to the "systems theory" approach mentioned above.
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm
...selected quote....

Quote:

cognition is not a means to acquire knowledge of an objective reality but serves the active organism in its adaptation to its experiential world.

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@tiesti-episteme,

Quote:

In his (2009) "Making up the mind", neuropsychologist Chris Frith claims that what we are aware of is a "fantasy which coincides with reality"; that is, our brains construct a model, or representation, of reality, which is the result of a great deal of unconscious inferences, necessary for the interpretation of the raw sensory data.

Yes, you're storing representations of past experiences that are employed to understand continuing new perceptions of the "external world" presented to you: As language, concepts, beliefs, facts, personal memories and conditioned responses, hermeneutical approaches or methods of one sort or another.

Quote:

At the same time, in Philosophy of Mind, intentionalists claim that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being such and such, and that the properties we attribute to the outer objects need not be instantiated ones; rather, those properties are merely represented in our experience.

The commonsense assumption that there is an orderly structure to simulate. Kant's "things in themselves" were discrete sources of power or influence that got organized into a "world" within certain "TiTs" (minds) possessing intuitions (space and time) and intellective rules (categories) for integrating these discrete effects into such. That is, Kant's so-called "representations" were really more like "presentations", as there wasn't even a spatiotemporal or natural world prior to the generation of experience, to be poorly copying. What we perceive accordingly is the "empirically real world" (not a copy), though science could still infer or add hidden substrates to this phenomenal world, just as analyzing a broad concept will reveal other concepts / particulars subsumed under it.

Kant may have been ahead of his era. There's a trend in physics, driven by QM to seek quanta or discrete components for everything, where even space and time (or spacetime) will eventually be regarded as non-fundamental.

Tim Folger: "These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time? As [Carl] Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. 'Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,' says Rovelli. 'There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.'"

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@G H,

I suppose the expression on "top of one another" which still is a continued attempt of "spacializing" something renders me dazzled as without any sense of space "on top of one another" is just meaningless...the poor definition of absence of space as being one infinitesimal point, to where I stand is just that, a definition... one that try s to bring some sense to something ultimately incomprehensible...personally while I accept time as one expression of extended space, I can't accept space itself as not fundamental even if reducing its multi dimensional expression to at least a single one...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

...while I may agree that a final more abstract and more mature concept of Space needs not be the concrete physical holder space we know, where matter and energy dwells, and thus that such space may in fact be an emergent property of reality, I still maintain that completely overcoming the fundamental essence of such concept is utter bullshit...it aims nothing but havoc and confusion.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

I suppose the expression on "top of one another" which still is a continued attempt of "spacializing" something renders me dazzled as without any sense of space "on top of one another" is just meaningless...the poor definition of absence of space as being one infinitesimal point, to where I stand is just that, a definition...

It would be "interpenetrate each other" rather than "on top of one another"; that is, leave it to scientists to botch their choices for non-quantitative descriptions. Although one might refer to an unlimited number of bosons being able to occupy the same quantum state as a helpful metaphor, it's not necessarily the case that any fundamental quanta of time and space would be depending upon a similar inapplicability of the Pauli Exclusion Principle to themselves. Also, the quoted metaphor of residing in some singularity-like realm was off-course as well, since a conclusion or need for such results from being embedded in an extended circumstance that engenders the relational contrast and comparison of "That's extended (space) and this is not (point)". The former being absent leads to the other term or classification having no relevance.

Quote:

one that try s to bring some sense to something ultimately incomprehensible...personally while I accept time as one expression of extended space, I can't accept space itself as not fundamental even if reducing its multi dimensional expression to at least a single one...

That's normal for any of us. Experience is trapped in the principles it conforms to. Higher dimensions were once incomprehensible in terms of perception and phenomenal imagination, but nevertheless were finally captured by and derived meaningfulness in mathematical description / formulation. One could say the same for much of the weird, intelligible world -like substrates and entities that physics deals with. They try to offer "pictures" for how they could exist in an empirical non-abstract manner, but in the end it's perhaps similar to assigning the English word-symbol "London" to represent the actual city, which does not remotely resemble the latter.

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@G H,

I think in the least one can't evade space even if some sort of "abstract space"...without it, even best words like "interpenetration" are meaningless...any form of orderly description of phenomena requires some sort of spatial axis even if abstract...for instance imagining independent time (not spacetime ) relative or not, does just that...that is, time "structuralizes" a sequence of relating events without referring necessarily to an "actual" background...a colourful way to put it would be by saying that you still have "space" without space, as long as cause and effect are in place, or as long events have a sequencing for manifesting themselves...so from the beginning, one must be careful with what one means with having or not having space...

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