Implicitness - Bikhard

Implicitness . One important property that is inherent in interactive representation is that of implicitness. Interactive representations differentiate those environments, and environmental properties, that would support the interactive anticipations from those that would not -- but those differentiations are strictly implicit. There is no explicit representation of those environments or properties per se. There can be explicit representations of relationships among such implicitly defined categories: for example, any encounter with anything in "this" implicitly defined class of environments will also be an encounter with "that" implicitly defined class of environments (Bickhard, 1998a).

One important aspect of representational implicitness is that environmental equivalence classes can be differentiated without having any further knowledge or representation about any specifics of the environments in those classes; this stands in contrast to encoding models, in which all representation is explicit (witness the encodingist arguments about whether frogs, which will tongue-flick at flies, but also at BBs, "really" represent flies or BBs or little black dots, etc., Fodor, 1987, 1990a; Loewer & Rey, 1991). A related aspect is that implicit representations are unbounded: there is no apriori bound on what will fall in a differentiated class.