Representation (re-présentation ?!)

Representation Just as one of the serious problems for a naturalization of function is to make sense of dysfunction, one of the serious problems for a naturalization of representation is to make sense of (the very possibility of) representational error (Fodor, 1987, 1990a). There is a arge literature on this task, but virtually none of it would satisfy a strict naturalism even if it succeeded on its own terms -- and even "its own terms" are generally conceded to have not been met: "Deep down, I think I don't believe any of this. But the question what to put in its place is too hard for me." (Fodor, 1990b, p. 190)

The reason that success in the attempted models of representation would not yield a naturalistic model is that they involve an intrinsic and ultimately circular dependency on an observer. The primary criterion that is set for modeling representational error is that an observer of the supposed representational system could distinguish correct representations from false representations (as, for example, if Fodor's asymmetric dependency condition succeeded "on its own terms" -- Loewer & Rey, 1991). Success in this endeavor would at best yield a notion of representational error, and, thus, representation, that was dependent on such an observer. But observers are precisely what we are attempting to model in the first place -- or at least their representations -- so this dependency introduces a fatal circularity.

Furthermore, if representational error can be distinguished only from the perspective of an observer, then the offered model of representation cannot be accepted even if the circularity per se is ignored. There are many processes and activities that are guided by representational error -- error feedback in interaction and error selection in learning, for example -- and these require representational error that is detectable by the system itself, not just by an observer. A system cannot guide interaction or learning with respect to error that it cannot detect. None of the standard approaches to representation can satisfy this fundamental criterion (Bickhard, 1999; Bickhard & Terveen, 1995). [2]

Note that the central argument of classical skepticism is that any check on representational error is circular, and, therefore, knowledge is not possible. If epistemic access to the world is in terms of epistemic correspondences, then correspondences cannot be checked except via those correspondences: circularity. This argument has had a rather long and successful career (Annes & Barnes, 1985; Barnes, 1990; Burnyeat, 1983; Groarke, 1990; Hookway, 1992; Popkin, 1979; Rescher, 1980). But the dependency of action and learning on precisely such error suggests that skepticism poses serious problems for the scientist as well as for the philosopher: representational feedback interactions and representational learning cannot be modeled in any framework that does not avoid the skeptical argument concerning error. Conversely, that career suggests that this is a problem that is non-trivial to solve.

I have argued that the error problem cannot be solved within the standard approaches to representation -- approaches that have dominated thinking about the mind and representation for a very long time. Such approaches, which I collectively call encodingism, assume that representational relationships are some special form of correspondence relationships -- correspondences between representations and the represented (e.g., Clark, 1997; Dretske, 1981, 1988; Fodor, 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1998; Hanson, 1990; Smith, 1987). [3] Correspondences, however, are ubiquitous throughout the universe, and very few of them are representational. Attempting to figure out which ones are, and how they are, has consumed a great deal of effort.

I argue that the only genuine correspondence representations are those that make use of the very representational properties that we want to account for in a model of emergent and original representation. Morse code is an example of genuine correspondence representations: "dot dot dot" is in correspondence with "S", and it is so because it is known to be so by everyone that uses Morse code. This works just fine for genuine encodings (or ciphers), such as Morse code, but is fatally circular if we are attempting to account for representation per se: Morse code correspondences are representational only because we, who already possess the capacity to represent, represent them that way.

The alternative that I offer, and will be assuming in the following discussion, is called interactivism. Interactive representation is emergent in interactive system organization. In this view, representation is a phenomenon of pragmatics, not just the processing of inputs. The framework for the model is consonant with the action focus of Peirce (Hookway, 1985; Joas, 1993; Mounce, 1997; Rosenthal, 1983), rather than the focus within consciousness of Plato or Aristotle.

The intuition of the interactive model of representation begins with the recognition that the course of an interaction between a system and its environment can be functionally anticipated in and by the system. This could be accomplished by, for example, pointers to (sets of functionally anticipated) "next states", or functional readinesses to process restricted classes of potential inputs, or functional readiness to proceed in restricted forms of further interaction, and so on. Such functional anticipations can be falsified by the actual course of the interaction -- the environment might not satisfy or fulfill the anticipations. Such potential falsification constitutes the emergence of truth value, the fundamental, criterial, property of representation (Bickhard, 1993). In particular, error in such anticipations is not only definable, but is also detectable in and by and for the system itself: failure of functional anticipations is a functionally detectable condition. In this view, the skeptical argument that discovering epistemic error is impossible is valid, but unsound: it is based on a false assumption about the basic category within which representation is to be understood -- correspondence.

Such a minimal emergence of naturalistic truth value is a long way from accounting for more familiar representational phenomena. The minimal model might account for the representations of very simple organisms, but what about representations of objects, space and time, numbers and other abstractions? What is interacted with for such abstract representations? And what about other phenomena that are commonly thought to be representational in nature, such as language? I will not address these issues here, but will assume that all are more complex versions of interactive representation, and interactive phenomena in general (see, in addition to references mentioned above, Bickhard, 1980a, 1987, 1992c, 1995, 1996, 1998a; Bickhard & Campbell, 1992; Campbell & Bickhard, 1992b).