Explaining Cognitive Phenomena with Internal Representations: A Mechanistic Perspective

Abstract

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a (truly, genuinely, nontrivially, etc.) representational explanation in the first place. The aim of this article is to propose a solution to this latter problem. I will assume that representational explanations should be construed as a form of mechanistic explanations and proceed by proposing a general sketch of a functional architecture of a representational cognitive mechanism. According to the view on offer here, representational mechanisms are mechanisms that meet four conditions: the structural resemblance condition, the action-guidance condition, the decouplability condition, and the error-detection condition.

Structural representation and the two problems of content

“…The fourth and most controversial condition is “system‐detectable error” (systems dependent on S‐representations must be capable of detecting an error based on an insufficiency in their correspondence to their target). Advocates of system‐detectable error typically take it to be required, for it is only systems that are capable of detecting a mismatch resulting in their own actions and some target, for which error matters for that system (e.g., Gładziejewski, ; Miłkowski, ; following Bickhard, , ). As we shall see below, system‐detectable error strengthens the idea that content adds something of epistemic value when describing the contribution of an S‐representation to the success or failure of a containing system.…”

“…The mechanistic framework allows us to conceive of a representation as a mechanism which contains at least one component whose functional role is to stand‐in for something on behalf of the containing system. Piecing this together with our discussion of S‐representation as an account of sufficient conditions for playing the role of a stand‐in, at least one way of being a representation is to be a mechanism which contains a component whose functional role is characterized by structural correspondence, action‐guidance, decouplability and system‐detectable error (Gładziejewski, ). Once again, a key virtue of embedding S‐representations within a mechanistic framework is that it turns the notion of representation into a substantive theoretical commitment with empirical force.…”

“…This instantiation reflects those conditions under which the S‐representation would count as accurate, if those conditions were to co‐extend with the target. Let us call this the representation's “contextual content.” I take contextual content to be equivalent to the kind of content identified by Bickhard () and Gładziejewski (), such as when the latter talks of content as that which “determines the representations conditions of successful action guidance ” (p. 80. Original emphasis).…”

“…Let us call this the representation's "contextual content." I take contextual content to be equivalent to the kind of content identified by Bickhard (1999) and Gładziejewski (2015), such as when the latter talks of content as that which "determines the representations conditions of successful action guidance" (p. 80. Original emphasis).…”

“…Though some proponents of S-representation have touched upon the issue of how to think about content (e.g., Cummins, 1989;Gładziejewski, 2015;Gładziejewski & Miłkowski, 2017;O'Brien & Opie, 2004;Ramsey, 2007Ramsey, , 2016, the literature has largely been pre-occupied with dissecting and defending the broad-brush functional properties required for an entity to count as an S-representation. In this paper, I tackle the issue of content head on.…”