In defense of picturing; Sellars’s philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

I argue that Sellars's distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called 'signifying' and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark's 'radical predictive processing', to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended.

Picturing, signifying, and attending

“…2 The significance of this claim will become clearer over the course of this paper; but for now, the important thing to note is that Sellars's distinction turns on an account of the embodied strategies that cognitive systems develop as they learn to engage with aspects of the world that matter to them. Sellars argues that cognitive systems develop models of the world that they inhabit using simple forms of error-driven learning; the resulting models are highly structured, but they are not conceptually organized-they are holistically structured models that are constantly 2 For alternative discussions of picturing, which explore Sellars's claims in more detail, see Levine (2007), O'Shea (2007), and Sachs (2018).…”

“…I no longer think that this is the right way to develop the argument. But for another way of thinking about this distinction, which draws on a predictive coding framework, and which may be closer to Sellars's own commitments, see Sachs (2018).…”