The Representational and the Presentational by Benny Shanon

Author:Benny Shanon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cognition, cognitive science, conceptual foundations, mind, representational account, representationalism, cognitive system, action in the world, consciousness, psychology, computationalism, explanatory gap, action and interaction, time, temporality
ISBN: 9781845405120
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The fourth line of the critique

As noted at the outset, this is a psychological, not a philosophical, critique. Its topic is a particular theoretical framework in contemporary psychology: it is concerned with specific structures (representations in the technical-psychological sense), and it examines how suitable they are for modelling cognition. By contrast, philosophical critiques of representations are concerned with their status and role, regardless of their specific structural features. Such critiques ask not whether specifically defined representational structures are suitable for the modelling of mind, but whether such modelling necessitates the postulation of representations tout court. In the terminology introduced in Chapter 1, the subject of these critiques is representation in the naive and epistemic senses.

Yet, even though this critique is psychological, it bears on the philosophical questions as well. It appears that one can argue against the postulation of representations in the naive and epistemic senses not only on philosophical grounds, but also on psychological ones. With the completion of the three lines of the psychological critique, it seems that not only the profile of characteristics of semantic representations specified in (**) of Chapter 1 but also the very notion of mental entities sitting somewhere in the mind and serving for the representation of knowledge are not tenable. In this last chapter of the critical part of the book, I shall consider this notion. With this, I shall come full circle, for the problem of knowledge is most closely related to the epistemic issues with which I began this critique. As I shall show, the consideration relates to the other lines of the critique as well.

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