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Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences

Does Representation Need Reality?

Preface
Currently a paradigm shift is occurring in which the traditional view of the brain as representing the "things of the world" is challenged in several respects. The present volume is placed at the edge of this transition. Based on the 1997 conference "New Trends in Cognitive Science" in Vienna, Austria, it tries to collect and integrate evidence from various disciplines such as philosophy of science, neuroscience, computational approaches, psychology, semiotics, evolutionary biology, social psychology etc., to foster a new understanding of representation. The subjective experience of an outside world seems to suggest a mapping process where environmental entities are projected into our mind via some kind of transmission. While a profound critique of this idea is nearly as old as philosophy, it has gained considerable support with the advancement of empirical science into the study of mental processes. Evidence such as the discovery of single cells that respond to particular environmental features, or specific areas of the brain that light up during specific mental processes in imaging studies, have supported the notion of a mapping process, and provided a deep foundation for materialism and "localism". But the idea of a clear and stable reference between a representational state (e.g., in a neuron, a Hebbian ensemble, an activation state, etc.) and the environmental state has become questionable. Already, we know that learned experiences and expectations can have an impact on the neural activity that is as strong as the stimulus itself. Since these internally stored experiences are constantly changing, the notion of referential representations is challenged. The goal of this book is to discuss the phenomenon of representation on various levels of investigation, as well as its implications. In order to give much room to conceptual and epistemological questions (and less to technical details) the book starts with our position paper "Does Representation Need Reality?" It opens the ground in reviewing evidence that create problems for the conventional understanding of representations. The paper also summarizes the rationale for the selection of contributions to this volume, which will roughly proceed from relatively "realist" conceptions of representation to more "constructivist" interpretations. The final chapter of discussions, taped during and at the end of the conference, provides the reader with the possibility to reflect upon the different approaches and thus contributes to better and more integrative understanding of their thoughts and ideas.

This book has a truly interdisciplinary character. It is presented in a form that is readily accessible to professionals and students alike across the cognitive sciences such as neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. We hope that it will pave the way for a better understanding of representation and inspire its readers in their field of study.

Contents of "Understanding Representation..."

The Fundamentals of Brain Development

Integrating Nature and Nurture

By Joan Stiles, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego.

In a remarkable synthesis of the research of the last two decades, a leading developmental neuroscientist provides psychologists with a sophisticated introduction to the brain--the system that underpins the functions that they study.

In clear terms, with ample illustrations, Joan Stiles explains the complexities of genetic variation and transcription, and the variable paths of neural development, from embryology through early childhood. She describes early developmental processes from gene expression to physiology to behavior. Sections on clinical correlations show the consequences for later physiological, neurological, or psychological disturbances in neural development.

As Stiles shows, brain development is far more complex and dynamic than is often assumed in debates about nature vs. nurture, nativism vs. cultural learning. Inherited and experienced factors interact constantly in an ever-changing organism. The key question is, what developmental processes give rise to particular structures or mechanisms?

A landmark of synthesis and interdisciplinary illumination, The Fundamentals of Brain Development will enrich discussion of developmental processes and more rigorously define the terms that are central to psychological debates.

Philosophy in the Flesh:

The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What is truth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions—that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason is disembodied and universal—that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science. It has been shown empirically that: Most thought is unconscious. We have no direct conscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Our ideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observe them in any simple way.Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical. Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature of time, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavily on basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literal in our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptually impoverished. All the richness comes from metaphor. For instance, we have two mutually incompatible metaphors for time, both of which represent it as movement through space: in one it is a flow past us and in the other a spatial dimension we move along.Mind is embodied. Thought requires a body—not in the trivial sense that you need a physical brain to think with, but in the profound sense that the very structure of our thoughts comes from the nature of the body. Nearly all of our unconscious metaphors are based on common bodily experiences.Most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosopy all do not exist.Then what does?Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosopy responsible to the science of mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self: then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosopy. They reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors. Finally, they take on two major issues of twentieth-century philosopy: how we conceive rationality, and how we conceive language.Philosopy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosopy as it has never been seen before.