![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a further kind of representation – procedural representation – represents. It is argued that, in some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are distinctively practical, in a sense which I will clarify. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments. I am also indebted to Tyler Burge, Felipe De Brigard, Mike Martin, Gabe Greenberg, Kevin Lande, and Josh Armstrong for helpful discussion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. On the perspectival character of perceptual representation, see also Lande (Citation2018b).
2. Of course, the relevant false reading is de dicto – with the “as…” clause having a narrow scope.
3. Not everybody understands perception in terms of tracking. For example, Lupyan and Clark (Citation2015) defend a view of perception as a predictive process rather than as a tracking process. It is an interesting question, but one that I cannot fully address here, whether on such a “predictive” view of perception the taxonomy I am proposing for mental representation would radically change. I am grateful to Felipe De Brigard for discussion here.
4. I am following Burge (Citation2010) in taking predication to be a kind of categorization, one that is distinctive of concepts. I am allowing that perceptual representations can categorize too, although they cannot predicate. By “categorization,” I mean both category production (when a person identifies which attributes an individual possesses if it is a member of a certain category) and category identification (when a person identifies the category to which an individual belongs). Cfr. Prinz (Citation2001, p. 9).
5. I will remain neutral on what these conceptual representations must be like in order to play the theoretical role of explaining higher-order cognitive capacities of predication and thinking – for example, whether concepts must be definitions, exemplars, prototypes, bodies of knowledge, or anything else.
6. It is important to clarify that the current claim is not that whenever one mental state has a mind-to-world direction of fit, it also represents practically. For example, desires have a mind-to-world direction of fit, but they do not represent practically in the sense clarified here. This is because they do not represent the world differently depending on the subject’s practical abilities. I will return to this point later in the text.
7. Indeed, it is quite natural to think of motor commands as linguistic representations, on the model of programming languages’ commands. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I do not want to lean on the assumption that motor commands must be linguistic. I want to allow that motor commands might be more akin to imperatival pictures such as architectural plans or road-side warning signs than they are to linguistic representations. As a consequence, my discussion will be more abstract but will hopefully gain in generality.
8. What is an action? As Barker (2012, p. 1) puts it, “Actions change the world. This means that actions can be characterized by before-and after pictures, that is, by a picture of the world before the action is performed, and a picture of the world afterwards. Technically, then, an action will be a relation over worlds, a set whose elements are ordered pairs <w, wi> where w is the world before the action and wi is the world after the action in question has been performed.” Thus, for example, the meaning of an imperative such as (1) is the set of world pairs in which the second world is a continuation of the first world in which the addressee dances.
9. One might think that probabilistic methods are a counterexample to this “determination” claim, for they enable the execution of a task only with a certain probability of success. However, the determination claim can still be upheld by being careful about what task it is which a probabilistic method determines or fixes: A probabilistic method for F-ing with x percent probability of success determines the task of F-ing with x percent probability of success. Because methods stand to tasks in a many-to-one relation and can be said to determine tasks, several people have pointed out (Girard Citation1989: chapter 1; Moschovakis Citation1994, p. 17; Muskens Citation2005; Pavese Citation2015b, p. 3) that methods stand to tasks in the same way that Fregean meanings (or senses) stand to their denotations (or referents). Consequently, methods are plausible candidates for being the modes of presentation of tasks.
10. This argument to the effect that methods cannot indefinitely divide tasks into sub-operations closely resembles Fodor’s (1968, p. 629) argument against the objection from the “proliferation of homunculi.” Like Fodor’s, my argument focuses on the need for a satisfactory explanation (e.g., of how a system s performs a task) to be finite.
11. If we do so, though, it is important to keep in mind that Fodor’s definition of elementary operations (as operations that a system can perform directly but of which it cannot perform a proper part) is not entirely correct, for the system may still be able to perform parts of the chunked sequence in isolation. Thus, an elementary operation is not correctly defined as one that the system can perform but of which it cannot perform a proper part. Rather, an elementary operation should be thought of as one that the system can perform without thereby performing any proper part.
12. On certain assumptions about the semantics of mental representations, it also makes sense to assign a distinctively practical meaning to motor commands (Pavese, Citation2017b). Start by asking “What is the function of a motor command within the motor system?” Within the motor system, as output of the motor planning and input for the execution of the task, its function is not, like that of truth-conditional representations, to track the environment. More plausibly, its function is to prescribe a task, or to represent a task as to be executed in accordance with a certain method for performing a certain task. However, note that, if the motor command represented the task as to be performed in accordance with something less of a method – that is, in accordance with a way of breaking down a task in terms of something else than its elementary operations – then the motor command would fail its function. In this circumstance, the system would malfunction, and, thus, in this sense, it would misrepresent. Hence, from the perspective of a broadly teleo-semantic approach to the meaning of mental representations, it makes sense to think of the meaning of a motor command in terms of a practical meaning, where a practical meaning is a way of breaking down the task in terms of operations that a system can elementarily perform. However, since methods are relative to the stock of elementary abilities, so are practical meanings.
13. For a dissenting view, see Sutton (Citation2007).
14. Although, see Feinberg (Citation1978) and Campbell (Citation1999) for a view on which motor processes and (presumably) motor representations may also enter in thinking and thought.
15. Later, Nanay (Citation2013, p. 4) clarifies that pragmatic representations are kinds of perceptual states: “Pragmatic representations are perceptual states but not all perceptual states are pragmatic representations.”
16. The analogy is helpful also because it highlights that, just like perceptual modes of presentation do not need to be conceptual, practical modes of presentation do not need to be conceptual either.
17. Fridland (Citation2017) makes a similar mistake in objecting to intellectualism.
18. The first occurrence of the personal–sub-personal distinction is in Dennett (Citation1969).
19. I am grateful to Felipe De Brigard for having drawn to my attention the case of conceptual priming as evidence for the possibility of conceptual but sub-personal representation.
20. I would resist taking senses to be necessarily conceptual in a robust sense. In Pavese (Citation2015b), I took the view that practical modes of presentation are practical senses, primarily in order to highlight that they determine their referent and that they are compositional, rather than in order to emphasize their conceptual character. Yet, the thesis that senses are conceptual (in a robust sense) is very widespread. Because of this, I will engage with this idea in the main text.
21. Some have mentioned the fine-grainedness of motor representation as the main reason for why this sort of representation cannot be a component of propositions (Carruthers, Citation2006, p. 284; Levy, Citation2017, p. 520, fn, p. 8). The idea is that a motor representation’s fine-grainedness would outstrip a subject’s conceptual abilities. It is worth noting that this argument relies on several assumptions. It assumes that motor representation is always too fine-grained to be grasped by a subject, but more general motor representations, such as motor schemas, do not need to be quite as fine-grained. Motor schemas are motor representations that mediate between intentions and motor commands; they store knowledge about the invariant aspects and the general form of an action and are implicated in the production and control of action (Schmidt, Citation1975, Citation2003; Arbib, Citation1981, Citation2003; Jeannerod, Citation1997). They are less context-specific, more abstract, and longer enduring representations than motor commands. As such, they are less detailed. Hence, it is not at all clear that the argument from fine-grainedness against the Fregean construal of practical modes of presentation applies to motor schemas too. Secondly, the current objection assumes that, in order for a subject to be able to grasp a representation, one must be capable of grasping (or of introspectively accessing) all of its details. However, note that that is hardly true even for bona fide conceptual representations. For example, I might have the concept of a parrot and thereby possess a complex representation that underlies my ability to sort parrots from non-parrots and engage in reasoning about parrots. That may be true even though not every detail of the representation that accounts for my sorting abilities may be accessible to me by introspection. For example, there may be all sorts of sub-personal perceptual clues of which I may not be aware, such as the smell of parrots, that intervene in enabling me to sort parrots from non-parrots. These details are part of the complex representation that underlies my classification abilities, even though they are not accessible to me by introspection. Hence, it is not clear, and it should not be taken for granted, that for one to be able to grasp a representation underlying one’s classificatory abilities, one needs to be aware of all of its details.
22. Mylopolous and Pacherie (Citation2017) contend that practical concepts might indeed be needed to overcome Butterfill and Sinigaglia (Citation2014) interface problem – the problem of explaining how motor and, more generally, practical representation can compose with intentions in producing motor skillful behavior.
23. This essay leaves open that there might be practical representations over and beyond what cognitive scientists call “procedural representations.” I am also leaving to further work the task of providing more principled reasons – that is, reasons not simply having to do with cognitive scientists’ current practice of positing procedural representations – for thinking that practical representation is psychologically real. See Pavese (manuscript) for developments.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Carlotta Pavese
Carlotta Pavese is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, where she has been an Assistant Professor since 2014. In 2013-2014, she was a Bersoff Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Philosophy at NYU. Before that, she was a graduate student at Rutgers University.