We ended up looking at a list of tenets of enactivism, one of which said something like "the meaning of cognitive contents comes from their role in action, not from virtue them representing an external circumstance or containing a miniature world".
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Replying to @xuenay @Meaningness and
And I was like, okay, you could interpret the probability in this light, where its meaning comes from its role in the action. Or you could take a more representationist view, where its meaning comes from that *and* the representational contents that allows it to do its job.
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Replying to @xuenay @Meaningness and
And these seemed to me like two equally valid lenses for analyzing it, one of which emphasized the action and downplayed the representative aspect while the other didn't, but neither could be said to be more right or wrong than the other.
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We have found that it is difficult to do philosophy over twitter. However, I’ll give it a bit of a go… First, everyone agrees that artifacts can be representations; a stop sign e.g. They are representational in virtue of our treating them as such, not inherently.
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
Most representations in a computer also obviously only have this sort of “derived intentionality.” If you read a news report on your screen, what it means is not intrinsic to the pixels, but to human ability to understand it.
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
The hard question is “original intentionality”: under what circumstances (if any) is something inherently representational, & how does that work? E.g., is a chess program’s representation of board states inherently that, or is it like a stop sign, requiring human interpretation?
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
If the program controls a robot and machine vision system that interact with a physical board, then it is more plausible to say that representations are inherently of board states (although even this turns out to be surprisingly tricky).
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
So, e.g., some neurons in human V1 cortex can reasonably be said to represent edge angles, because they’re causally coupled to those. The question is whether you can extend a representational story to cognition in general (and if so, how).
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
E.g., there’s no direct coupling of my knowledge that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Fasso to Ouagadougou. I have no idea what it looks like, how to get there, etc. This *can’t* be grounded in my personal perception or action (so some versions of “enactivism” are wrong).
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
In that case, we need a social account of distributed knowledge: I can regurgitate the phrase “Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Fasso,” but it is meaningful only in virtue of *other* people being able to interact with it, and therefore meaningfully interpret my “knowledge.”
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Additionally, much of what we know does not, as far as can be told, involve representations at all. A standard example is bicycle riding. Cognitivists have to say that this ability is represented unconsciously, but there’s zero evidence for that, and good arguments against it.
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
So the representationalist story is that ALL mental activity, by definition, is computations over representations that are intrinsically meaningful. This runs into a slew of different problems, and is just not at all credible, and was abandoned by all serious philosophers ~1992.
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
One can imagine weakening the cognitivist story so that only certain sorts of mental activity are like that, or something, but I don’t know of any serious proposals along those lines.
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