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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Thanks for the explanation; unfortunately still seems like a strawman to me. :) yes, "all mental activity is representations" obviously wrong, but still seems to be a lot of pragmatic value for thinking in terms of representations even if we have no precise theory of them...
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Dennett’s “intentional stance” is perfectly sensible: thinking about other people *as if* they had beliefs, desires, and so on, while considering that those are useful fictions, is often (not always) the most effective way to understand them.
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The first fMRI study was 1992, which was just when AI-based cognitivism died (I helped kill it). So the cognitivists all transferred their hopes to “neuroscience will eventually explain how representation works.”
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But fMRI is not nearly fine-grained enough to see representations, if they even existed, & also fMRI basically doesn’t work at all, so thirty years work from a lot of otherwise seemingly intelligent people has been wasted.
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