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).
But, by construction, it doesn’t seem that this can be extended into a mechanistic theory of cognition, which is what cognitivists want (in order to prove materialism correct).
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But is this "the representationalist story is wrong" or "the representationalist story can't be the whole story"? You might not be able to have a full theory with representations alone, but they can still play important roles in their original sense.
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If my characterization seems like a straw man, it’s because you weren’t there in the 1980s...hard representationalism was the mainstream view. During the 80s, there were bitter arguments about what makes something a representation, which ended in general acknowledgment of failure
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