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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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
Instead, cognitivists just agreed to carefully avoid talking about anything that would make the difficulties obvious. Unfortunately that was almost everything, so cognitive science has been basically sterile and at a standstill since the 1992 implosion.
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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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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
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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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
My thesis tried to combine computationalism, interactionism, and social grounding. I still think something like that is probably right (and we agree that representations of some sort play some role). However, no one has been able to work out a credible theory of this.
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
Your criterion 1 won’t work, unfortunately. It’s critical to being a representation that something can be mistaken. This is the key starting point for BCS’s account (cc
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Replying to @Meaningness @xuenay and
Lots of very smart people spent 40 years (1950-1990) trying to find a plausible mechanistic account of representation and failed. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it would require some radically new approach.
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The first 25 clever ideas any smart person comes up with, on their own, will all have well-understood failure modes. To avoid reinventing pentagonal wheels, I would suggest reading the history and understanding clearly why each of those didn’t work.
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Replying to @Meaningness @_awbery_ and
I didn't mean to say that you would be strawmanning the 1980s model, but rather that the strawman is the claim that e.g. the submind model would presuppose the 1980s model. If the old model makes obviously wrong assumptions, it seems to me that we could just... not make those.
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Replying to @xuenay @Meaningness and
I'll accept your claim that my proposal has well-known failure modes though, since as you say I'm not familiar with the relevant literature.
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