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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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
I’ve really enjoyed lurking through this conversation and hope to read up so as to actually understand it some day

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Replying to @ifIknewIdtellya @xuenay and
Depending on why you are interested… I would recommend against it. There’s masses of complex confusion that finally resulted in an insurmountable impasse. No cheese at the end of any of the paths through the maze.
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However… this is an OK-ish summary, which will be opaque on its own, but could point to things to read on particular subtopics of one of them grabs your interest: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-representation/ …
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