tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72063732384182881132024-03-13T01:51:09.474+00:00Thought • Art • RepresentationSecond Nature Is First Culture
Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.comBlogger322125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-6596110667623978012019-03-10T07:20:00.000+00:002019-03-17T09:32:59.571+00:00In Honour of Donald Brook<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uumVAHM1Big/XIS1zpZP5aI/AAAAAAAAB8M/ICxbisKLc0U-KhkJe4Gz7TAwjera2iNHwCLcBGAs/s1600/BrookFingerOnButton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1039" data-original-width="835" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uumVAHM1Big/XIS1zpZP5aI/AAAAAAAAB8M/ICxbisKLc0U-KhkJe4Gz7TAwjera2iNHwCLcBGAs/s320/BrookFingerOnButton.jpg" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the cover of "Get a Life", Donald Brook, 2014.</td></tr>
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<i>The following is from a memorial service held in honour of Donald Brook (1927-2018) held at the Ron Radford Auditorium – Art Gallery of South Australia, Thursday 7 March, 2019.</i><br />
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When invited to give a lecture to accompany a group exhibition in 2015, Donald didn’t attempt to massage any egos or to ingratiate himself by means of praise and adulation for the work presented. Instead he made an important observation about the difference between art on the one hand and works of art on the other; between the discovery of repeatable acts of ingenuity and a particular class of items, only very few of which are the result of such acts. I suspect that this was a great disappointment to his audience. After all, not even the most incorrigible art enthusiast is likely to welcome the suggestion that their favourite works of art are almost certainly bereft of art. <br />
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Donald was obviously well aware of “the awful truth about what art is”—of the logical impossibility of our ever deliberately making art. Works of art, on the other hand, are easily contrived, but the discovery of new forms of ingenuity—art in this stricter sense—is not a contrivable circumstance. Donald’s slogan “Art is the driver of cultural evolution” was never about works of art, it was always about innovations that change the face of culture.<br />
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He never stated it explicitly, but Donald’s theory of art is a theory of illumination, insight, discovery and revelation. It is a revelation about revelation itself. However, if art has almost nothing to do with works of art and even less to do with the machinations of the artworld, then it follows that art theory is not what we usually take it to be. More to the point—and I’m sure Donald recognised this with more than a pinch of irony—it follows that as an art theorist he really was one of a kind! Had he lost his marbles? Was he playing with words? Or worse still, was he Theorising with a capital T? No. None of these. He was merely following the logic of the most important philosopher of his lifetime: Ludwig Wittgenstein.<br />
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For Wittgenstein, as for Donald—indeed for all of us—representational communication is a sociocultural enterprise. It necessarily emerges at the level of communities, not at the level of individuals or their subsystems. In recent years, Donald took this insight a stage further by linking art, cultural evolution, nonverbal representation and purposeful action in what might be regarded as a unified theory of revelation. I realise this may appear grandiose. But put simply, Donald’s work enables us to see that the discovery of new forms of action is only possible in virtue of skills that we first gain as members of a community and moreover as users of representations. <br />
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Wittgenstein once famously invoked Goethe by declaring “In the beginning was the deed.” He was referring to the origins of language. Donald long knew, and very frequently argued, that this must necessarily have been a nonverbal deed. But we are now in a position to see that this first deed was in fact <i>art</i>: the first ever discovery of a repeatable act of ingenuity. In the beginning was art! This is a momentous realisation with profound implications.<br />
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It wasn’t only Newton who stood on the shoulders of giants. We all do. But Donald stood taller than most, and by standing on his shoulders we have an opportunity to appreciate the intimate relations between art and representation. As the privileged inheritors of everything that comes with our elevated position we owe it not just to Donald’s memory but to one another, in the broadest sense, not to squander his insights or the clarity that comes from his vantage point. We owe it to humankind<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">—</span>to art in fact<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16px;">—</span>to revisit his work, to share it, to discuss it, to make use of his insights and thereby, and most especially, to ensure that his discoveries do not languish in obscurity. Culture flourishes in virtue of the things we repeat, not in virtue of the coruscating flotsam that we leave in our wake. Donald lives on not merely or even mainly in the vividness or vagueness of our memories but in the public sharing of his outstanding contributions to culture.<br />
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I miss him dearly, but I never cease to be astounded by the light that Donald’s work continues to shed.<br />
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Farewell Donald <br />
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Your friend Jim<br />
Glasgow, February, 2019.<!--EndFragment--><style>
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</style>Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-2679659388573867692019-01-23T14:12:00.000+00:002019-10-30T14:12:30.050+00:00Death, Metaphysical Darkness and Revelation<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">©</span><a href="https://shop.artlink.com.au/" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); color: #555555; font-family: Arial, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; text-decoration: none;" title="">Artlink Australia</a>,<span style="background-color: white; color: #555555; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> 2013 </span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sadly, my friend and mentor, the British-Australian art theorist Donald Brook, died last month at the age of 91. I will dearly miss our correspondence, his encouragement, advice and inimitable wit. Over the last seven years, we exchanged more than 1700 emails, almost all of which are on the subject of representation and cultural evolution. For someone of his advanced years, he was always incredibly lucid and insightful and I often felt humbled by his keen intelligence. Despite the complexity of the many issues we discussed, he almost always found a way to inject humour into the discussion and it was rare that he failed to respond to the many rabbits that I sent running across the field (as he once teased me for doing). The following is his last email to me, written shortly after my previous post on this blog. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i>Hi Jim:</i><br />
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<i>Yes, you are right. I was trying to compress too much into what I was trying to say in a single sentence (or two).</i><br />
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<i>An individual kangaroo is an item of the kangaroo kind. The kangaroo kind evolves, whereas the individual kangaroo does not evolve. The variation of complex genetic constitution that is subjected (significantly but not exclusively) to external environmental pressures is responsible for the evolution of the kind of animal.</i><br />
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<i>Similarly an individual cubist painting (or an individual greeting by handshake) is an item of the cubist painting kind (or of the relevant greeting kind). The variation of complex memetic constitution that is subjected (significantly but not exclusively to revelatory discoveries) is responsible for the evolution of the relevant cultural kind.</i><br />
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<i>I don't know how I came to identify memes with cultural kinds (or, indeed with items of cultural kinds), unless it was in a misguided effort to associate memetic activity so intimately with cultural evolution (or with cultural kinds) that I could move on unimpeded to the point about the idea of self-consciousness being logically dependent upon the manifest existence of other items of the same kind as oneself that are regularly and predictably manipulable by the performance of behaviours that qualify (because one can represent them and their anticipated consequences in advance) as actions.</i><br />
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<i>I'm sorry to say that my head has most of the dominant characteristics, these days, of a boiled cabbage.</i><br />
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<i>Donald</i><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As is often the case with Brook’s writing, the convolutions of the cabbage can be a little forbidding. Basically, our conversation was about Brook’s theory of cultural evolution. “Meme” is a technical term, originally coined by Richard Dawkins, conceived as the cultural equivalent of the biological “gene”. Unlike other meme theorists, Brook insists that items of culture cannot be memes for the same reason that items of a biological kind (“members of a species” if you prefer) cannot be genes. It makes no more sense to say that a slogan or song is a meme (in the meme theorist’s sense) than it does to say that a kangaroo or a carrot is a gene. For Brook, repeatable actions are the only logical equivalent of genes. If meme theory was clear on this point, then perhaps it wouldn’t be languishing in obscurity.<br /><br />I don’t wish to attack or defend meme theory here, but rather to discuss <i>theory </i>itself and especially theory as it relates to the work of Donald Brook. Earlier this month I attended a conference with the title: “Philosophy of Film Without Theory”. I was attracted to the conference especially because of its focus on the rejection of theorisation and the likelihood that it would include discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on theory. I wasn’t disappointed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><span lang="EN-GB">Of the papers presented, the first was undoubtedly the most relevant to my interests. Dr Andrew Klevan, </span><span lang="EN-GB"></span><span lang="EN-GB">from the University of Oxford gave a paper about Ordinary Language Philosophy. Like Wittgenstein, most Ordinary Language Philosophers were very wary of the philosophical tendency towards theorisation born of what Wittgenstein called a “craving for generality”. These philosophers </span><span style="color: #222222;">devoted themselves to the study of the ways that we use language and to dissolving the sorts of confusions that arise when certain words or phrases are used in unfamiliar or inappropriate contexts. </span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Somewhat relatedly, and this is something that Klevan emphasised, Wittgenstein is often quoted as declaring that “Nothing is hidden!” He urged philosophers not to regard human intentions or the rules of language as being somehow mysteriously concealed from view but as being fully manifested in the things that we do and say.</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At one point in his presentation, Klevan mentioned how understanding can sometimes strike one as a “revelation”. Afterwards, I asked him whether he saw any conflict between the idea of revelation and Wittgenstein’s view that nothing is hidden. He agreed about the appearance of a conflict, but he wasn’t worried by it. What Wittgenstein objected to, was the tendency to make generalisations and essentialist claims about the nature of the world. He had no quarrel with the possibility of illumination. Getting clear about something—understanding it—is usually a more modest enterprise than theorisation. It doesn’t seek to convert the uninitiated.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But what about the theories of Donald Brook? Was he attempting to theorise in the way that scientists do; in the way that Wittgenstein claimed leads philosophers into complete metaphysical darkness? I don’t think so. The roots of Brook’s approach lie firmly planted in the soil of Ordinary Language Philosophy and in the rough ground of non-verbal representation. He freely acknowledged the importance of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein in the development of his philosophical approach and he was evidently convinced that conceptual analysis is key to disentangling metaphysical muddles. Nonetheless, Brook seemed to have no qualms about describing himself as a theorist and there is little doubt that he felt that genuine insights can sometimes be revealed through careful theorisation. Indeed, one of his books, “The Awful Truth about what Art is”, is in many ways a theory of revelation. I’ll try to explain.<br /><br />Brook begins, like any Ordinary Language Philosopher, by examining the concept of “art”. He notes that we use the term in two quite different ways. For example, we commonly speak of things like the “art of pastry making” or the “art of motorcycle maintenance”. On the other hand, we speak of objects and events broadly recognised as art by the artworld. So, at this point, Brook is merely making a perfectly reasonable distinction. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Brook’s next step is to remind us of what we all already know: “Art is not instantiated in every work of art just as sucrose is not instantiated in every date; and certainly not in dates such as the 17th of September.” Brook playfully uses this homonym to echo the two senses of the word “art”, but his point is worth emphasis. We don’t need to be cynical to know that there is no prospect of finding art in every object regarded as work of art. And we also know that there is plenty of art to be found outside the objects, institutions and norms of the artworld.<br /><br />Brook then goes on to show that we commonly distinguish between artworks or works of art on the one hand and art on the other. No sign of metaphysical darkness so far!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So, what does Brook suggest art is? In this sense, art is the revelation of the genuinely new and significant. To discover something new is to gain a previously unrealised ability, whether this be a new way of representing the structure of the universe, a new way of doing the high jump or a new way of splitting the atom. Repeatable actions (or memes according to Brook's important revision) lie at the core of this understanding and are the reason for the recognised parallel between memetic evolution and biological evolution. As Brook often put it: art is “memetic innovation”. It is the “driver of cultural evolution.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Of course, Brook’s theory demands that we view the concept of “art” with a different lens, but I don’t think he is making any metaphysical claims. I suppose it might be argued that he is making an essentialist claim about “what art is”. That can hardly be denied. But if he has been led into complete darkness, it seems to me that he has taken a very bright light with him and there is a lot to be gained from the illumination it provides.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-56163348151457107752018-06-04T13:22:00.003+01:002020-08-09T10:10:21.689+01:00Atoms of Experience and Beetles in Boxes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In one sense we can regard our whole life as an experience and we can also regard specific events within our lives as experiences. But does it make sense to regard experiences as being divisible into ever more finely dissected particles? For example, are the individual colours, flavours, temperatures, sizes, shapes, positions, orientations and numerous other properties of the things we experience, experiences in their own right? Or are these just the ordinary properties of the things that populate our experiences? <br />
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Dictionaries explain that "Experience" can be used as either a verb or as a noun. But what dictionaries do not suggest is that it makes sense to describe objects or their properties as experiences. We have experiences in virtue of things, but the elements of these experiences cannot themselves be experiences. This observation will be useful in a moment.<br />
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Some contemporary philosophers discuss experience by reference to its “phenomenal feel” or “phenomenal character". They talk of such things as “the experience of redness” or “what it feels like to see the colour red”. In a <a href="http://iai.tv/video/the-dance-of-life">panel discussion</a> on the subject of experience, David Chalmers claims that: “There is a distinctive character to seeing the colour red.” He remarks that it is notoriously difficult to describe this character to a colour-blind person because “they don’t know that particular subjective character of redness.” Another member of the same discussion, Peter Hacker, identifies several confusions in Chalmers’ view. Whilst Chalmers acknowledges one or two of Hacker’s observations, he seems to be so beholden to his account that no amount of careful analysis will enable him to see things more clearly.<br />
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Although we can usually differentiate between many thousands of colours, it doesn’t follow that a rainbow is an abundance of distinctive feelings. To look at Barnett Newman’s painting “Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV” (1969-70), is not to have three experiences, but one. And consider the proposal that the distinctive feeling of wool has its own distinctive feeling.<br />
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It might be argued that Chalmers doesn’t appeal to distinctive feelings as such, but only to the “particular subjective character of seeing the colour red.” This is no less circular. Even a distinctive subjective character, could be regarded as having its own distinctive subjective character. And even if there were a distinctive character of salty, or a way that salty things uniquely “feel”, it couldn’t itself be an experience, for if it were, it would fail to answer the very question it is supposed to illuminate. Most people would rightly say that we experience things and events, not unique feels or the distinctive subjective character of things.<br />
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Is Chalmers’ point unsalvageable though? Surely there is something about scarlet that makes it distinctively scarlet and not crimson, round, big or soft. And surely this unique quality is what we find so difficult to describe to someone with colour-blindness? It turns out though that the difficulty we find in describing such experiences isn’t because we are “inarticulate”, as Chalmers suggests, but because there is something irreducible about them, beyond which it is silly to venture. Wittgenstein made a very similar point with his famous “beetle in a box” analogy:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. — Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. — But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? — If so it would not be used as the name of a thing? The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. — No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §293)</blockquote>
Whether or not there is something in our experiential beetle box, it makes no sense to try to characterise it, and any attempt to do so will only lead to nonsense and confusion.<br />
<br />
In an important sense, experiences are events that we participate in, witness or observe and they are the basis of empirical knowledge. Some philosophers regard dreams as experiences because—or so they claim—dreams have distinctive phenomenal character. If dreams are experiences, then they must be a very unusual category of experience, because we do not participate in, witness or observe our dreams, nor are they a source of empirical knowledge. To dream is to gain experience of dreaming, not to gain experience of the things that one dreams of. If, after someone recounted a dream, we were to ask if they had actually experienced the things they described, they couldn't easily say "Yes" and mean it. And, if they did say "Yes", we would think that they didn't understand the difference between dreams and experiences (at least not experiences of the ordinary sort).<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep. (Norman Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)</blockquote>
Norman Malcolm is well known for his denial that dreams are experiences. He writes: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (p.21). Thus, according to Malcolm, we cannot do anything or have any experiences whilst dreaming. Hacker takes a similarly uncompromising position on the subject of lucid dreams: “…a lucid dream is a dream in which the sleeper dreams that he is dreaming, not a dream in which he is conscious that he is” (2013 p. 58). I agree with Malcolm that we do not encounter anything in our sleep, but are Malcolm and Hacker right to suggest that a dreamer could never think, but only ever dream that they are thinking? What about those times when we say “The idea came to me in my sleep”? It seems perfectly right to say that we cannot reason while we are unconscious, but can nothing even occur to us in our dreams? And when Malcolm’s climber dreams that he is falling from the mountain, must we deny the terror that shocks him into wakefulness? Are parents wrong in believing that their children are frightened when they have nightmares?<br />
<br />
When someone says that they had a terrifying dream, it wouldn’t be odd if they acknowledged that the dreamed events didn’t really happen, but it would be distinctly odd if they were to say that the dream wasn’t really terrifying or that they hadn’t really been terrified. I’m not claiming that these sorts of examples show that Malcolm in particular was wrong to deny that dreams are experiences, but I’m not sure that ordinary language is as strict in this instance as both Malcolm and Hacker suggest. People can be semi-conscious for instance and the concept of experience seems to accommodate this. When I had my wisdom teeth removed several years ago, even though I was heavily sedated, I distinctly remember the crunching noise and the strain as the dentist tore the most stubborn tooth from my jaw. In every other respect I was oblivious to the world. Did I experience the removal of one of my wisdom teeth? Evidently I did to some extent. Was I unconscious at the time? Only if we conclude that there is such a thing as unconscious experience and I agree with Malcolm and Hacker that there is no such thing. Was I conscious then? Yes, partially.<br />
<br />
Many advocates of the phenomenal character of experiences claim that dreams and experiences stand on the same phenomenal footing. So for example, they will say that an actual colour and its dream equivalent are the same in respect of their distinctive phenomenal character. What these philosophers fail to realise is that the phenomenal is not a footing. You cannot kick a phenomenal character of solidity or measure a distinctive subjective character of long, heavy or hot. These are not perceptible entities upon which any public agreement can be reached. Whatever phenomenal characters you have dancing around the stage of your private Cartesian theatre is of concern only to you, if at all.<br />
<br />
Most experiences involve all of our senses operating as a unified system. Obviously we often focus our attention on certain aspects of an experience, but this doesn’t mean that the rest of our senses are inoperative and make no contribution to the experience overall. References to “visual experiences” or “auditory experiences” etc. usually indicate attention to a single mode of interest, nonetheless philosophers are not always clear in their use of these terms. In her 2010 book, “The Contents of Visual Experience”, Harvard Professor of Philosophy, Susanna Siegel writes: “A visual experience is one of the states (among many others) that you are in when you see things.” One can be in a state of anxiety, confusion, terror, vexation or boredom etc. but it makes little sense to say that we can be in “a state of visual experience”? If Siegel is correct, then a sporting experience is one of the states (among many others) that you are in when you are in a marathon. I see nothing to commend this view.<br />
<br />
Several other contemporary philosophers believe that it makes sense to describe pictures as experiences. Robert Hopkins (2012), claims that photographs are “factive pictorial experiences”, Mikael Pettersson (2011) argues that pictorial experience involves “pictorial perceptual presence” and Dominic McIver Lopes asserts that “when people look at a picture, they typically have a visual experience of its subject.” These claims deserve much closer scrutiny and analysis than is appropriate here, but I will make a general point. We do not gain any experience from looking at photographs, reading books or watching films. Or at least the experience we do gain is merely of looking at photographs, reading books or watching films. We often gain knowledge in these ways of course, but the distinction between experience and knowledge is not a trivial one that philosophers can simply ignore or override. If someone spent their life in a room looking at photographs of animals they would gain no experience of looking at animals. The knowledge they gain might be encyclopaedic, but someone else with the briefest visit to a zoo would gain more experience. <br />
<br />
It is helpful to be aware of how strict we can be about the application of the concept of experience. If you experience a representation of thing X, then you cannot be having an experience thing X, even if the representation is a perfect replica. So the claim that photographs are experiences threatens to obliterate a vitally important distinction. Yes, of course photographs, films and books trigger many of the same responses, thoughts and feelings as the things they represent. This is not at issue. What is at issue is the integrity of our conceptual scheme. Is it unreasonable to expect philosophers to be a little more careful with the concepts that we all know and love?<br />
<br />
<b> Conclusions</b><br />
<br />
The tendency to reduce experiences to their component parts and then to regard these as experiences can be a significant source of confusion.<br />
<br />
It makes no sense to try to characterise any irreducible component of our experience.<br />
<br />
The phenomenal is not a footing upon which anything can stand or from which anything can be established.<br />
<br />
Norman Malcolm may have been wrong to deny that we have certain feelings in our dreams.<br />
<br />
“Visual experience” is not a state that you can be in.<br />
<br />Representations do not provide experience of the things they depict.<br />
<br />
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</style>Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-16934717158758964942018-04-25T17:16:00.001+01:002020-02-01T16:09:25.165+00:00Naturalism or Preternaturalism?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9z25tMciRH4/WuCjfHZI7wI/AAAAAAAAB6g/pzwt2aofZoENkjxirIJ2JeVDtQql3ZfHwCLcBGAs/s1600/traumgesicht-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="424" data-original-width="600" height="282" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9z25tMciRH4/WuCjfHZI7wI/AAAAAAAAB6g/pzwt2aofZoENkjxirIJ2JeVDtQql3ZfHwCLcBGAs/s400/traumgesicht-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Dream Vision" by Albrecht Dürer, 1525.*</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Naturalism in philosophy is (roughly) the view that the structure and behaviour of the universe is governed by natural—not supernatural—laws. Many naturalist philosophers also hold the view that science is the best means for investigating the nature of reality, including the reality of consciousness. Others would point out that many contemporary perplexities are not due to a lack of scientific evidence or insight but are instead the result of various conceptual errors over which science has no authority. After all, we don’t look to science to adjudicate on questions of logic. Sense is not science.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I’m a member of a Facebook discussion group on the subject of naturalism. The group is managed by Tom Clark, who also runs a website by the same name (<a href="http://naturalism.org/">naturalism.org</a>). In an <a href="http://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/experience-as-a-virtual-reality">article</a> about lucid dreaming, Clark writes: “As people learn about lucid dreaming, an interesting fact about the brain will become known: it is a virtual reality generator. But an even more remarkable fact is waiting in the wings: waking experience is virtual reality too.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like Clark, I sometimes have lucid dreams, but unlike him, I don’t regard these as evidence that “the brain constructs a conscious phenomenal world”. Clark’s view is very similar to what is known as “mind-body dualism”, since it seeks to explain the relation between mind and matter by way of supernatural, or in Clark’s case preternatural, powers. I hope it is clear that even a preternatural explanation conflicts significantly with the aims and commitments of naturalism. This post is a very brief attempt to bring this conflict into relief.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Across the natural world, many organisms have developed deceptive strategies that aid their survival. Camouflage is just one example of this evolutionary achievement. Dissimulation is another. It might not be obvious, but all forms of deception exploit various weaknesses, whether these be perceptual weaknesses or weaknesses of knowledge or understanding. This raises a very serious problem for Clark, because in order to generate any form of virtual reality, the brain would have to exploit some form of weakness, constraint or limitation on the part of the consumer/victim/user. In the competitive context of organismic life, there is something to be gained from deceiving potential predators or prey. But in the case of the internal organs like the brain, the advantages are obscure. Organs obviously don’t prey on other parts of an organism and nor can they exploit anything or be exploited in any way that isn’t to the advantage or detriment of the organism as a whole. So from this evolutionary perspective, Clark’s dualistic claims simply do not stack up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Clark repeatedly uses terms like “generates”, “constructs”, “builds”, “models” and “represents” to characterise the alleged creative abilities of the brain. When we speak of a gust of wind creating a mess or a tsunami creating destruction we do not suppose that the wind or sea are creators. Clark’s use of these terms, on the other hand, invokes a very different sense of “creation”; a sense that is little different from the supernatural explanations that naturalism ordinarily seeks to avoid.<br /><br />What is true of terms like generation, construction, creation etc. is also true of action in general: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="text-align: start;">When we describe a wheel as rotating, a ball as rolling downhill, water as flowing, a pendulum as swinging back and forth, a ship as steaming ahead, we are not describing them either as </span><i style="text-align: start;">acting</i><span style="text-align: start;"> or as </span><i style="text-align: start;">acting on</i><span style="text-align: start;"> anything. We are merely describing what they are </span><i style="text-align: start;">doing</i><span style="text-align: start;">. (Hacker 2010, p.144. Original emphasis)</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Brains certainly <i>do</i> things in the same way that other inanimate objects do things, but any <i>actions</i> brains are <i>involved in</i> are actions of the organism as a whole. No organ, not even a brain, can <i>take action</i> on its own behalf. This is why we rightly regard brains as integral to the organisms of which they are parts. It makes no sense to treat brains as autonomous agents with their own generative powers.<br /><br />Naturalism usually takes the view that explanations should seek to make as few assumptions as possible. But the virtual reality hypothesis requires an order of complexity, coherence, organization and generative action far beyond anything found in the natural world. In fact it is far beyond anything found in the cultural world either. The assumption that brains are devious creators is almost as extravagant and implausible as it is possible to conceive. Only an omniscient deity would be a more unlikely puppet-master.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">*Dürer's text reads: "In 1525, during the night between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsuntide, I had this vision in my sleep, and saw how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the ground about four miles away from me with such a terrible force, enormous noise and splashing that it drowned the entire countryside. I was so greatly shocked at this that I awoke before the cloudburst. And the ensuing downpour was huge. Some of the waters fell some distance away and some close by. And they came from such a height that they seemed to fall at an equally slow pace. But the very first water that hit the ground so suddenly had fallen at such velocity, and was accompanied by wind and roaring so frightening, that when I awoke my whole body trembled and I could not recover for a long time. When I arose in the morning, I painted the above as I had seen it. May the Lord turn all things to the best."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Long before making this image, Dürer wrote: "How often do I see great art in my sleep, but on waking cannot recall it; as soon as I awake, my memory forgets it."</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-49418700276751449682017-09-30T12:17:00.000+01:002018-11-18T15:27:38.631+00:00The Structure of Representations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iFUWq53V0h8/Wc99DjSr2_I/AAAAAAAAB5s/-NjjArRWniM0gNMmYwbVFT0K68zKHs_SwCLcBGAs/s1600/GATC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="688" data-original-width="1000" height="275" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iFUWq53V0h8/Wc99DjSr2_I/AAAAAAAAB5s/-NjjArRWniM0gNMmYwbVFT0K68zKHs_SwCLcBGAs/s400/GATC.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">[C]lassification cannot be embodied in, or reduced to, or
dissolved in, discriminant behaviour directed towards the classified objects,
but involves the use of symbols specific to the purpose. These symbols will be explicit
symbols: they will not be mistaken for the things classified; they will stand
off from the world whose contents are being classified. (Raymond Tallis 2000)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">It’s almost
a platitude to say that representations come in all shapes and sizes, but it isn’t
a platitude to observe that there is no representation without structure. Even
in their most ephemeral and ethereal forms, words, images, models and
performances are far from immaterial, and when we consume them, their contours
rarely escape our notice. If not for this awareness of the differences between representations
and the things they are used to represent, there could be little, if anything
in the way of representations or acts of representing. A clone of an apple is just
another apple<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7206373238418288113#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>.
If on waking, we were to find ourselves in an identical copy of this world, we
would accept it as readily as this one. Interestingly, such a copy would not qualify
as an illusion because the concept of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sameness</i>
logically excludes illusion. If you surreptitiously swap your dog’s dinner bowl
with another of the same design, there is no illusion involved and no
representation either. So much for the suggestion that we might be dwelling in
a simulated universe!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Not only
are representations structured, they must be crafted, manufactured or otherwise
performed, and thus the skills necessary to do so must first be discovered, developed
and refined through social and environmental feedback. Nothing as sophisticated
as representation could just spring out of the evolutionary sandbox fully formed.
Deaf songbirds never learn to sing, let alone to pick-up the localised “dialects”
paraded by their chirruping friends (<a href="http://www.elsevier.com/books/natures-music/marler/978-0-12-473070-0" target="_blank">Marler 2004</a>).
Without feedback, there could be no opportunity for the shaping or “grounding”
(Harnad 1990) of communication. There could be no right way and no wrong way of depicting,
characterising or even mimicking aspects of the environment. Even camouflage, which is arguably not a form of representation<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7206373238418288113#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>,
would be impossible, because there would be no constraining mechanisms guiding
its evolutionary development.<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Perceptibility in Principle</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Must
representations always be perceptible? Can imperceptibly small images, models or
words still be representations? So long as a candidate representation remains
perceptible <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in principle,</i> it seems perfectly reasonable to say that it qualifies as a representation. But if we divide a representation into fragments
and rearrange these in an unrecognisable form, then I think it is fair to say that they would no longer
qualify as representations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">"Imagine a painting cut up into small, almost
monochromatic bits which are then used as pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. Even when
such a piece is not monochromatic it would not indicate any three-dimensional
shape, but should appear as the flat colour patch. Only together with the other
pieces does it become a bit of blue sky, a shadow, a highlight, transparent or
opaque, etc. Do the individual pieces show us the real colours of the parts of
the picture?" (Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Colour” §60, 1977)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Data Processing and Storage<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">It might
be argued that the data stored on a hard drive is representational. At best, this
would be “representation” dressed up in a lab coat, not representation in its
ordinary non-technical attire. Many objects and patterns have representational
utility (i.e. they are apt for representational interpretation and use), but
they do not constitute representations unless we treat them as such. So for
example, the highly patterned structure of DNA is widely regarded as a code,
but few self-respecting biologists would wager that the “genetic code” is
anything other than a convenient metaphor for the exquisitely computable structures
of Guanine, Adenine, Thymine and Cytosine. Similarly, the facial movements of ordinary
speech are not representations in addition to the words we produce, but they
are nonetheless a visible component of speech and can be reliably interpreted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as</i> representations by lip readers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">So when
we say that photographs, videos and emails etc. are stored on digital media, it
needn’t follow that this storage is representational too. Computation relies on
the fact that we can convert analogue signals into the meaningless binary
states of digital processing and storage media. Think of Wittgenstein’s jigsaw
again. When the picture is disassembled, it no longer represents anything. Only
when the fragments are reassembled do they become an image once more. So even
though computers disassemble their various inputs in highly structured ways
(into what we commonly refer to as “data’), this structuring alone is not
sufficient to constitute representation. Data stored on digital media has to be
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">converted back</i> into representational
form before we can recognise it as such.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11.0pt;">According
to Jerry Fodor (1981): “There is no computation without representation.” </span><span style="font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 11pt;">This
assertion lies at the foundations of computationalism; the doctrine that our
brains are biological computing mechanisms. Fodor is half right. There can be
no computation without representation because computation is a human invention necessarily
dependent upon a history of cultural innovations involving the manipulation of
symbolic representations. If not for this thoroughly human knowhow we would
never have discovered how to create machines capable of saving us the trouble
of crafting, producing and manipulating (including computing) representations in
the first place.</span></div>
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<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
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<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7206373238418288113#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This is not to suggest that apples are any less apt for representational use
than anything else of course.<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7206373238418288113#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Because it isn’t performed for the purposes of communication.<br />
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Thanks to John Ragin, for some very helpful discussions about digital processing and storage.</div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-4832025191587452582017-09-11T12:54:00.000+01:002018-04-10T10:04:30.506+01:00I Refute It Thus!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AuBsGan1O3c/WbZ4j7tF8II/AAAAAAAAB5c/zeFzS4eiG_Mf8zORaxrxzx73M_26e7MTgCLcBGAs/s1600/Refute-it-thus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AuBsGan1O3c/WbZ4j7tF8II/AAAAAAAAB5c/zeFzS4eiG_Mf8zORaxrxzx73M_26e7MTgCLcBGAs/s400/Refute-it-thus.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Some theorists take the view that we have no direct perceptual access to the world. They argue that perception is mediated by our representational skills, creative techniques and—if they are to be consistent—the raw materials we use as well (although—tellingly—many would deny this latter condition). This doctrine is known as Transcendental Idealism and was first propounded by the German philosopher Emanuel Kant in the 18th Century. Idealism also comes in a vanilla edition which takes perception to be a creation of the mind or brain for the benefit of... well for the benefit of the mind or brain I guess. Many withering and sometimes funny attempts have been made to discredit Idealism, but its followers seem to be incurable. In contrast to both forms of Idealism, Realism—which also comes in various flavours—takes the world to be very largely as we find it.<br />
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The Realist philosopher Karl Popper claimed that Idealism (including Transcendental Idealism no doubt) and Realism are “neither demonstrable nor refutable”. Perhaps he was right. However, some would argue—with a tinge of irony—that his claim itself is not beyond refutation. One famous attempt at a refutation of Idealism was performed by Samuel Johnson, who kicked a neighbouring stone and quipped: “I refute it thus!” Most philosophers find his demonstration to be thoroughly unconvincing. Nonetheless, Johnson’s perfunctory gesture may have more to commend it than is ordinarily conceded or acknowledged.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Natural or manufactured objects, like the heart [or brain], chemical agents, the planets or engines, have an action, which may be slow, complicated or beautiful; but they do not take action, they do not act, however much they may act on other things. (Alan White "The Philosophy of Action", 1968 p.2)</blockquote>
Johnson had to take action to kick the rock; in order to make his demonstration. There is no such thing as a representation without some actions being taken to produce it. But a brain or mind cannot <i>take action,</i> least of all representational action. Brains are obviously significantly involved in the taking of actions but they do not have agency or take actions on their own or anyone else's behalf. The Idealist's claim that the mind/brain <i>creates</i> representations simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Even Transcendental Idealists reject Idealism as wholly incoherent.<br />
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When we act, our actions are comprised of countless unthinking physiological processes that have been shaped by millions of years of evolutionary development. Representation is merely a very recent cultural and fully public outgrowth from a winnowing process that has left countless behaviours and sensory failures in its wake. Life in general is a testament to the undeniable efficacy of mindless sensory responsiveness. It is this sensory integration, and not our representations or even our perceptions, that determines what we reliably take for granted.</div>
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“The thesis that ‘our representational practices determine all the divisions’ is vulnerable to the criticism that the de facto success of our representational practices can only be attributable to regularities that are implicit in the relationships between the components of the universe itself.” (Donald Brook, in personal correspondence 20/09/16)</blockquote>
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Some people find Brook a little difficult to grasp, so perhaps I can try to put it differently. If the world were not comprised of objects and circumstances in precisely the configurations that we find them, then our representations, not to mention our biological processes, would never have gotten off the ground in the first place.<br />
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</style>Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-70574029089440959792017-08-05T13:07:00.003+01:002021-03-27T14:55:53.172+00:00Content<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sSHVF4S8yXQ/WYWzqlpvK2I/AAAAAAAAB5I/nbyc5w9-CUATv5UX2PwikoFgicsba6DTgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Wittgenstein%2527s-Grave.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sSHVF4S8yXQ/WYWzqlpvK2I/AAAAAAAAB5I/nbyc5w9-CUATv5UX2PwikoFgicsba6DTgCK4BGAYYCw/s640/Wittgenstein%2527s-Grave.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers to the bartender, and says “Five beers please.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A two-fingered gesture can be used as a stand-in for two objects or (according to a different convention) five. It can symbolise a “V” for victory or be thrust in the air as a symbolic act of defiance. Evidently even the simplest gestures can be interpreted in various ways. But what may not be clear is that the meanings we ascribe to things often have much less to do with their nature than with our “nature” as communicators; with our “form of life” as Wittgenstein helpfully put it. The following discussion is intended to show that symbolic/semantic content—or “meaning” as it is ordinarily known—depends upon the shared conventions of a discursive community and is therefore fundamentally grounded in culture. I also hope to shed some light on one or two of the confusions that can arise when theorists discuss the notion of content.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In ordinary language, we frequently speak of films, books, images etc. in terms of their content, usually in reference to their meaning. At other times we might refer to their content in a different way: in respect of its ethical implications. In this sense, to describe a film say, as having explicit content, need not suggest that it has explicit meaning. Explicit, graphic, adult and other forms of what we might call “ethically sensitive content” are therefore conceptually distinct from the symbolic content (the meaning) of a film, story or picture etc. This is why Picasso's “Guernica” is not censored, because its violence is largely implied. Figurative or abstracted pain, suffering or violence of this sort is generally considered to be of less concern than its more literal, explicit or graphic incarnations. Goya’s depictions of the horrors of war, on the other hand, are unquestionably disturbing because they leave so little to the imagination. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"Guernica", Pablo Picasso, 1937.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Whilst content is commonly associated with representational media, it is not exclusive to them. To the extent that any object or event can be measured or interpreted, it can also be said to have content. Familiar examples include the nutritional content of foodstuffs, the mineral content of soil deposits or the energy content of chemicals and other substances. Light from distant celestial events also carries content, as do our genes. Even the style and state of our clothes has content that can convey information about our preferences, social position and sometimes even our political tendencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Many of the sciences are concerned with the discovery, observation and measurement of quantifiable forms of naturally occurring content. The arts, on the other hand, are much more concerned with the interpretation of content of the cultural sort. Unlike quantifiable forms of content, symbolic meaning (sometimes called “semantic content”) is not an essence that can be extracted, distilled or derived from representations by probing their constituent parts. So a satisfactory answer to the question "What is the meaning of Picasso’s 'Guernica'?" would not be given by describing its depicted features, no matter how exhaustively or precisely. And a detailed appraisal of the materials used in its manufacture would miss the point entirely. Instead, the meaning of representations is largely (perhaps entirely) dependent upon the interpretive and associative abilities that we bring to bear upon them. In other words, we imbue things with meaning, and we do this according to skills that we acquire to a very significant degree through our participation in discursive culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It might be helpful to consider the difference between content and contents. I can read the contents-page of a book, and this may give an indication of the book’s content, but if I turn the book upside-down, it would be absurd to suggest that its content has also been turned upside-down. Similarly, I can pour the contents of a packet of nuts into a bowl, but it would be misleading to suggest that I have also tipped their energy content into the bowl. The point here is that content and contents are often liberated, released, extracted or otherwise accessed in very different ways. Where representations are concerned, it makes little sense to say that we can extract, release or liberate their meaning, because, as I have already tried to make clear, the meaning of a representation is not a quantifiable feature. Meanings can be accessed of course, but this relies on a familiarity with the ideas and associations that make things intelligible not on any form of determinable magnitude.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the visual arts, we commonly distinguish between the form of an image, its pictured subject and it’s meaning. The terms used to describe this triangular relationship may vary, but in general, everybody understands the difference between what a depiction shows, what it is about and it’s material constituents. Interestingly, this relationship is also reflected in ordinary language: in the basic prepositions we use to describe images. We distinguish between what an image is <i>of</i>, what it is <i>about</i> and what it is made <i>from</i>. So even though some of the preferred terminology may vary, this need not suggest any underlying confusion over the conceptual differences involved.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Some theorists also use the terms “connotation” and “denotation” to discuss the content of words and images etc. Definitions of these terms typically correlate them with literal and figurative content. So the literal/denotative content of the Jolly Roger design is a skull and crossed bones, whereas it's figurative/connotative content is piracy. Note however, that the </span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">denotation/connotation distinction applies differently to non-verbal representations than it does to verbal ones. </span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">A poem's denotative content is its literal or obvious <i>meaning</i> and is primary in a sense that the <i>meaning</i> of an image or other non-verbal representation is not. </span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> A photograph of an apple does not </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">mean</i><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> an apple, it </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">depicts</i><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> one. Accordingly, any meanings an image might have are in fact secondary connotative content. </span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">So it turns out that the denotative content of an image is exactly the same its pictorial content</span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">, and thus there is little need for the additional jargon, especially if this misleadingly characterises images </span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">sculptures, models, maps and other forms of non-verbal representation</span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> as quasi-linguistic artefacts.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Some philosophers, claim that experience and consciousness have representational content. Strangely, many of these same philosophers make no clear distinction between “contents” and “content” (<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-contents/" target="_blank">see here</a>). In fact they seem to take “contents” merely to be the plural form of “content”. This is equivalent to saying that the subversive content of Piero Manzoni’s infamous can of “Artist’s Shit” is the same as its unappealing contents. Something is awry. Furthermore, when philosophers speak in this way of “contents”, they misleadingly imply, and may even mistakenly believe, that it makes sense to regard this as a detectable—and thus measurable—feature of the brain. As should be clear from the “Guernica” and Manzoni examples, the content of a representation is not to be found by prodding around in its contents.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It might be argued that the brain/mind is different in this regard, that it contains our thoughts and that these are therefore rightfully described as content. If “mental content” means anything, surely it refers to our thoughts, and these happen in our heads? It is true that we sometimes talk of thoughts being “in our heads”, but consider the following question: “Where were you having that thought about buying a new phone?” Not “In my head” but “At work”, “On the way to the shops”, “In the car driving along the High Street” etc. Thinking is an activity, and it is carried out wherever we happen to be. The fact that a significant portion of its biological operations occur in the brain, does not mean that its performance can be intelligibly reduced to the neural level, even if it seems scientifically shrewd to do so. Thinking is something whole people do, not their brains, minds or neurons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Another problem with “the content view,” as it is known in philosophy, is that it confuses the kinds of accounts we give of experiences with the kinds of accounts we give of objects experienced. To describe what an object “is like”, is to make a comparison of some kind, invariably with a familiar object or some feature of it. Interestingly, to do so is to pick out a suitable representational relationship—a likeness in fact. But to describe what an experience is like is entirely different. We don't say that our experience of a lime is like a green lemon or even that it is like a lime. We say that the experience is nice, horrible, disgusting or whatever. As Peter Hacker makes clear (<a href="https://jamesgarveyactually.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/hackers-challenge.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>), the qualities of experiences are given in hedonic terms, not in terms of the qualities of objects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Charles Travis (<a href="http://web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/papers/travissilenceofthesenses.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>) is also critical of the view that experience has representational content. His arguments are quite lengthy and involved, so for the sake of brevity, I will mention what I think is a decisive point: "If we are going to be represented to in experience, then the relevant representing must be something we can appreciate for what it thus is." In other words, if we fail to recognise that something is a representation, then there is no question of our grasping its intended use. As Wittgenstein famously remarked of an arrow-like “dead line on paper”: “The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.” This is because representations and the symbolic content that we often ascribe to them are cultural contrivances. The representational currency of an object is necessarily secondary to its form; the “dead line on paper”. We first have to recognise the line, before we can appreciate its application.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We can apprehend the representational properties of representations only because we can perceive the non-representational ones. (Hacker 2003 p.193)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is silly to suppose that the world is representing itself to us or that we must necessarily be representing it to ourselves in order to perceive it. Meaning is attributed to the world; we imbue things with it according to skills we learn as representation-users; as communicators. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Anything can be a symbol and, in human life, almost anything is.” (Noble and Davidson 1996)</span></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Angus' "Ant City". Cambridge 1/8/17</span></td></tr>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-87215466093349689342017-01-26T11:42:00.001+00:002022-07-03T22:28:39.087+01:00Illusionistic Innovations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you see the drawing as such-and-such an animal, what I expect from you will be pretty different from what I expect when you merely know what it is meant to be. (L. Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. 1953, p205e)</div>
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If you merely know that a young child’s drawing is meant to be of a cat, it is probable that the drawing shares very little in common with a cat. But if you momentarily mistook a photograph or skilful drawing of a cat for an actual cat, it would be extraordinary if the picture turned out to share nothing in common with a cat.</div>
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Now a simple phenomenological inspection of any representation, either a drawing or a photo, shows us that an image possesses none of the properties of the object represented. (U. Eco. “Critique of the Image,” 1970)</div>
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For Eco, the relation between images and “real phenomena” is “wholly arbitrary”. But this is surely mistaken. Words like “cat” certainly do have a "wholly arbitrary" relation to the things they refer to. Consequently there is no question of our mistaking the word “cat” for a four-legged animal of the feline variety. But if, as Eco claims, images also share “none of the properties” of the things they represent, then how is it possible that we can very occasionally mistake what turn out to be images for the things they represent? Eco offers no explanation. I suggest that if it is true that we can sometimes mistake the properties of one thing for the wholly different properties of another thing, then it is reasonable to suppose that we must be dealing with some form of illusion.</div>
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It is important to realise here how familiarity, so to speak, takes the edge off illusion. Is the cinema a case of illusion? Well, just possibly the first man who ever saw moving pictures may have felt inclined to say that here was a case of illusion. But in fact it's pretty unlikely that even he, even momentarily, was actually taken in; and by now the whole thing is so ordinary a part of our lives that it never occurs to us even to raise the question. We might as well ask whether producing a photograph is producing an illusion—which would plainly be just silly. (J. L. Austin. “Sense and Sensibilia.” 1960, p26)</div>
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Silly as it might be to ask such a question, it wouldn't be silly to suppose that we could use a photograph to construct an illusion. Nor would it be silly in certain circumstances to momentarily mistake a life-sized photograph of a person for an actual person. So whilst familiarity may take the edge off illusion, it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of illusion and nor might it diminish the importance of the concept.</div>
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“The application of the concept of an illusion in general presupposes a concept of being wrong in the sense that were we never wrong in what we perceive, were we never to make a false judgement about what we perceive, we should not have the concept of an illusion.” (D. W. Hamlyn. Sensation and Perception. 1961, p196)</div>
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A few years earlier, Hamlyn (no relation by the way) made some similar remarks on the same subject:</div>
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There is not necessarily anything about an illusion which tells us that it is one, for if there were it would not be appropriate to say that we were ever taken in. This is not to say that it is always right to say of someone who sees something wrongly that he is taken in; for he may see it in this way despite the fact that he knows the thing in question is not like this. But in order for it to be appropriate to talk of illusions it must sometimes be the case that people are deceived.” (D. W. Hamlyn. “The Visual Field and Perception. 1957, p112)</div>
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Now if this person “knows the thing in question is not like this” then he is not seeing it “wrongly” at all. He is seeing it as anyone else with the same perceptual faculties would see it. Moreover he sees that it is illusory in some respects and he probably also knows that other people would find it illusory in the same ways. So if I say that the moon looks like a proximate flatly presented silvery circle, I am not making a perceptual claim that should be regarded as an instance of false or wrong perception. I am using a commonplace expression that will usually be readily accepted by anyone familiar with the ways in which illusory appearances are generally expressed in language.</div>
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Shared discriminatory capacities are a precondition for shared concepts of colour, taste, sound, smell, etc. Moreover, shared propensities for perceptual illusion are a precondition for shared concepts of perceptual appearances as distinct from actualities, viz. concepts of objects publicly looking thus-and-so although not being so. (Baker and Hacker. Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity. 2010, p.215)</div>
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One of my principal aims in exploring these issues is to show how these “concepts of perceptual appearances” are linguistic outgrowths from innovations in illusionistic representation. In other words, without these techniques, it would make no sense to say that yonder house looks small or that a glossy surface looks wet or that a static white cinema screen looks like a multi-coloured window onto a world of moving objects and people.</div>
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It may be that people without any experience of pictorial simulation would not say that the distant hills look blue, but even such innocents would probably be tricked, by being smuggled into a good planetarium, into believing that they were looking at the open night sky. (D. Brook. “How to Draw the Curtains.” 1985)</div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-75800576239509550992016-12-22T18:04:00.000+00:002016-12-22T21:37:21.187+00:00The Achievement of Illusion<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C1bDLlafCAI/WFwSxa1dSVI/AAAAAAAAB2g/lJZYn7vHQt4tNNTaHQSDSVdnGOgcIGIIQCLcB/s1600/kitaoka-spiral.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C1bDLlafCAI/WFwSxa1dSVI/AAAAAAAAB2g/lJZYn7vHQt4tNNTaHQSDSVdnGOgcIGIIQCLcB/s320/kitaoka-spiral.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Akiyoshi Kitaoka</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><br />There’s an interesting discussion on the New York Review of
Books at the moment between writer Tim Parks and realist philosopher Riccardo
Manzotti on the subject of consciousness. Manzotti rejects the idea, popular in
much cognitive neuroscience, that our experience of the world is a mediated product
of the mind or brain. Instead Manzotti takes an “externalist” stance that conceives
of experience as somehow “spread” out across the things of the world. Even if
we agree with Manzotti’s realism, this needn’t commit us to either internalism or
externalism. Experiences simply happen wherever they happen. A walk in the
highlands certainly doesn’t happen in your head, but it makes little sense to
say that it is spread over the mountains either. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">One of the standard objections to realist accounts of
consciousness is what is known as “the argument from illusion”. The basic idea
is this. If we are susceptible to optical illusions and other illusory
phenomena, then we cannot rely on perception. Manzotti responds: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">“Mirages and Hallucinations are
not necessarily ‘pure appearances’, one sees something that is really there,
only that one takes to be something else. Yet it is not misperception, rather
it is misjudgement!” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Few people would claim that mirages, hallucinations and
illusions are not caused. But if one mistakes a reflection in a mirror for an
actual thing, then it isn’t true that “one sees something that is really there”.
If the mirror (the thing that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>
really there) isn’t seen and its reflection “is taken for something else”, then
quite clearly the mirror has been misperceived. Such a response cannot be a
“misjudgement” because judgement is not a precursor to perception. If you look
before you leap, you don’t judge before you look.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Manzotti seems to have fallen into
a conceptual trap. In his eagerness to refute internalism, he has adopted an
opposing view when it would have made more sense to stick to his otherwise justified
critique of internalism and to point out that consciousness is something we ascribe
to whole people, not to their brains or minds.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Parks and Manzotti discuss an
interesting optical illusion by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. What appear to be blue and
green portions are in fact the same colour. Internalists argue that this illusion
shows that everything we perceive is an illusion generated by the mind/brain. If
so, this would be a truly miraculous achievement on the part of the brain even
if it were sometimes wrong. However, a far simpler and more parsimonious explanation
is that these apparent colours are merely the result of the very opposite of an
achievement. They are the product of a very ordinary perceptual failure brought
about by the circumstances in which the illusion is presented. Change the
circumstances in the right ways and it becomes obvious that there is only one
colour involved. No neural mysteries need be imputed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"></span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4lIGeIQc5Q/WFwTUciuz7I/AAAAAAAAB2k/KDiDQ6kqWS8nUZDlElGutaL9Oyqzrt3rwCLcB/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-12-22%2Bat%2B07.12.31.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u4lIGeIQc5Q/WFwTUciuz7I/AAAAAAAAB2k/KDiDQ6kqWS8nUZDlElGutaL9Oyqzrt3rwCLcB/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-12-22%2Bat%2B07.12.31.png" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">The effect conforms the same
principle used to make colour prints with inkjet printers or to produce colours
on the screen you are currently using. In fact, the same basic principle
enables us to place tiny black and white squares together to produce a patch
that looks grey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">If it weren’t for the fact that all
normally sighted people are susceptible to illusions in the same sorts of ways
and in the same sorts of circumstances, then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> illusionistic media (images, movies, representational paintings
and drawings etc.) would be unacceptable as representations. There would simply
be no ways and no circumstances in which such representations would be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i> the things they might otherwise
represent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Sometimes things can look like other things
because they are genuinely alike. Two leaves from the same tree will usually be
alike in a whole variety of respects. Such isomorphism is the very basis of
what we take to be observer-independence, of what is objectively real. On the
other hand, things can look like other things because in some regularly
occurring or contrivable circumstances it can be difficult for us to
discriminate between them in one or more respects. Equally, and for the same
reasons, two things that are actually the same in one or more respects can <i>seem</i>
to be different. The mastery of illusion is not an achievement of the brain, it
is an achievement of human culture.<br /><br />I will leave the last word to the Scottish realist philosopher Thomas Reid:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">“The sceptic asks me, Why do you believe the existence of the external object which you perceive? This belief, sir, is none of my manufacture; it came from the mint of Nature; it bears her image and superscription; and, if it is not right, the fault is not mine: I even took it upon trust, and without suspicion. Reason, says the sceptic, is the only judge of truth, and you ought to throw off every opinion and every belief that is not grounded on reason. Why, sir, should I believe the faculty of reason more than that of perception?—they came both out of the same shop, and were made by the same artist; and if he puts one piece of false ware into my hands, what should hinder him from putting another?” (Thomas Reid, IHM 6.20, 168–169)</span></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A Cartesian can believe that the existing world is not visible, that the only light is that of the mind, and that all vision takes place in God. A painter cannot grant that our openness to the world is illusory or indirect, that what we see is not the world itself, or that the mind has to do only with its thoughts or with another mind. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1964, 186)</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The following discussion aims to show that our perception of the world is in no way illusory. Whilst we are obviously susceptible to illusions, our various skills and tools enable us to recognise and exploit many of these susceptibilities in a variety of powerful ways.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to Alex Byrne: "Perception comprises, by stipulation, veridical perception and illusion" (<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2009.614.x/abstract" target="_blank">2009</a>). For Byrne, and many other philosophers, one “veridically perceives an object if and only if one sees it, and it is the way it appears or looks.” In other words, veridical perception is what we usually mean when we speak of perception in ordinary language. It is the perception of how objects ordinarily are, or what we typically call “ordinary perception”, “normal perception” or just plain “perception”. However, like Byrne, some philosophers claim that perception “comprises”, or at least sometimes involves, illusion or illusory perceptions. Two important points need to be made regarding this claim. Firstly, an illusory parrot is not a species of parrot—in fact it is not a parrot at all. And by the same token, an illusory perception is not a perception either, at least not in the respects in which it is illusory. The same is true of misperceptions, false perceptions or perceptual mistakes etc. A failure to perceive something in certain respects cannot be a sort of perception in those respects. Missing a train is not an instance of catching a train.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Secondly, to notice or recognise an illusion is not to be at its mercy. It is to grasp the illusion for what it is. To say that one length of an optical illusion "looks" shorter than the other is not to say that the line <i>is</i> shorter than the other. Recognising that the two lines could be mistaken as being of different lengths does not preclude our seeing that they are the same length.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In a <a href="http://jodea.net/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ODea-Art-and-Ambiguity.pdf">forthcoming </a>book chapter, John O’Dea writes: "I can think of no good reason to deny that a tilted coin could be seen as elliptical and flat with respect to the viewer. This would be tantamount to denying the possibility of illusion." It is perfectly justified to say that a tilted circular coin can be treated, regarded or considered as a flatly presented ellipse, because a tilted circular coin can be successfully depicted as a flatly presented ellipse. However, if O’Dea intends “seen” in the sense of “perceived”, which seems likely in the context of his discussion, then his claim should be examined in light of the conclusions we have already drawn about the relation between perception and illusion. Thus, if the alleged perception is an illusion, then it is not a <i>de facto</i> perception in the relevant respects. On the other hand, if looking at a tilted circular coin results in a perception of an illusion—in seeing the illusion for what it is—then a description of the illusion alone will not answer the question of what has been perceived. What has been perceived is a tilted circular coin that can be successfully depicted through the use of a flatly presented ellipse. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, O’Dea writes:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Constancy often fails; deep shadows can make surface colour perceptually unclear; at severe angles, shapes constancy disappears; size becomes harder to judge from more distant objects; and so on. Is perceptual experience illusory in these conditions?</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Evidently O’Dea has mistaken <i>illusions</i> of inconstancy for <i>actual failures</i> of constancy. Constancy is usually characterised as the stability we regularly encounter in the properties of perceived objects, despite changes in angle of view, illumination, shading etc. So if circumstances of apparent inconstancy do not constitute actual inconstancy, but rather the illusion of inconstancy, then it would be false to conclude that they are perceived as inconstant. A failure to see that a dead parrot is deceased is not a failure of constancy on the part of the parrot.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If the properties of a stable object, like a book or a table (or even a dead parrot), are perceived as having constancy, there is nothing to prevent us from also regarding, considering or treating these same objects as if they have inconstant features like being blurred when viewed at close quarters or being small when seen from a distance or being colourless in moonlight etc. This is important because it shows that we are often capable of treating things in two quite different ways, one of which involves the capacity to <i>represent the actual properties we perceive</i> whilst the other involves a more sophisticated knowledge of <i>how to represent objects by way of illusionistic representational techniques.</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The following passage from Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a related point:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It took centuries of painting before the reflections upon the eye were seen, without which the painting remains lifeless and blind, as in the paintings by primitive peoples. The reflection is not seen for itself, since it was able to go unnoticed for so long, and yet it has its function in perception, since its mere absence is enough to remove the life and the expression from objects and from faces. [...] It is not itself seen, but makes the rest be seen. Reflections and lighting in photography are often poorly portrayed because they are transformed into things..." (2012, §364)</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is true that eyes quickly lose their lustre in the absence of lubrication, but if the reflection is not seen for itself, an obvious question arises. Is the reflection on a pond seen for itself, or the reflection in a mirror? Merleau-Ponty provides no obvious answer, but it seems reasonable to conclude that his view would be this. Until the discovery of depictive techniques capable of transforming reflections into <i>things</i>, people were not capable of representing them. In other words, it is by virtue of the emergence of pictorial techniques that visual phenomena like blurring, reflections, perspectival distortions etc. have become communicable (there is even <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-art-of-colour.html" target="_blank">evidence</a> that this applies to the colour blue). This is not to say that reflections have not always played a part in perception. After all, if tears produced no reflections, they would be invisible. As Merleau Ponty says: the reflection “is not itself seen” but it enables the tears, the pond etc. to “be seen”. And what of mirrors? Do we not perceive the reflection in a mirror? His point is that the reflection is not perceived “for itself” as a <i>thing</i>. We might occasionally mistake a reflection for a thing, but this would not constitute a perception. It would be the perceptual equivalent of sitting on the platform of Glasgow Queen Street station dreaming that you are on the 8:15 to Edinburgh Waverly.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Schwitzgebel (<a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/perplexities-of-consciousness-by-eric.html" target="_blank">2011</a>) raises another reason to be wary about the claim that perception involves illusion. </span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Consider the oar's looking bent in water. Could we say that the oar's appearance is an illusion? That seems natural. But if so, then presumably the look of things through a glass of water, which will be similarly distorted, is also an illusion. And if that, then also the look of things through a magnifying glass held appropriately close? Through a telescope? Through ordinary corrective lenses? (166n.8)</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It makes little sense to say, for example, that when things recede into the distance, they gradually become illusory. They are simply harder to make out. When we look across a table, we see less of the far side. This isn't an illusion. It's a commonplace and unremarkable consequence of the spatial fall-off of sensory input. The more distant an object, the less we see of it. The effect is regular and gradual and leads eventually to the complete loss of input as objects recede into the distance. If our sensory systems were perfect, there would be no fall-off. But then again, if our sensory systems were perfect, there would be nothing we could not perceive and there would be no such thing as partially seeing or barely hearing something etc. Partial perception and the gradual failure to make things out in certain respects are just normal characteristics of our sensory relation to the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />In ordinary circumstances, when we perceive things normally,
we often describe them as if they have properties that they do not actually
possess. We might say that shiny surfaces commonly "look silvery or
wet", that rainclouds "look leaden or grey" or that fast-moving
objects "appear to be blurred". These are not perceptual reports (or
at least not perceptual success reports), but they do not preclude other
(arguably more objective) ways of reporting things in terms of their actual
perceived properties. In normal usage though, it doesn't really matter which
strategy of representation we invoke in describing the objects we see (or
"seem to see" on account of the ordinary fallibilities of all sensory
systems), because we all familiar with the same representational techniques and
we are all subject to very much the same perceptual strengths and weaknesses.</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Very much less theoretical attention has been paid to those perceptual failures that are the logical corollary of success. […] In the wake of each positive perceptual advance the reciprocal logic of discrimination failure opens up new prospects for influential representational substitution. (<a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/BROONR" target="_blank">Brook 1997</a>)</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is a vitally important observation with profound implications. To be under the spell of an illusion is to be incapable either of recognising it or exploiting it. It is simply to make a mistake. However, to recognise an illusion is not only to be capable of recognising and perhaps avoiding other similar illusions. It is to have an insight into how other similar illusions might be staged and used as effects. While many creatures are capable of learning from their mistakes, only tool-users are capable of recognising and exploiting their mistakes in the form of illusionistic effects.</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-25381344458773769412016-10-13T22:16:00.004+01:002022-07-04T11:50:53.787+01:00The Grammar of Information<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Wittgenstein said he preferred to reserve the expression “I know” for the cases in which it is used in normal linguistic exchange. […] If we are to build a theory of information, if there is ever to be a science of information, that, after all, is what we want a theory, a science, of — whatever we, in normal conversation, are talking about when we talk about information. (Dretske 2003)</blockquote>
According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: "There seems to be no pragmatic pressure in everyday communication to converge to a more exact definition of the notion of information." The following discussion is not intended to offer a more exact definition, but it is intended to present what I think are some important observations about the concept of information that are all too commonly overlooked, ignored or misunderstood.<br />
<br />
<b>Communication Dependence</b><br />
<br />
The first of these is that information is dependent upon communication and the skills that mediate between intelligent creatures. To fail to account for this connection is to risk undermining the important distinction we typically assume between communication and causation. To communicate is to share information, usually between two or more parties. Inanimate objects cannot share information. Their influence is causal, not communicative. Nonetheless, the effects of causal influence can be used as information, but only by creatures with some understanding or awareness of cause and effect.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Transmissibility and Communication</b><br />
In a paper entitled “The Metaphysics of Information” (2003), Fred Dretske argues that information has three “essential properties”, one of which is its transmissibility. On this point I agree, but I think we could probably be a little more specific. Communication always involves transmission but transmission does not always involve communication. Conductive materials transmit heat or electricity, but they do not communicate heat or electricity. Communication is the narrower conceptual category, but it still encompasses all forms of information. It might be rightly argued however, that information about the origins of the Universe is transmitted from distant stars without being communicated by them. The important point to bear in mind though, is that without our culturally acquired communication skills and associated technologies we would have no capacity to treat the light from distant stars as information.<br />
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<b>The of/about Distinction</b><br />
<br />
The next “essential property” of information, according to Dretske, is that it is about something and is therefore necessarily semantic: “If it isn’t about anything, it isn’t information.” If this means that nonverbal (i.e. non-semantic) representations do not qualify as information, then we would have good reason to object. A simple but vitally important distinction will help to exemplify the issue. We commonly distinguish between what nonverbal representations are <i>of</i> and what they are <i>about</i>. I can answer the question of what an image (for example) is <i>of</i> by offering another depicted view (by providing different information that is). But I cannot answer the question of what a representation is <i>about</i> in the same way. “Aboutness,” as it is sometimes called, is necessarily semantic, whereas <i>of-</i>ness is not. A more detailed image of what a representational sculpture is <i>of</i> will certainly provide more information, but it will not necessarily provide more information concerning the semantic content of the sculpture, i.e. what it is <i>about</i>. We could document Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss” in minute detail without providing the slightest information regarding what it is <i>about</i>.<br />
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<b>False Information</b><br />
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The last essential property of information according to Dretske, is that it is true. He acknowledges that we sometimes talk of misinformation and false information, but he regards it as “heavy-handed” to conclude that information can be false. He states: “False information is fake information and fake information is not a species of information any more than fake diamonds are a kind of diamond.” If a theory of information needs to take account of “whatever we, in normal conversation, are talking about when we talk about information,” then it makes little sense to reject our ordinary talk of false information, misinformation and misleading information etc. It is also mistaken to suggest that “fake information” will serve as a superior substitute. Fakes are always intended to be fakes, whereas false arguments, for example, are almost never intended to be false.<br />
<br />
Unreliable information needn’t always be false information. Information may be adequate in some circumstances and not in others. And even if such information were always reliable in most circumstances, this would only make it contingently true and not universally true.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Effects as Information</b><br />
<br />
According to Steven Pinker (1997) “Information itself is nothing special; it is found wherever causes leave effects.” There is potential to be led astray here. Causation is not in the business of leaving representations in its wake. We can measure and evaluate many of the effects of causal processes, but these measurements and evaluations—not the effects measured and evaluated—are invariably instantiated in the form of representational tokens of one sort or another. It should be clear then, that information concerning the precursors of a certain effect is not to be found like apples lying around an orchard. It can only be found through the application of various skills, tools and techniques, many of which have taken many centuries of experimentation and discovery to reach their current levels of sophistication.<br />
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<br />
<b>Carrying Information</b><br />
<br />
Pinker continues: “We can regard a piece of matter that carries information about some state of affairs as a symbol; it can ‘stand for’ that state of affairs.” It may not be immediately obvious, but this is a tautology. It is like saying that we can regard a symbol as a symbol. To say that something “carries information” is already to imply that it can be regarded in symbolic terms. When information is transmitted, the process can be described in either of two ways: causal or symbolic. Despite being a tautology, Pinker’s point is correct—a piece of matter can be regarded as a symbolic stand-in for a state of affairs of which it is the effect. That’s what it means to “carry information about some state of affairs”.<br />
<br />
<b><br />The Burden of Information</b><br />
<br />
It is also important to distinguish the carrying involved in information-transfer (or communication more generally) from the carrying of a physical burden. Carrying in the sense that we use when discussing information, is not at all like the carrying of a sack of potatoes or the carrying of a virus. It is more like the carrying of value or responsibility. When we say that a coin “carries” value, it would be absurd to assume that the value inheres, and is therefore detectable, in the coin. Value is conferred upon the coin through a system of exchange that enables the coin to be traded for various goods or services. The carrying of responsibility is likewise, something that finds its expression in actions. To carry responsibility for looking after a friend’s dog, is to be trusted to treat the dog with care and consideration. Burdens of responsibility are not burdens that can be measured by the kilo; they are burdens of expectation. <br />
<br />
So when we say that something “carries information,” we mean that it can be treated in representational terms and, by virtue of this treatment, we acquire information either in the form of actual representations or through the ability to produce them.<br />
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<br />
<b>Representational Utility</b><br />
<br />
In a paper entitled “The Informational Turn in Philosophy” (2003), Fred Adams writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Waves of radiation traveling through space may contain information about the Big Bang before anyone detects it. Fingerprints on a gun may contain information about who pulled the trigger before anyone lifts the prints. Thus, information appears to be mind-independent (and, thereby, language independent too).</blockquote>
Just as the utility of objects precedes any use that might be made of them, so too does the capacity for something to be used as information precede any use we might make of it. So, whilst the ways of exploiting the world did not exist before they were discovered, the regularities—that enable exploitation—almost certainly did. Fingerprints on a gun are not representations, but when used as representations about the identity of of a murderer say, they can have very significant utility indeed. It should be noted though, that without the necessary skills and techniques, this utility of fingerprints—and thus any information they might contain—would remain wholly inaccessible. A latent image on a sheet of unprocessed film is not yet a representation, even though it contains information. It clearly follows then, that it is the techniques and processes that we apply to things that draw out their representational utility; their information.<br />
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<b>Information Reified</b><br />
<br />
According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Audi, 1999), information is: “an objective (mind independent) entity.” If information is an entity, we could be forgiven for trying to put a finger on it. Sometimes philosophers use the term “entity” to cover concepts (as does Dretske in fact) and this is usually unproblematic. In Audi’s case though, the claim that information is an objective mind-independent entity, would surely make it more substantial than a concept. Representations are entities but a capacity to represent something is not. Skills exist of course, but it is both silly and misleading to suggest that they are entities. If I commit some information to memory, I have not taken an entity on board, I have developed an ability. Abilities are not entities, they are actions that we can perform. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Principle of Information Proliferation</b><br />
<br />
When we produce information, the way that we do so can also be treated as information. When we make a phone call, the time, duration, origin and destination of the call can all be measured and recorded. This kind of information has recently become known as "metadata" and there is no reason in principle why the measurement and recording of metadata could not itself be measured and recorded. It will be evident then, that, in principle at least, this process could proliferate infinitely. I can think of no better or more persuasive evidence that information is a consequence of the way that we treat things as representational tokens.<br />
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<br />
<b> The Media of Information</b><br />
<br />
Without its representational utility, information would have no capacity to inform. So when we say that something "carries," "contains" or "conveys" information, this utility is implicit. Information is something we use. To use an object as information is to treat it or respond to it in a particular way or ways that have to be learned. Using information is thus a skill and is reliant upon techniques of communication in which representations function as the fundamental medium of exchange.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I would like to thank the members of the British Wittgenstein Society Facebook Group for valuable input during the preparation of this text.</span></div>
Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-88621060954769087502016-10-01T11:57:00.000+01:002018-11-19T23:24:26.490+00:00A Brief Introduction To My Research<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The following is an
introductory text produced for an exhibition of research staff currently
teaching at Gray’s School of Art.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Throughout my career as an artist and academic, I have always
been interested in the theory as well as the many practices of representation. During
the last 5 years this interest has developed to the point that my research has become
wholly devoted to the theory of representation and its wider implications, most
especially as it pertains to perception, communication and consciousness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What is representation? By "representation" I mean precisely
what we commonly mean by the term in ordinary language. Representations are
stand-ins typically, although not exclusively, used for the purposes of communication. Even political representatives act as proxies for the people whose political views they represent. In short, representations are useful substitutes for the
things they represent (although substitution alone is obviously not sufficient for representation).<br />
<br />
The means by which representations function might seem
to be extremely varied, because they are can involve so many different
techniques. But in fact representations can be divided into three distinct
categories (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vide</i> Donald Brook 1997,
2013), two nonverbal and one verbal. The two nonverbal
strategies of representation rely on two importantly different sorts of resemblance,
whereas verbal communication relies upon the capacity to accept almost anything as a symbolic substitute for anything else. This is an
extremely sophisticated skill, almost entirely restricted to most humans.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is my view that our prodigious skill in the use of
symbolic communication is the result of a long history of tool-use and especially
of practices of social exchange in which objects and behaviours become
interchangeable due to socially negotiated attributions of value that are ascribed
to them. It is this process—this technique—of value attribution that I regard as
such a vital factor in the emergence of practices of symbol-use and the
ascription of symbolic meaning.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It will be clear then, that I regard symbolic meaning as an
exclusively human invention because it is fully dependent upon the
capacity to treat objects and circumstances as having significance that is not a quantifiable property of them. <o:p></o:p>When we say that a ball <i>means</i> "playtime" to a dog,
we need not be committing ourselves to the belief that the dog regards the ball
as a <i>symbol</i> of playtime. We merely
mean that the dog knows that the ball usually accompanies playful activity. In
other words, we take the dog to be capable of forming associative responses to
things and thus to know what they mean in this limited sense.<br />
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Returning to nonverbal representations, we find that
language enables us to treat these also as verbal constructs, but it does not follow that it is always appropriate to do so; to treat them as messages, signifiers, descriptions or texts. What a nonverbal representation is <i>of</i> is what we might regard as a first-order representational feature. What it is <i>about,</i> on the other hand, is a second-order representational feature and thus depends on a different set of interpretive resources on our part.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is another common confusion that my research seeks to disentangle.
Images, for example, do not resemble things in the same way as models. Models,
copies, replicas, reproductions, re-enactments, and exemplification etc. all
function because they share features in common with the things they represent.
These shared features may be approximate to various degrees, but they are not the result of <i>effects</i>. Images,
on the other hand, are only <i>fully</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i>
the things they represent in certain ways and under certain conditions. In other words, depictions
can sometimes be mistaken for the things they represent, but such mistakes rely
to a very significant degree on the particular circumstances of presentation
or encounter (i.e. the level and evenness of light, our point of view, our level of
attentiveness etc.). This is the basis of many illusions of course.<br />
<br />
Finally, to say that an image is a description or that
a description is a picture or that a picture is a model or that models
delineate the world etc. is to talk in circles. My research is intended to show
how the theorisation of philosophers, researchers and sometimes even scientists can go awry
when they carelessly confuse, misunderstand or mischaracterise distinct categories of
representation.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-78945742238257120232016-06-30T20:21:00.000+01:002016-07-01T08:39:29.563+01:00Taking Advantage Of Our Mistakes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f9ABg3wzuuE/V3VwgHULRyI/AAAAAAAAB1o/CHPcPGoGjO0zDe6oa2UEzWxk8y7iXCNHwCLcB/s1600/LeggyFingers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f9ABg3wzuuE/V3VwgHULRyI/AAAAAAAAB1o/CHPcPGoGjO0zDe6oa2UEzWxk8y7iXCNHwCLcB/s320/LeggyFingers.jpg" width="294" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">‘Just to see what happens…’ is
the sense of the word ‘experiment’ with which we are able to conceive of an
experimenter who is lurching forward through more or less random behaviours in
a limbo of ignorance, but with some (usually unjustified) air of optimism. It
is also the sense in which, in the course of doing something that the
experimenters <i>do</i> know how to do (such as boiling flasks of
urine), they unexpectedly discover how to do something that they did not know
how to do and thereafter—if an unexpected but desirably efficacious outcome has
emerged—are able to do ‘the same thing’ again, although now in a differently
purposeful way. (<a href="http://donaldbrook.com/?p=79" target="_blank">Donald Brook 2015</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">My 5 year old son recently mistook a photograph behind a
shop counter for an actual person. After a brief moment of surprise, he
remarked: “That could scare other children.” I had noticed the picture too, but
hadn’t been fooled by it, partly I think because my vantage point made me less
prone to the illusion. My son’s comment seemed to be fairly trivial at the time,
but it left me wondering about the nature of mistakes. Most especially it left
me thinking about how discoveries and insights are often the unexpected offspring
of mistakes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“A <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">discovery</span> is said to be an accident <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">meeting a prepared mind</span>.” -Albert
Szent-Gyorgyi<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Invariably when we make discoveries, they arise unexpectedly.
You cannot get up in the morning and decide to have a discovery, an epiphany, a
revelation or an insight. It is in the nature of these concepts, that their
treasures are stumbled upon “in the limbo of ignorance”, even when our anticipatory
bags are diligently packed in preparation. No matter how well prepared we might
be, no matter how well equipped, we can only fully anticipate what we already
know or can imagine. There would be nothing to discover, no insights to be had
and no revelations to befall us if we were already acquainted with our
discoveries in advance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">During a tutorial a few years ago, I found myself saying: “A
mistake is a discovery never to be repeated.” I made a point of committing this
phrase to memory for future use, but I’m beginning to realise that it isn’t the
pithy truism that I had assumed. Sometimes there is potential in our tendency to
make mistakes, especially mistakes of a commonly occurring and therefore exploitable
sort. Indeed, there are times when our mistakes become what James Joyce called:
“portals of discovery”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">When my son mistook the shop image for an actual person, he made
a fairly commonplace mistake. But when he remarked that the image could scare
other children, he had already transformed his mistake into an insightful
observation: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other people like him would have
a similar response in similar circumstances</i>. In essence he had discovered,
or at least he was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noting the fact,</i> that
in certain circumstances images can be mistaken for the things they represent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In my investigations of the theories of Donald Brook, I have
often been struck by the emphasis he places upon the notion of “sensory
discrimination failure”. It has often seemed to me that he places too much
emphasis on what we fail to perceive and not enough on what we succeed in perceiving.
In my attempts to explore and exploit his insights I have frequently avoided the
notion of failure, preferring instead to draw attention to the
“characteristics” of our sensory system or our sensory “limitations”. But if it
is true that our perceptual mistakes can be the source of insight—of discoveries
of how we and others like us are susceptible in the same purposefully exploitable
ways—then perhaps my uneasiness has been unwarranted. To be fair to Brook, on
several occasions he has mentioned that sensory discrimination failure is a
great “felicity”. After all, amongst other things, it enables us to successfully
simulate three-dimensional objects with the flat things we call “pictures”
or—by a completely different method of substitution—to imitate (with various
levels of success of course) the sounds of innumerable different creatures or
to replicate, copy, mimic and emulate all manner of things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: JA;">Non-verbal matching and
non-verbal simulating are two significantly different ways of exploiting
the useful <i>substitutability </i>of one thing for another thing under certain
circumstances, for certain communities of perceivers, for certain purposes, by
virtue of the fact that all sensory systems are systematically unreliable in
certain ways. Science is the most orderly and progressive way of finding out
what we might be expected to say about the world if our sensory systems were <i>not
</i>unreliable. (In spite of this--and not paradoxically--we could never have
got language, and hence science, going at all if our sensory systems hadn't
been unreliable in the felicitous way they are, enabling us to substitute one
thing for another thing in ways that have an evolutionary pay-off). (Brook, in
personal communication 27/12/12)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That perception is usually successful is obvious. No doubt
this is why Brook’s primary concern has always been to elucidate the contrasting
importance of perceptual mistakes in our account of representation and
perception. Unlike mistakes of a more procedural sort, perceptual mistakes cannot
be overcome by careful practice or training. We can be more or less vigilant of
course, but illustrators, photographers and even perceptual psychologists are
no less susceptible to well presented illusions than the rest of us. There is
no sense in which my son could have avoided his mistake by trying a little
harder or by being better informed. Such illusions do not result from a lack of
knowledge or expertise, they result from our creaturely fallibilities. Where
our skills come to the fore is in the dawning realisation that we have made a
mistake, not in the mistaking. And by the time we have figured out what is
going on, the mistake has already been made.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Some people take the view that we would have language even
if we had no inability to discriminate between certain things in certain circumstances. But what would this
entail? To be able to discriminate between everything and anything under all
circumstances and in all respects would be to exist in a universe with no
regularities and patterns whatsoever. Nothing would be the same as anything
else and even similarity would be out of the question because there would be no
end to our discriminations. In such a universe there would be no possibility of
substituting or exchanging one thing for another equivalent thing because no
two things would be equivalent. Language simply couldn’t get the slightest
foothold in such a universe because nothing would be like anything else at all.
It is hard to imagine a more alien universe or one more unsuited to
communication. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton’s rendition of Wittgenstein: “It
makes no sense to speak of perceiving something in a context where we could not
possibly make mistakes."</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-83510130568637827412016-06-23T19:04:00.000+01:002017-06-13T14:52:42.295+01:00Can Information Be Naturalised?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dc4Q9jLTyxQ/V2wj4LjqsXI/AAAAAAAAB1Y/uE0SWYLAO0ch7wQuyzlzSSTCjrDTFQnXQCLcB/s1600/INFORMATION.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dc4Q9jLTyxQ/V2wj4LjqsXI/AAAAAAAAB1Y/uE0SWYLAO0ch7wQuyzlzSSTCjrDTFQnXQCLcB/s320/INFORMATION.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Psychologists Sabrina Golonka and Andrew Wilson have recently
shared a yet to be published paper entitled: <a href="http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/15/058925" target="_blank">“Ecological Representations”</a>. I
noted their work in the summary literature review I posted here a couple of
weeks ago, but from this new paper it would appear that that they have shifted
their position on the question of cognitive representation considerably. They
write: “We will agree that cognition requires representations.” Hopefully they
can be persuaded that this is only true if the required representations are of
the fully public and intentional sort and not the neural and non-intentional sort
that they seem to have embraced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The influential psychologist J. J. Gibson, is well known for
his rejection of representationalism. His work on perception is foundational to
many of the ideas pursued by Golonka and Wilson. At the core of G&W’s
argument is the conjecture that “Gibson’s ecological information fits the basic
definition of representation.” They observe that most “radical” theories of
embodied cognition are based on Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and
action, and that, despite some successes, these theories have not made significant
headway in explaining higher order cognitive processes such as thinking about
absent objects etc. They claim to have discovered a way to salvage the good
work on all sides of the debate. I aim to show that their proposed solution
comes at an unacceptably high price.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In Chapter 8 of Gibson’s book “The Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception”, (1979) Gibson coins the term “affordances” to describe what
he suggests the environment “offers” animals for their survival. He writes:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;">[I]f there is information in light for the perception of surfaces, is there
information for the perception of what they afford? Perhaps the composition and
layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to
perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that
the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly
perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings
are external to the perceiver.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The hypothesis that values and meaning are external to
perceivers corresponds closely with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who,
towards the end of his life, developed some carefully nuanced arguments to show
how values and meanings are best understood as socially negotiated and rule
dependent practices rather than inner states of perceivers. However, unlike
Gibson, Wittgenstein almost certainly would not agree that we actually <i>perceive</i> meanings and values, whether
directly or otherwise. To put the point as simply as possible, the value of
money is not a perceptible property of the coin or note in your pocket. Value
is ascribed to things by virtue of practices of exchange that involve the
treatment of things<i> as if </i>they have
properties that they do not in fact possess. Indeed, <i>without the capacity to pretend and to accept acts of pretence, the
skills necessary to ascribe value and meaning to things would be out of the question</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So when Gibson proposes that we perceive the affordances
the “environment…offers… provides or furnishes”, he confuses practices of use attribution
and/or meaning ascription with skills of perception. I think this is a very
serious mistake that Golonka and Wilson only amplify with their new paper. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Wittgenstein took the view that the meaning of a word is best determined by looking at the various ways in which it is <i>used. </i>The Scottish Enlightenment Philosopher, Thomas Reid made a very similar point about 300 years ago. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">On several occasions </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Wittgenstein also suggested that we should regard words as tools. Do tools have perceptible affordances? </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to Martin Heidegger a tool has a "usability" that "belongs to it essentially". Wittgenstein would disagree. Do we perceive the use of a tool we have never seen before? Think of a fork. Would we immediately see its alleged inherent Heideggerian function if we were intelligent animals of a different shape and size? G&W are bound by the force of reason to say that we do not. So then, how can the many different ways of using a stick</span>
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<!--StartFragment--><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">—</span><!--EndFragment--> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">be perceptible in the stick?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Another serious issue that arises in Gibson’s theorisation,
and that G&W further ramify, is his suggestion that light <i>carries</i>
information; that there is information <i>in</i>
it (I will return to this issue of “content” in a moment). The philosophy of
information (as distinct from Information Theory which is an engineering term) was
in its infancy in Gibson’s day (some say that it still is (Floridi 2011)), so
it is unlikely that Gibson would have been aware of the dangers of his use of the
word. “Information” is what Ryle (1954) might have called a “smother word”. For
Ryle, terms like “depiction”, “description” and “illustration” often smother
important conceptual distinctions and create otherwise avoidable philosophical
dilemmas. It is the task of conceptual analysis to tease out these differences
and to dispel conceptual confusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have mentioned before on this blog how even the early Wittgenstein misleadingly described language as a "<i>picture"</i>
of the world. I have also discussed how C.S
Peirce regarded the whole universe as being perfused with meaningful <i>signs</i>. Grice (1957) too, saw no
confusion is assuming that nature creates “<i>natural
meanings</i>” in addition to the “non-natural” ones that we humans generate. More recently, Fred Adams
published a paper (2003) attempting to “naturalise meaning” and to suggest a
way to account for the meaningful <i>content</i>
that he believes is realised <i>in</i> the
mind/brain. He writes: “To be of value to a would-be knower, or to someone
interested in naturalizing the mind, information must be an objective,
mind-independent commodity.” He provides the following two examples as evidence
of this supposed <i>natural commodity</i>
(if that isn’t already a careless oxymoron): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Waves of radiation traveling
through space may contain information about the Big Bang before anyone detects
it. Fingerprints on the gun may contain information about who pulled the
trigger before anyone lifts the prints. Thus, information appears to be
mind-independent (and, thereby, language independent too).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to a recent comment from Golonka on their <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/ecological-representations.html" target="_blank">blog</a>,
they “agree with content critiques regarding mental reps”, so they would
probably reject at least some of Adams’ radical representationalism.
Nonetheless, since they take Gibson’s ecological information to fit with
ecological representations they have a job on their hands to reconcile their
agreement with say Hutto and Myin (2013) on the question of content and their
own representational “vehicles”. If, as I contend, the influence is merely
causal, then no representation, no vehicles and no content need be imputed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G&W are clearly aware that perhaps the greatest
explanatory challenge for a theory of cognition is to give a coherent account
of intentionality. In philosophy "intentionality" has a technical sense that I assume is the sense in which G&W are using it. Nonetheless, both senses are applicable here. They state that: “The need for
intentionality therefore provided the first and primary motivation for treating
cognition as necessarily representational.” What should be pointed out here is
that this assumption is questionable on grounds of logical incoherence. In
order for cognition to be intentional (in either sense), it must be intended, but if it
is intended this intention must (according to the logic of the argument) be supplied by representations, then these must also be intended and must
therefore be motivated by further intentionally generated representations. This is a logical
regress of the most vicious kind that is widely overlooked in much of the relevant literature. Perhaps it is this general lack of recognition that has led to G&W's oversight of this serious logical obstacle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G&W do acknowledge the “symbol grounding problem” though.
This is characterised as the challenge of explaining how symbols gain their
meaning (their representational <i>content</i>
in fact) outwith a system of mutually agreed rules. This is another serious
challenge to representationalism that, for example, Adams fails to mention at
all. He evidently takes it as unchallenging that fingerprints “contain”
information. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Words like “contain” and “content” are a common cause of conceptual
confusion. When we talk of the “content” of a painting, we do not mean that the
content is a property analogous to the size and shape of the painting. Content
is not a special characteristic of objects. It is not perceptible. If anything, content
is a special characteristic of us; of the things we can do, not something that
inheres in things ready to be extracted like some kind of magical inform-essence.
Fingerprints are part of a forensic <i>system</i>.
They are meaningless outwith this system. Our knowledge <i>imbues</i> nature with meaning but in the process it leaves nature
entirely untouched, in respect of its content that is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G&W also wisely acknowledge the “system-detectable error
problem” (Bickhard, 2009). Within any notionally intelligent system there has
to be a way for the system to detect and avoid errors. Once again, within a
social system this process depends on the observance of various socially negotiated
rules. But without such rules it is challenging to say the least, to know how
errors could even qualify as errors, let alone be avoided. Like most of the obstacles
to representationalism, the issue here comes down once again to intentionality.
In order to detect errors you need a system that can represent and compare errors
with successes and in order for the system to represent the difference between
error and success, evaluative criteria or some form of metric is needed by
which such comparisons can be made.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In their definition of representation, G&W begin,
rightly, by stating that representations are stand-ins. However they then rely
heavily on Newell (1980) who was principally concerned with <i><span lang="EN-US">symbol</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> systems
and “designation”. Newell defines representation/designation thus: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">An entity X designates an entity Y relative to
a process P, if, when P takes X as input, its behavior depends on Y.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In my view
this is too narrow a definition of representation. Onomatopoeia does not
designate the thing it represents and nor does a photograph, an enactment or a
model. Designation is more akin to delegation, nomination or stipulation than
it is to depiction or imitation. So, at best, Newell’s definition applies to symbolic
representations only. However, to be fair to G&W they do a quite good job
of translating Newell’s formulation into a more palatable version: <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">X, is a thing that is not Y but can close the
gap and that P can access and use as if it were Y; when it does, P works as if
it had access to Y.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This can be
tidied up as:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">X is a thing that P can use as if
it were Y. When it does, P works as if it had access to Y.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So, on this basis: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A wind turbine is a thing that a
lightbulb can use as if it were a battery. When it does, the lightbulb works as
if it had access to a battery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Or, better still:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sugar syrup is a thing that a
honeybee can use as if it were honey. When it does, the honeybee works as if it
had access to honey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I may be missing something important, but I fail to see how
this qualifies the wind turbine as a representation of a battery or sugar syrup
as a representation of honey. All of the paradigmatic cases of representation
of which I am aware involve substitution <i>for
the purposes of communication between agents</i>, not simple replacement of
functional component A with alternative functional component B. The radioactive
isotope of strontium substitutes for calcium in bone formation but it certainly
isn’t a representation of calcium. Something is awry in Newell’s formulation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Leaving this objection aside for the moment, G&W focus their
attention on what they see as “the gap” which X can “close” between P and Y
(the bee and its honey). But this is merely an anomalous consequence of their turn
of phrase (which I edited out of my reformulation). Sugar syrup does not close
a gap between the bee and its honey; it simply replaces honey. Nonetheless G&W
spend several sentences fleshing out the significance of this supposed “action
at a distance”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G&W turn next to a consideration of “ecological information
[as] a representation”. They define ecological information as energy patterns of
“lawful interaction of the energy with
the dynamics of the world [that] are <i>used</i>
by organisms to perceive that world.” [My emphasis]. If organisms <i>use</i> energy patterns to perceive the
world, then this form of <i>usage</i> needs
to be sharply distinguished from intentional <i>use</i>, otherwise we have no means of distinguishing tool <i>using</i> creatures (humans mostly) from all
the other creatures in the world who do not <i>use</i>
tools. Moreover, we also need this important distinction to distinguish between
the intentional actions of purposeful creatures and the efficacious (but not
intentionally directed) behaviours of their internal processes. My bone forming
processes do not intend to use strontium as a replacement for calcium, but my
dentist did intend to use gold as a crown for one of my teeth. This is why my
crown is plausibly a representation—indeed it is a cast—of parts of the tooth
it replaced. The reason such actions, as the replacement of a tooth, are
intentional is because they are performed in pursuit of a goal that can be
represented on demand. The fact that my dentist could explain his behaviour is
not because a representation of my tooth was <i>contained</i> in his neural fibres but because the capacity to
represent the aims of his activity was something he could <i>do</i>; something he could <i>perform</i>
as a competent agent embedded in a culture where such actions are understood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If I might be allowed to go into a little technical detail,
theorists often distinguish between teleological and teleonomic descriptions of
behaviour. A telos is a goal, an aim or an envisaged end that an action is
intentionally directed towards. Teleological behaviours are thus genuinely
purposeful <i>actions</i>. Teleonomic behaviours,
on the other hand, often have the appearance of purposefulness but are actually
merely efficacious (some theorists use the word “purposive” here, as contrasted
with genuinely purposeful activity), having been shaped by millions of years of
evolution. When we say that a plant <i>uses</i>
varying light intensities to find its way towards the sun, we do not mean to
suggest that the plant is an intentionally directed agent: a perceiver. We are
simply using a teleonomic description. Unfortunately I think both Gibson and
G&W conflate teleonomic descriptions in which organisms and their inner
processes “<i>use</i>”<i> </i>energy and genuinely teleological descriptions in which we human
agents use energy—to illuminate a light bulb for instance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I do not believe that perceivers use energy in the way that
both Gibson and G&W suggest. I might <i>use</i>
my desk light in order to read a book at night, but the inner processes that in
large part bring about my perception of the book do not <i>use</i> either the desk light or the energy patterns that emanate from
it in this intentionally directed way at all. I can choose to turn out the
light, but my inner processes have no choice in the matter. Choices are
exercised by whole agents, not by their parts (Hacker and Bennett 2007).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A lot of confusion can be cleared up in discussions of
representation if we distinguish sharply between processes in which X is <i>taken</i> as Y and actions in which X is <i>treated</i> <i>as</i> Y. My bones will <i>take</i>
strontium as calcium but only a performer of actions can <i>treat</i> an act of mock aggression <i>as
if</i> it is merely playful as opposed to genuinely threatening. This is why I
argue that pretending is the most fundamental and important <i>skill</i> in intelligent behaviour because
it is the basis of the higher forms of cognition that G&W are so keen to account
for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">G&W return to the notion of “a gap” when they state: “Most
of the behaviorally relevant dynamics in the world are ‘over there’ and not in
mechanical contact with the organism. They must therefore be perceived.” The
fact that the keys of my keyboard are “over there” and not in “mechanical
contact” with my fingers does not mean that they are not causally influential
upon me by virtue of the light reflected from them. My perception certainly
depends upon light but my perception is not<i>
of the light as information, it is of the keys as keys. </i>Light is something
we <i>know about</i>, not something we see.
So, whilst it is true that we pretenders can act <i>as if</i> light is perceptible, the light reflected from my keyboard is
simply <i>taken </i>by my sensory system<i> </i>not <i>as</i>
information but<i> as</i> causal influence. When
G&W say that: “Perception relies on information about dynamics” this is not
true. Only <i>knowledge</i> (propositional
knowledge that is) relies on information <i>about</i>
dynamics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to G&W: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Gibsonian ecological information is only a kinematic projection of those dynamics into an energy array. […] This
means that kinematic information cannot be identical to the dynamical world,
and this fact is effectively a poverty of stimulus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kinematic information is quite clearly a culturally enabled
ascription—indeed a “description”—of “units” of measure to the “dynamical world”.
There is no possibility that such sophisticated cultural contrivances as <i>units</i> are to be found in nature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Their worries about “a gap”, “action at a distance” and “a
poverty of stimulus” continue when they write:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt 36pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Other lines of neuroscientific enquiry do suggest that at least some of the
structure of energy impinging on perceptual receptors is preserved as it travels
through the nervous system.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">According to G&W’s theory of representation it is
important that <span lang="EN-US">structure is
carried through the nervous system because this qualifies the structure as a neural
representation of the ecological information that caused it (recall that they
take all forms of replacement to be representational). At the risk of repeating
myself, the fact that some pattern corresponds with an antecedent state of
affairs does not mean that the pattern is a representation. Effects are not
representations of their causes. If they were, then the universe would be nothing
but representations. I therefore think we have good reason to reject </span>G&W’s <span lang="EN-US">proposal that “</span>at
least some of the neural activity caused by informational representations will
qualify as a neural representation of that information.”<span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To be fair to G&W, they observe that: “These neural
representations are… not implementing the mental representations of the
standard cognitive approach.” because they do not “enrich, model or predict
anything about that information.” If this is true, then it leaves these
representations as representations in name only. <span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Later in their paper G&W attempt to tackle the issue of
higher order cognition. They remark: “To be clear, the stipulation that
knowledge systems must be conceptual and componential is so that knowledge
systems can support counterfactual thinking, etc.” This is mistaken. Pretending
that I am rocking a baby in my arms is a gesture that would be understood by
humans the world over but, even though it is counterfactual (there is no baby
after all) it is not a conceptual representation. Conceptualisation relies on
the ability to manipulate abstractions and there is no other species on the
planet that has the capacity to manipulate abstractions with anything more the
most rudimentary competence.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: left;">Washoe, the first of the signing apes, had been regularly bathed. Sometimes between the ages of one and a half and two years, she picked up her doll, filled the bathtub with water, dumped the doll in the tub, took it out and dried it with a towel. In later repetitions she even soaped the doll. This is imitation, but it also must be a form of representation—indeed, of pretence. (Jolly 2000, 291)</span></span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">On page 18 G&W write: “From the first person perspective
of the organism, it is just interacting with information.” We commonly interact
with others <i>by means of</i> information
but it is somewhat confused to suggest without qualification that we interact
with information<i>. </i>Our use of
information forms <i>part</i> of our
interactions with other intelligent agents: people usually. When we use so
called “interactive technologies” we do so in a sense that is derivative of
these interactions with other agents. Information is simply not responsive in
the way that that other intelligent agents are. It helps to regard information as a tool. We use our tools but it is somewhat strained to say that we interact with them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In conclusion, G&W are right to regard representation as
important in the explanation of higher order capacities but only if we regard representation
as a thoroughly public activity of intelligent agents. G&W are also right
to focus on behaviour that <i>treats</i> X <i>as if</i> it is Y. Nonetheless their Newell-derived
definition of representation is inadequate to the task of distinguishing between
behaviours in which X is <i>taken</i> for Y
and actions in which X is <i>treated</i> as
Y. If they were to thoroughly examine this important distinction, they would
probably recognise that representation is the point of demarcation between evolved
efficacious processes and behaviours and <i>de
facto</i> teleological actions; between nature and culture. Information cannot
be naturalised because information is a cultural contrivance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-416850743385464122016-06-16T13:50:00.000+01:002016-06-17T15:42:19.843+01:00Dretske’s Dreadful Theory Of What We See<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Izt2gVSOs2c/V2KU_o92NTI/AAAAAAAAB0Y/7f3vgIBU_RElM_5gjLJH6rvwm5hdegcMgCK4B/s1600/Dretske.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Izt2gVSOs2c/V2KU_o92NTI/AAAAAAAAB0Y/7f3vgIBU_RElM_5gjLJH6rvwm5hdegcMgCK4B/s320/Dretske.jpg" width="238"></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In
a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLr-HsxT4zI" target="_blank">presentation from 2008</a>, the late (as of 2013) </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Stanford philosophy professor </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Fred Dretske argues that seeing includes the perception of objects
(including relations between objects), properties (shape, size and colour etc.)
and facts. For Dretske, the facts we perceive are “things we come to know by
seeing”. He claims that there is a danger that we take a failure to notice or
detect objects and properties as a failure to actually see them. He presents
the following two images in order to explain this claim.</span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zx4IiYzGZzk/V2KWTeokNII/AAAAAAAAB1A/ruA79zTJIFk0IDpYSUvX8Ez0LSQVM807wCK4B/s1600/Screen-Shot-2016-06-15-at-11.50.53.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zx4IiYzGZzk/V2KWTeokNII/AAAAAAAAB1A/ruA79zTJIFk0IDpYSUvX8Ez0LSQVM807wCK4B/s320/Screen-Shot-2016-06-15-at-11.50.53.jpg" width="320"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image A</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ia2mv0vMuoE/V2KWSX2GQvI/AAAAAAAAB04/rTnXb4m5mwcNnOm3ICLSTLc6Xl7CKFjgACK4B/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-06-15%2Bat%2B11.50.59.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="264" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ia2mv0vMuoE/V2KWSX2GQvI/AAAAAAAAB04/rTnXb4m5mwcNnOm3ICLSTLc6Xl7CKFjgACK4B/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-06-15%2Bat%2B11.50.59.jpg" width="320"></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image B</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Image
B contains an additional shape. In his presentation,
Dretske presents the images one after the other and inserts a transition between the
two that makes it difficult to see the difference between them. In Dretske’s
view: “One should not conclude from the fact that you didn’t see that there was
a difference to the conclusion that you didn’t see the object that made the
difference.” He remarks:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt 24.7pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Even if you
don’t detect it, even if you don’t notice it, even if you don’t know that you
are seeing different things. Even if you don’t see the fact that there is a
difference, you still might see the objects and properties that make the
difference. You just don’t realise you do.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It
should be obvious that if you do not detect, realise or notice that the traffic
lights are red, then you cannot be said to see them (at least in respect of
their being red). Nonetheless Dretske holds that seeing is independent of
conscious awareness. In his view, we can genuinely see objects and properties
without detecting, noticing or knowing that we do so. Dretske uses this
questionable conclusion to promote his theory of conscious experience. He
claims that: “Your experience of an object is conscious if it gives you
knowledge of that object.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For
Dretske, all knowledge is knowledge of facts, and in order for an experience to
be conscious, it must provide such knowledge. But this is absurd. If we look at
a familiar object, we do not lose consciousness of it because it ceases to give
us knowledge. If consciousness depends on the acquisition of knowledge, then
all lapses in attention must be accompanied by lapses in consciousness. This is
quite evidently not the case.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">We
perceive the phonemes, morphemes and sentences in which facts are typically
stated but it is debatable whether we actually perceive facts at all. Earlier
today I asked my partner “When did you last see a fact.” She looked at me
quizzically and remarked: “You don’t see facts.” Some people might contend that
texts, graphs and diagrams etc. can be seen and thus are visible facts, but it
is important to note that representations </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">of</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> facts are not the facts they
are used to represent. Many facts can be demonstrated, but it does not follow
that a demonstration of a fact can be reduced to the fact it is intended to
demonstrate.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Earlier
in his presentation, Dretske states: “The facts we see—the things we come to
know by seeing—we come to know them by seeing objects and their properties.”
Clearly then, Dretske realises that perception of things is not the same as the
“perception” (his use, not mine) of facts. Facts must be <i>derived</i> in some way </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">from</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> perception, but quite how they
are <i>derived</i> Dretske neglects to mention.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
absurdity of Dretske’s position becomes more pronounced towards the
end of his presentation. He argues that when we look at a wall of 350 bricks
for a few seconds, we acquire 350 “distinct pieces of knowledge—one for each
brick in the wall.” Not only this, but during the Q&A session it
becomes clear that he thinks we acquire “infinite” knowledge “for free” when we
look at things. The reason he believes this is because he is committed to the
idea that the perception of facts involves the acquisition of what he calls
“tacit knowledge”. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt 24.7pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>You don’t
have to actively think something to know it. There are a great many things you
know tacitly, not because when you acquired the knowledge you are actually
thinking about it or believing it but because you have the kind of experience
of it which, if you do later think about it, will tell you what you need to
know.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">There
is no such thing as a memory “telling” us anything, so Dretske can only
mean that we have to <i>interpret</i> an experience ("later think about it") to </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">derive</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> factual knowledge <i>from</i> it. If
we do not think about it—if we do not interpret the memory by means of our conceptually enabled inferential skills—then we cannot be said to have yet formed any
factual knowledge on the basis of the memory. An analogy will help. If we have a
workshop full of materials, we may be capable of using these to create some
tools, but unless we actually manufacture these tools, we cannot claim to possess them. Tacit knowledge, and knowledge in general in fact, is not
something that we possess like a scar or a souvenir, it is something we are
capable of doing, something we are capable of bringing about by the application
of skill.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">When we fail to see a difference between two different things, at least two factors need to be taken into consideration. Firstly, our sensory organs may be limited by evolutionary constraints that give rise to regularly occurring fallibilities in certain circumstances. Secondly, the circumstances of encounter (the illumination, position, angle of view, delay between images etc.) may limit discrimination more than might otherwise be the case. Certainly any actual differences within our visual field may have a causal influence upon our sensory system,
but this does not mean that these influences are dealt with at some non-conscious, unconscious or “sub-personal” (Dennett 1987) level of <i>seeing</i> that we "just don't realise". It just means that
there are various complex processes involved in perception that are not
conscious and that some of these have insufficient influence to rise to the level of purposeful action: consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At the 25:00 minute mark of the presentation, Dretske discusses
an image of a square divided into nine coloured portions. He claims that if each </span></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">of the nine squares was </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">coloured the same shade of blue</span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> and placed so close together that </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">we couldn't see the edges between them,</span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> we would still see nine squares. </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is like arguing that we see the screen when
we watch a movie. If pressed, we would probably agree that the screen is visible while we watch Star Wars or Gone With The Wind etc. But what we would
be very unlikely to concede, and what follows from Dretske's thesis,
is that we see each pixel on the screen and thus gain millions of dis</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">tinct
pieces of knowledge—one for each pixel. It should also be noted that pixels are themselves divisible into individual photons. Do we have distinct pieces of knowledge of photons too? </span><br>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">At some point we have to acknowledge that all sensory systems are limited in various ways and it therefore follows that these limitations make it impossible to discriminate between things (that may in fact be quite different) in certain circumstances and in certain respects. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is by virtue of differences that all creatures discriminate between things. Without sensory discrimination there would be no life. Nonetheless, sensory discrimination is not free of limitations.</span></span><span style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif; "> Without these limitations, there would be no question of our mistaking any one thing for another different thing, and there would also be no question of our accepting a flat thing as a viable stand-in of a three-dimensional thing. The fact that things of one sort (images say) can be mistaken for things of another sort (three dimensional objects for example) makes images supremely apt as representational tools; as things that can stand-in for the objects they represent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I suggest that any
explanation of perception that fails to account for the role of discrimination
failure within our practices of nonverbal representation is probably doomed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-54242712535349119172016-06-07T19:05:00.001+01:002017-06-13T14:59:35.307+01:00Non-Representational Philosophies of Mind: A Summary Literature Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="line-height: 18pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">This literature review is intended as a brief
outline of the principal works and theorists currently pursuing non-representational approaches to the theorisation of cognition/mind. Since many
of the theorists listed have already been mentioned on his blog, I have provided links to this material </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;">where relevant</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;">. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;">Although
the interest in non-representational theories of mind is clearly growing, the
academic literature published is relatively sparse when compared with the material
published on representational theories. Many of the papers, chapters and books gathered
here centre around or are informed by discussions of previously published
material in both the Analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy; <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+Ryle" target="_blank">Gilbert Ryle</a> (1949) and <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+Ponty" target="_blank">Maurice Merleau-Ponty</a> (1945) being commonly cited forerunners. American
Pragmatism has also exerted a notable influence – see, for example, the work of
Timor Solymosi (2013 & 2014), who makes frequent reference to the philosophy
of <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-conceptual-divide-between-biology.html" target="_blank">John Dewey</a>. Likewise, Eric P. Charles (2011) draws upon the work of both
William James and Edwin Holt to develop a “New Realism” in psychology </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;">that dispenses with any
explanatory reliance upon inner </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 18pt;">representations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Psychologists
Andrew D. Wilson and Sabrina Golonka (2013) take the influential work of J.J.
Gibson</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">(1986) as a starting point for their exploration
of perception via his concept of “affordances”. They argue that embodied cognition
is the most “exciting hypothesis</span>”<span lang="EN-US"> currently on offer in
cognitive science and that “explicit representations of behaviour of knowledge
have no place in embodied solutions.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Pierre
Steiner’s article in ‘Pragmatics and Cognition’ (2010) criticises the
representationalist assumptions that pertain to contemporary models of
cognition. He proposes that extended and distributed models of cognition should
reject representationalism, suggesting that their adherence to such a model
is a by-product of the extended character of science. Steiner is a philosopher,
with a particular interest in non-representationalism nestled in the broader
setting of mind and language. </span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">This
idea is further examined by Anthony Chemero in his article ‘Anti-
Representationalism and the Dynamical Stance’ (2000). He aims to fill what he
sees as gaps in the arguments in favour of non-representationalism in cognitive
science. He divides this non-representationalism into two: ontological and
epistemic, before debating the merits and disadvantages of each view. This
article, published in the journal ‘Philosophy of Science’, sets out some of the
arguments for and against different strands of non- representationalism within
the wider area of cognition. In his 2009 book “Radical Embodied Cognitive
Science” Chemero again takes up a pragmatist critique of representationalism.
In it he argues that cognition should be viewed in terms of agent-environment
dynamics rather than in terms of representation or computation.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A
prominent theorist working in the Analytic tradition of philosophy and
exploring different theories of mind is John Searle (1983, 1992). He too is
concerned with the so-called ‘mind-body problem’ and, like Ryle before him,
Searle is also the subject of much debate amongst academics. Dennis Sauvé
(2006) claims that Searle writes of a collection of non-representational mental
capacities that make intentionality possible. He examines the reasons for this
observation and Searle’s conclusion that an intentional state cannot come into
being without the existence of a ‘background’ (the underlying non-representational
biological processes). Furthermore, Ronald McIntyre (1984) notes that Searle is
part of a growing number of analytic philosophers who have taken an interest in
the work of phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl. He draws many parallels between
Searle and Husserl, most notably in his study of the former’s
representationalist approach to intentionality. McIntyre devotes a lot of time
to a discussion of ‘networks’ and ‘backgrounds’; terms used by Searle in his
explanation of intentional content, and highlights his apparent struggle to
separate the idea of a non-representational ‘background’ and a representational
‘intentional state’. Thus, whilst Searle’s work may not be particularly non-representational
in nature, the discussions surrounding it provide some interesting points to
consider, in particular surrounding the separation of representational and
non-representational theories of mind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Like
Searle, <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/bewitched-by-language.html" target="_blank">Peter Hacker</a> (2003) has a longstanding interest in the work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein who, like many philosophers of the early 20<sup>th</sup> Century
(<a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/imagining-itself-part-xii-sartres.html" target="_blank">Sartre</a> being another prominent example) had no need for a representational
theory of mind. Hacker is </span>highl<span lang="EN-US">y critical of what he sees as widespread
conceptual confusion in the work of many contemporary neuroscientists and
philosophers, including Searle. In collaboration with neuroscientist Maxwell
Bennett, Hacker has written several books that attempt to show how the careless
use of concepts leads scientists and philosophers astray. Amongst the many
concepts that Hacker and Bennett analyse, “representation” is regarded as generating
particular confusion. They explain (with examples drawn from neuroscience) how
scientists commonly confuse ordinary language uses of the term with its more </span>restricted<span lang="EN-US"> technical usage.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Coming
from a phenomenological standpoint, Hubert L. Dreyfus (2002) provides an
evaluation of the arguments set forth in Merlau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of
Perception” (1962), and proposes that the most basic forms of intelligent
behaviour can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain
representations. Instead he suggests that the skills needed for the body to
connect to the world are stored not as representations, but as dispositions to
respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. Despite providing this
interesting and useful assessment of Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus’ other work
interprets, in a fashion akin to Searle, the writings of Husserl to be rooted
firmly in the representational tradition (1984). He even goes so far as to
describe Husserl’s theories as being in line with those of Jerry Fodor.
However, a number of papers and books are available that debate this, most
notably those by Beth Preston (1994) and Christian Lotz (2007). Preston argues
that Dreyfus should be seen as being at odds with the representational theory
of mind. She remarks that the relationship between Dreyfus and Fodor needs to
be re-examined, as well as the entire relationship between phenomenology and
what she describes as the Anglo-American philosophy of mind. This defence of
Husserl and subsequent criticism of Dreyfus is further explored in Lotz’s more
recent paper. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like
Dreyfus, Varela, Thompson and Rorsch are clearly influenced by Merleau-Ponty in
their 1991 book “The Embodied Mind” which disavows representationalism in
favour of a situated, embodied and enactive theory. Shaun Gallagher and Dan
Zahavi (2008) take a similarly enactive view, as does Richard Mennary (2007) in
his book “Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded”. Mennary argues
that in the study of mind, the units of interest are often too narrowly
restricted and he thus advocates a more extended and world involving
conception.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+No%C3%AB" target="_blank">AlvaNoë’s</a> “actional” theory (2004) is another prominent extended philosophy that
borrows to some degree from in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (in fact Noë was a
student of Dreyfus). Noë denies “internal representation” yet he evidently sees
no contradiction in his frequent reference to perceptual “content”. </span>In contrast, <span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+Hutto" target="_blank">Hutto and Myin</a> (2013) are very critical of what is sometimes known as
the “content view”. They take a more radical position and argue that content
(i.e. representation) is limited to minds involved in “scaffolded” cultural
practices.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Like
Hutto and Myin, <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/representing-mind.html" target="_blank">Mark H. Bickhard</a> (1993) rejects the content view and raises
some very significant</span> logical<span lang="EN-US"> challenges for representationalism. He
explores a version of what has come to be known as the “Symbol Grounding
Problem” (Harnad 1990) in order to critique what he terms “encodingism”: the
mistaken assumption that intelligent processes necessarily involve
representations.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">On several seperate occasions <span lang="EN-US">Kevin O’Regan (2011) has collaborated with Alva Noë and Eric Myin and
his approach obviously shares much in common with these two theorists. In
recent years he has further developed his </span>sensorimotor theory of embodied and extended
cognition in which our manipulation of the environment is a central feature of
perception. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Another
contemporary paper comes from Alex Morgan (2013) who builds his argument around
the theories put forward by <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/against-cognitive-representation.html" target="_blank">William Ramsey</a> (2007). Ramsey agrees with the
structural conception of mental representation, yet uses it to develop an
argument against representationalism. From here, Morgan explores the idea that
although structural representations might count as genuine representations,
they aren’t distinctively mental representations, as they can be found in a
number of non-intentional systems. </span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Karim
Zahidi (2013) argues that non-representational cognitive science is a
relatively new paradigm in the study of cognition, that illustrates a radical departure
from classical cognitive science. In a similar way to the work of Miller,
Zahidi shows how one can develop a form of realism that reflects rather than
accommodates the core principles of non-representationalist embodied cognitive
science. </span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">These
books and articles suggest that non-representational theories are of growing
interest and importance within both psychology and the philosophy of mind.
Whilst this review is neither extensive nor detailed, it is intended to highlight
the major theorists in the field, alongside some of the academics discussing
their work in current publications.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Bibliography:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">BENNETT, M.R. AND HACKER, P.M.S., 2003.
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. <i>UK: Blackwell Publishing</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">BICKHARD, M.H., 1993. Representational
content in humans and machines.<i>Journal of Experimental & Theoretical
Artificial Intelligence</i>, <i>5</i>(4), pp.285-333.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">CHARLES, E.P. ed., 2011. <i>A new look
at New Realism: The psychology and philosophy of EB Holt</i> (Vol. 1).
Transaction Publishers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">CHEMERO,
A., 2000. Anti-representationalism and the dynamical stance. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Philosophy of Science, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">67(4), pp. 625-647 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">CHEMERO,
A., 2009. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical Embodied Cognitive
Science.</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">MIT press.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A. and TORIBIO, J., 1994. Doing without representing? </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Synthese,
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">101(3), pp. 401-431 </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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H.L., 2002. Intelligence without Representation. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">1(4), pp. 367-386 <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">GALLAGHER, S. AND
ZAHAVI, D., 2002.<i> The Phenomenological Mind</i></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">HARNAD,
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">HUTTO,
D. AND MYIN, E., 2013, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Radical
Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content.</i></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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M., 1958. Ryle and Psychology. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Philosophical Review, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">67(4), pp. 522-530 </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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J., 2012. Phenomenological skillful coping: Another counter-argument to Daniel
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RONALD, 1984. Searle on Intentionality. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Inquiry,
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B., 1994. Husserl’s non-representational theory of mind. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Southern Journal of Philosophy, </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">32(2),
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-29636335490270589112016-03-01T14:29:00.001+00:002016-06-16T14:48:38.259+01:00The Conceptual Divide Between Biology And Culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Washoe, the first of the signing
apes, had been regularly bathed. Sometimes between the ages of one and a half
and two years, she picked up her doll, filled the bathtub with water, dumped
the doll in the tub, took it out and dried it with a towel. In later
repetitions she even soaped the doll. This is imitation, but it also must be a
form of representation—indeed, of pretence. (Jolly 2000, 291)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Biological evolution is a well-developed and widely
understood field of enquiry, whereas cultural evolution is significantly less
well understood. Even more poorly understood perhaps, are any conceptual distinctions
we might reasonably make between biology and culture. For instance, one area of
clear divergence can be discerned through an analysis of the concept of intention.
Nothing outside of culture ever arises as a consequence of intention because
intention is a thoroughly social disposition. The following discussion is
intended to explain this claim.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To do something for reasons, whilst not the only purposeful form
of behaviour (I will return to this point), relies upon being capable of giving reasons, of explaining your motivations.
If we cannot give reasons for our behaviour, then our behaviour cannot be said
to be intentional. Unlike most human beings, bacteria do not have reasons for their
behaviour. We can readily explain bacterial behaviour by way of reasons, but
these reasons can only be provided and understood by creatures capable of using
conceptual categories.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some theorists and researchers believe that intelligent animals
possess and use simple concepts and that it is therefore fair to assume that
these creatures may be able to reason to some degree. The counterarguments are
too lengthy to detail (some are available <a href="http://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/animal-minds.html" target="_blank">here</a>), but it should be clear that
the ability to use conceptual categories must necessarily depend on more basic
competences, and it is my view that these fundamental nonverbal skills provide
a more plausible explanation for intelligent behaviour than the conceptual classification
and manipulation necessary for reasoning. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On this view, we can say that a dog may not have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reasons</i> for its intelligent behaviour,
but it may well have expectations. I will take it as given then, that
intelligent behaviour (action) is a form of behaviour that necessarily involves
predictive abilities on the part of the agent. Bacteria have no predictive
capacities and cannot anticipate anything, therefore bacteria do not qualify as
intentionally directed agents.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Whilst I agree with Mead (1934) and Hacker (2013) that intellectual powers are the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>preserve of verbal communicators, I contend
that it is also reasonable to attribute genuinely purposeful—and therefore
intelligent—capacities to creatures capable of nonverbal communication. Communication,
as I have argued elsewhere (here), is an intentional activity, performed with
an expectation of a result. Unintentional behaviour can be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpreted</i> in intentional terms (Dennett 1987), but since it lacks
intention, it has more in common with the behaviour of weather systems or the
motions of celestial objects than it does with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actions</i> of communicators.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Communication then, marks a vitally important conceptual
divide between biology and culture. Intention, agency, perception, imagination,
learning and even consciousness itself, all arise as a consequence of socially formed
skills in the use of representations: of communication. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Whilst communication is a transaction typically involving
others, it nonetheless develops from more rudimentary behavioural dispositions
that are not—in the first instance at least—intentional. Mimicry is a
behavioural tendency observed very widely in nature, but this need not imply
that the imitative mating choices of female guppies (Dugatkin 2000), for example, are
intentional. Likewise, there is no reason to suppose that the imitative
behaviours of newborn humans are intentional either. Intention emerges through the
mechanisms of social feedback as certain behaviours are reinforced by carers, parents
and peers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Earlier versions of this view can be found to various
degrees in the work of Pragmatist philosophers like Mead (1934), Dewey and Bentley
(1949) or in the sociogenic theory of Vygotsky (1933, see also Leudar 1991):<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Vygotskian perspective sees
imagination as a learned thought process originating in collective social
interactions and eventually differentiating so that it can serve either
personal wish-fulfilment or be used in creative problem-solving in art and
science. (Smolucha and Smolucha 1986) <o:p></o:p></div>
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More recent theorists have also come to similar conclusions
through the influence of Wittgenstein and the Ordinary Language school of
philosophy (Melser 2004, Hutto 2008 and Brook 2008 and 2014). Like several
theorists in this tradition, I hold the view that to understand consciousness, we
first need to understand what it is to pretend (Austin 1958, Anscombe <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">1958,</span> see also Carruthers
2006).<o:p></o:p></div>
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[A]s children interact with more
knowledgeable play partners they learn further pretend play skills, such as
using object substitutions and visual isomorphisms to create or extend pretend
play scenarios. Children also learn how to direct play activities by renaming
the objects (calling the laundry basket a ‘boat’) and by framing the activities
as pretense (“Let’s pretend we’re pirates”). Gradually, the verbalizations and
the sensory/motor templates that accompany the object substitutions, are
internalized as imaginative figurative thinking. (Smolucha and Smolucha 2012).<o:p></o:p></div>
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Often when we pretend, we do so in the absence of something.
We can pretend to dance with an absent partner, to rock an absent baby in our
arms or to eat an absent item of food etc. In each case we rely on performative
actions to trigger responses on the part of others that would otherwise be had
in the presence of the absent object. We are extremely adept at such forms of performative
communication, to such a degree in fact that we commonly overlook the role
played by our skills of pretence in the formation of mind. Mind then, can be
regarded as a repertoire of techniques (communicative techniques in particular)
that have been learned through practice and can be demonstrated. Moreover,
these techniques can be pretended and thus can be entertained to the point
where they need not be performed at all, merely imagined.<br />
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According to philosopher John Searle (1983), all actions are
intentionally directed. Several, if not all of the theorists I have mentioned
would agree with Searle on this important point. Brook (<a href="http://donaldbrook.com/" target="_blank">2015</a>) for instance,
makes a sharp distinction between behavioural actions and behaviouristic responsiveness.
On this view, the mechanistic behaviours of simple organisms do not qualify as
actions for precisely the same reasons that the behaviours of parts of
organisms do not qualify as being intentionally directed either. Simple
organisms, organs, cells, chemicals and atoms do not have interests and wants. We
commonly find it informative to describe them as if they do, but if we wish to
understand the fundamental difference between the behaviour of simple
organisms, organs cells etc. and the more sophisticated intelligent actions of
intentionally directed agents, then we need to be extremely clear about this
distinction: the distinction between biology and culture.</div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-49673801139222519772016-02-20T15:14:00.001+00:002018-12-12T22:23:16.153+00:00Against Cognitive Representation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In a recent conference presentation, William Ramsey (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgq6uo9cDdY" target="_blank">2015</a>)
argues that when it comes to the question of representations in the brain, the
burden of proof lies with those who deny the existence of these alleged
entities. He makes it clear that the consensus amongst “the vast majority of
cognitive scientists” is that “representations are realised in the brain” and
he agrees with Godfrey-Smith (<a href="http://petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/PGS-on-Teleosemantics-2006-eprint.pdf" target="_blank">2006</a>) that the term “representation” is not used in a technical sense but is based on the standard definition in which representations are stand-ins for the things they represent.
On these last two points I agree.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ramsey focusses his attention on what he calls "representational deflationism." By this he means "views that deny that the value of representational theories depends upon the existence of actual representational structures in the brain." Ramsey argues very persuasively that representational deflationism either falls into anti-representationalism or what he calls "representational realism." On this point too, I think Ramsey's analysis is correct.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Even though I disagree that the burden of proof falls upon
the shoulders of those who deny that brains produce representations—and I will
explain why—I hereby take up Ramsey’s challenge.</span><br />
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<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Anyone who claims the existence
of an entity, whether it be a fairy, a god, a ghoul in the attic or a ghost in
the machine, is under an obligation to support their claims with evidence,
preferably empirical evidence. If the burden of proof lies with those who deny
the existence of nonentities, then there would be no end to the nonentities
they would have to disprove.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representations are actions or artefacts
produced by creatures as part of communicative transactions, usually involving
two or more agents. Brains do not interact or make transactions, only creatures
do.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Brains have no medium of representation.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Unlike embrained creatures, brains
do not have any manipulative agency or resources that can be mobilised for representation
use or production.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">All representations that are not
manifested as behaviours, are manifested as artefacts produced by tool manufacturing
creatures. Brains cannot fashion artefacts of any kind.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representation has evolved in
response to social pressures and opportunities. There are no social pressures or opportunities
for speculative exploitation of available resources in the brain.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representations either resemble
or symbolise the things they represent. If there are any resembling
representations in the brain, then they must be observable. Causal correlations
between world and brain are commonly observed, but cognitive representations
remain elusive.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Symbolic representation has an
evolutionary reliance on more rudimentary skills in the use of resembling
representations (imitation for example). Not even the most simple brains
contain any evidence of mimetic representation or any other rudimentary
representation, let alone more sophisticated forms.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representations are purposefully produced
by intelligent creatures. Brains are inextricable parts of the central nervous
systems of many creatures, but they do not have any intentions that are not the
intentions of those creatures as whole organisms.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Cognitive representations are
often invoked to explain intentionally directed action, but this explanatory strategy
is circular because all representations presuppose intention. There are no
unintentional representations, only occasional artefacts and patterns that
happen to resemble representations to varying degrees. Cognitive representations
are therefore explanatorily vacuous in this important respect.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If brains act on their own intentions,
then we are host to forms of agency which need to be explained without recourse
to an infinite regress of further intention initiating representations. Thus, all
cognitive representations must necessarily be unintentionally produced and
cannot therefore contribute to an explanation of intentional behaviour.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representations are necessary for
communication. Brains do not need to communicate because they have direct causal
influence over their own processes and those of the organism as a whole. Unlike
the brain/body relation of influence, the influence of representations is always
indirect (see note 3 above).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If brains were sufficiently
intelligent to develop as yet undetectable representational systems during
their evolution without leaving evidence of more rudimentary systems observable
in simple brains, then there is no reason to believe that they would need such
systems in the first place.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The only entities in need of
encoded representations are creatures with secrets and those they wish to share them with.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Representations are used to
mediate between intelligent agents capable of exploiting opportunities and of
making mistakes. Brains do not exploit anything that the organism as a whole
does not exploit and they do not make any mistakes that the organism as a whole
does not make.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ramsey claims that all
representations have content. Representational content is culturally
determined. There is no culture in the brain. Isomorphic representations
(copies, replicas etc.) do not depend on content, but there is no unequivocal evidence
of such isomorphic representation in the brain.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Symbolic content (what
representations are <i>about</i> as opposed
to what they are <i>of</i>) is not fixed.
Disputes over the content of representations are arbitrated according to social
norms and discursive practices. There are no social norms or discursive
practices in the brain.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If there are multiple agents in
the brain capable of producing and interpreting representations, then there is
no possibility of clearly explaining agency because there is no way of
explaining how final arbitration is reached in cases of conflicting
representational interpretations.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ramsey suggests (pace Putnam <a href="http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article020108.html" target="_blank">1975</a>)
that it would be a miracle if there are no representations in the brain. There
are two replies to this claim: A: The real miracle would be if there <i>are</i>
representations in the brain. B: If a creature has a capacity to produce representations, then this
capacity alone is sufficient to fit the explanatory job description. The
capacity to make a pot is not an inner pot.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Ramsey argues that the widespread
scientific consensus on cognitive representation is a reason to be a realist on
the subject. This amounts to nothing more than the observation that cognitive
representation is a widespread article of faith amongst scientists who believe
that they have better things to do than to determine whether their philosophical
foundations are firmly rooted or not. It is the job of philosophers to point
out the significant conceptual weaknesses in this theoretical position.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To see or otherwise experience a representation of X is not to experience X. Thus, an experience of a representation cannot be an experience of the thing/s represented.</span></li>
</ol>
<div>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-style: italic;">"Suppose someone were to coat the occipital lobes of the brain with a special photographic emulsion which, when developed, yielded a reasonable copy of a current visual stimulus. In many quarters this would be regarded as a triumph in the physiology of vision. Yet nothing could be more disastrous, for we should have to start all over again and ask how the organism sees a picture in its occipital cortex, and we should now have much less of the brain available in which to seek an answer." (Skinner 1969, 232)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If you have any suggestions of further objections to representationalism then please let me know.</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-82310617426504673892015-12-30T11:22:00.000+00:002017-09-30T12:11:11.570+01:00The Charge of Essentialism (a reply to David King)<br />
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Essentialism can be defined as the view that all things, or groups of things, possess essential features without which they would cease to be what they are. So, for example, all squares have four equal sides and four right angles. Without these fundamental attributes, a shape would not qualify as a square.</div>
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Essentialism has been around for more than two millennia, so inevitably there are several different versions on offer. Perhaps the most extreme version was developed by Plato who believed in an abstract realm of perfect "forms" of which the things of our world are merely imperfect copies. So, for example, all squares are approximations of an ideal square to which our only means of access is by way of ideas. Hundreds of years later, John Locke did not posit an immaterial realm of perfect forms but held instead that essences are in the mind, as ideas to which "things existing are found to agree, so they come to be ranked under that name."</div>
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Interestingly, it might be suggested that every form of essentialism must necessarily partake of some essential feature or features by which it might be identified as such. Just as all squares share essential features, so too perhaps, do all forms of essentialism. Nonetheless, as has been famously noted by Wittgenstein, many conceptual categories cannot be reduced to essential features, but share what Wittgenstein called "family resemblances." Different members of a family may share no single feature in common, yet several different features may be shared across two or more members. Games, Wittgenstein argued, are related in this way. As a conceptual category, there is no essential feature of all games, yet each game shares features in common with one or more other games. Accordingly, there can be no typical member of a family and no typical game. Therefore only a cross section of examples is likely to provide an indication of some, but not necessarily all, of the overlapping features of the group as a whole.</div>
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Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances is often taken to be strongly anti-essentialist and is frequently cited in disputes over whether it is possible to determine necessary and sufficient conditions for certain concepts. It should be noted though, that family resemblance categories are not entirely boundless even if many conceptual boundaries are fuzzy. That we usually do not need to see a border between Scotland and England in order to know which country we are in does not mean that no border exists or that no boundary can be erected. Likewise, Wittgenstein is not suggesting that there are no linguistic rules at all or that it is pointless to explore the boundaries between one conceptual category and another. For example, if the concept of games had no boundaries, then it would be indistinguishable from the more general concept of "activities" which itself would be indistinguishable from the concept of "change" etc. Wittgenstein's central point is that we do not need to establish any boundaries or to consult any putative mental or ideal essences to know how to use a concept. But in the process of making this point, he is not saying that we cannot establish necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts under any circumstances. Nor is he saying that it is impossible to distinguish between different conceptual categories through conceptual analysis. My reasons for these important clarifications will become clear in a moment.
On several occasions, philosopher, blogger and Facebook discussion group moderator, David King, has labeled me a "fundamentalist", a "Platonist", a "language policeman" and, in response to my last blog post here on the subject of communication, a "rabid essentialist". Evidently, by characterising my position in these ways he hopes to discredit my view in as expedient as way as possible. King is well aware that my commitment to conceptual analysis owes a great deal to the work of Wittgenstein and since he is also aware that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as an anti essentialist, he sees it as "ironic" that my methods should be so at odds with what he takes to be Wittgenstein's position. I hope I have already made it clear that Wittgenstein's position on essentialism is all too easy to oversimplify. After all, it was Wittgenstein who wrote "Essence is expressed in grammar." Of this statement, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains:</div>
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The 'rules' of grammar are not mere technical instructions from on-high for correct usage; rather, they express the norms for meaningful language. Contrary to empirical statements, rules of grammar describe how we use words in order to both justify and criticize our particular utterances. But as opposed to grammar-book rules, they are not idealized as an external system to be conformed to. Moreover, they are not appealed to explicitly in any formulation, but are used in cases of philosophical perplexity to clarify where language misleads us into false illusions.</blockquote>
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On at least two occasions King has asked whether I have conducted tests of native speakers or undertaken corpus analysis of people's every day speech interactions. In order to clarify where language misleads us into false illusions we do not need to consult native speakers to know that "communicating at someone" is not a strong candidate case of communication. Simply being an experienced native speaker—with all that that entails—is sufficient qualification to know that to communicate about someone is rarely, if ever, to communicate with them. And we can also readily observe that it is not entirely unintelligible—although it is somewhat strained—to say that we can "communicate to someone" or "communicate to ourselves" but we cannot do so without also communicating with someone or with ourselves. And to communicate with our hands, lips, mouth or voice is not to communicate to our hands, lips, mouth or voice. None of these points about the relation of the preposition "with" to the verb "communicating" require any corpus analysis any more than they require us to consult some inner essence, ideal, prototype or guide. Nor in fact do they require us to be experts in linguistics, although such credentials would probably help to convince some doubters. So, to suggest that science, linguistics or corpus analysis are necessary—essential even—to establishing anything about ordinary language is to have missed one of Wittgenstein's central points.</div>
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Even though it was clear that King's remarks were aimed more at undermining my arguments than engaging with them, it occurred to me that I could indeed test my conjecture in a way that might partially satisfy King's scrutiny. I Googled "communicating with", "communicating to", "communicating in" etc. and found, just as I had expected, that the preposition "with" is by far the most common usage. In fact it is sixteen times more common than its nearest rivals "to" and "in". With further research it might be possible to use Google to perform a statistical analysis of ordinary language locutions but in this case the results merely confirmed what should have been obvious from the outset. Nonetheless, for King, who seems unwilling to accept reasoned argument (philosophy) on its own merits, perhaps the possibility of providing some readily available statistical evidence might offer a certain utility.</div>
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My point in drawing attention to the relationship between the concept of "communication" and the preposition "with" has always been to emphasise that communication is a transaction, and like all transactions it usually occurs between two or more agents. We can communicate with ourselves of course—by making notes, keeping a diary or simply by talking to ourselves—but one group of locutions that are tellingly absent from Google are the following: "communicate in myself", "communicate inside myself" and "communicate in me". I take these as unequivocal evidence that the concept of inner communication is beyond the bounds of ordinary usage. King would dismiss these observations as a priori stipulations but such accusations do not change the fact that communication is a thoroughly public affair that can only ever occur between communicators or, at the very least, on the part of an individual already skilled in such transactions. There are no communicators within us, and without communicators there can be no communications.</div>
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So when theorists speak of inner communication, signals, codes, representations and information, they overstep the bounds of ordinary language. Communication is the mark of culture, not biology or physics. These theorists and researchers unwittingly expand the concept of communication to include causal influences, natural processes, stimuli, reflexes and autonomic mechanisms, none of which are communicative behaviours at all and simply do not qualify for inclusion in the category. Just because there are some family resemblances between one conceptual terrain and another does not mean that there is no boundary. Scotland is not a part of England.</div>
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When King accuses me of philosophical equivalent of nationalism, he fails to appreciate what I am trying to achieve. He argues: "You just assume without argument that neuroscientist are using the word 'communication' in a sloppy manner because they don't conform to your conventions. This is not an argument it is a statement of how you think they should speak." As I have repeatedly tried to make clear, the conventions I identify are not "my" conventions, they are the conventions of ordinary language. I do not berate anyone, but I am very critical of the misuse of ordinary language within the sciences and philosophy. But it should be noted that I am not critical of these misuses because of some quasi nationalistic commitment to ordinary language. I am critical of these misuses because of the devastating effect they have on our understanding of the difference between natural processes on the one hand and intentional actions on the other.</div>
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Intentional behaviours (of which communication is paradigmatic) require goals. What is the having of goals if not the having of abilities to represent the thing or things with which we are engaged? King consistently fails to address this question. If we cannot produce representations then we cannot communicate. This is why I am so insistent that communication is the turning point between biology and culture. If we bundle all natural processes into the same conceptual category as communication then there can be no clear distinction and many important insights will be obscured from view.</div>
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Evidently King regards all criticism of conceptual confusion as little more than an irksome punctiliousness on the part of a minority of "Wittgenstein fanatics". He does acknowledge that "Hacker and Bennett DEMONSTRATE [King's emphasis] some contradictory and confused uses of certain terms" but he is clearly unwilling to consider the possibility that the problems of conceptual confusion are much more far reaching.</div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-34302456652534581742015-12-23T12:52:00.000+00:002017-06-15T18:54:26.527+01:00The Concept of Communication<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It may not seem to matter much how we each
carve up our conceptual world. If you choose to apply a concept in one way and
I choose to apply it in another, the potential for difficulty might seem to be
of little consequence. Where, for example, is the conflict if, like the people
of Lilliput, you choose to attack your conceptual boiled eggs from the narrow
end and I, like the people of Blefuscu, choose to attack mine from the broad
end?</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If our efforts are limited to individual
projects, then there is little likelihood of disagreement. We can agree to
disagree. But if, on the contrary, we wish to cooperate, then the potential for
confusion, loss, damage or harm can be very significant. Two examples can be
used to illustrate this point.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In 1999, a $125 million NASA mission to
send a probe into orbit around Mars, ditched into the Martian surface.
Unbeknownst to NASA, one of the contractors had used metric units in their
component instead of the imperial standard used by NASA. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In 2003, the builders of a new bridge
between Sweden and Germany discovered that the German side was more than half a
metre higher than the Swedish side. The engineers were already aware that
Germany and Sweden determine the height of sea level in different ways, but
they had mistakenly reversed the correction, thus precisely doubling the 27cm
difference rather than cancelling it out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Problems like these are perhaps best
regarded as </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">conversion error</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">s. The bridge engineers </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">converted</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> between two conceptual systems
incorrectly and the rocket component engineers simply took it for granted that
no <i>conversion</i> was necessary. When errors have glaring material consequences, it
is often relatively straightforward to trace the source. But conversion
errors need not be obvious and may survive over long periods due to a lack
of appreciation of the significance and scope of the problem. I hope to show
that we face exactly such a problem with the way that the concept of
communication is understood and this has profound
implications in all fields in which the concept is used.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">The concept of communication can be
understood in any of three incompatible ways. The first—what we might call
"pervasive communication"—defines communication as the transfer of
information ("differences that make a difference" as Bateson put it
in 1972) between various entities. According to this view, all forms of life,
and even their parts, communicate with one another. For example Baluška </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">et al.</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> (2009, p.123) write: “Roots are
able to produce and to sense growth regulators, chemical messengers and
metabolites that communicate to the whole plant the result of processing and
integration of that information.” And Bais </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">et al</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">. (2004) claim that plants
communicate with other organisms: “Increasing evidence suggests that root
exudates might initiate and manipulate biological and physical interactions
between roots and soil organisms, and thus play an active role in root-root and
root-microbe communication.” Search Google for “bacterial communication” and
you will find nearly 50 million results. Clearly this generalised notion of
communication is extremely prevalent. Some theorists even speculate that there is communication of information at the quantum
level. Whilst, at the other end of the spectrum, it is not at all uncommon for
pheromones to be described as as a form of "nonverbal communication"
or for body posture, eye movements etc. to be called "body
language."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Most people recognise that language is a subordinate
concept of which communication is the superordinate. This is why we distinguish
between the verbal and the non-verbal; between language on the
one hand and what are sometimes called "the mimetic arts". Nonetheless, it is possible to find cases where communication is
conceived as a "kind of language" (Argyle 1975, Hudin 2009). This sense
of communication is what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949) would have
called a "category mistake" (which, incidentally, I would argue, is a
subordinate form of conversion error). Instead of conceiving of language as a
sub-category of communication, communication is regarded as a sub-category of
language. We find such category mistakes for example when people claim that
language is a kind of picture (Wittgenstein 1922) or that a "picture is a
model" (</span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Ibid</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">), that "models describe the world" (Daiper 2003) or that
"Drawing is a mode of description" Ingold (2011). There is little
illumination to be gained by explaining one form of representation in terms of
another. Strictly speaking, pictures do not describe or model anything,
language does not picture or model anything and models do not describe or
picture anything. A cat is not a kind of dog. With this in mind, it is
understandable that Wittgenstein later rejected his "picture theory"
of language as misleading. And I suspect that this realisation may
well have had a significant influence on his later important emphasis on
conceptual analysis.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The final—and I think the most
coherent—sense in which the concept of communication is commonly used can be
found at the beginning of the first sentence of the current Wikipedia entry devoted to
it: "Communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning 'to share') is the
purposeful activity of information exchange between two or more
participants..." In contrast with "pervasive communication",
this more restricted sense emphasises that all communications are meant; that
they are intentionally produced with a purpose, usually of eliciting a
response on the part of another individual or individuals. This is why it is
incoherent to conceive of communication as an act that can exist without an
intention, goal or purpose. Bacteria do not intend anything, quantum particles
do not pursue goals, roots do not deliberately influence microbes and people do
not purposefully generate pheromones.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Communication is a purposeful activity
because in principle it involves an anticipated outcome: a response on the part
of another perceiver. We cannot communicate </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">with</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> trees because trees cannot
communicate </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">with</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> us. Communication is a reciprocal affair. There is no such thing as
communicating </span><i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">at</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> something.</span></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fmW2uOSPud8/VnqYjzSQnYI/AAAAAAAABy0/Ww5y8TLO7jc/s1600/Concept%2Bof%2BCommunication%2BSchema.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fmW2uOSPud8/VnqYjzSQnYI/AAAAAAAABy0/Ww5y8TLO7jc/s1600/Concept%2Bof%2BCommunication%2BSchema.png" /></a></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-60193089471826684512015-12-07T08:54:00.000+00:002018-06-19T19:18:37.296+01:00Embodiments of Mind<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0D2ywMrGL9k/VmVIAIZQxBI/AAAAAAAAByY/YeG5-wAST40/s1600/Embodied.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="321" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0D2ywMrGL9k/VmVIAIZQxBI/AAAAAAAAByY/YeG5-wAST40/s400/Embodied.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have often mentioned on this blog that our actions are embodied. Sometimes I have also claimed that our thoughts are embodied <i>in</i> our actions, as I believe they are. There is nothing unusual about such turns of phrase. They are commonplace in ordinary language and serve very well to describe the relationship between our many skills and the ways these can be applied to the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the last twenty years or so, a new breed of theorist has emerged, a breed who see themselves neither as immaterial minds pulling the strings of material bodies, nor as brains locked away in skulls, but rather as minds interwoven into the very fabric of the body. These Embodied Mind theorists come in several varieties, but their principal claim is that the brain is not the locus of mind, but rather the body as a whole. Whilst I think this view is a vast improvement on that of mind/body dualism, I think it is mistaken to suggest that the mind is dispersed throughout the body, or throughout anything for that matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To be a minded creature is to be in possession of a range of abilities, all of which can be performed and are thus communicable in principle. The possession of abilities is nothing like the possession of scars or dentures or artificial hips. Abilities are not bodily things we can point to or examine with a scanner, no matter how sophisticated or precise. They are not to be found in our bodies but in the skilful things we do, the actions we perform and the complex tasks we engage in and carry out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">To develop a new ability—to learn something—is to be capable of demonstrating it, and to be capable of demonstrating an ability is also to able to use it to envisage goals, to form expectations and to anticipate outcomes. Such predictive capacities are the <i>embodiment</i> of intelligence and are by no means limited to our fellow human beings. But what does it mean to use the word "embodiment" in this ordinary way and what light might this usage shed upon the theory of the Embodied Mind?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Firstly, it should be obvious that my thoughts of swimming are not embodied in my sitting down whilst thinking of swimming. Nor are my thoughts of dancing or of laughing or casting my eye over Rodin's "Le Penseur". My posture and furrowed brow might well be taken to be the embodiment of my <i>thinking</i>, but not my thoughts. I can only embody my thoughts if I enunciate or enact them. It makes no sense to say that I am the embodiment of my thinking. When I act, my thoughts are embodied in the act, not in my body. But when I do not act, my thoughts are not embodied in my inactivity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">When we say that Hitler was the embodiment of evil, we do not mean that evil took bodily form in Hitler (though we might be sorely tempted to think so). We mean that Hitler is a prime exemplar of everything we regard as evil: he was the personification of evil. In ordinary language, to embody something is to represent it, not to contain it or to instantiate it or to be it. A red thing does not embody redness. We reserve the concept of embodiment for symbols, not for things that actually instantiate the relevant property. When we say that an act was the embodiment of goodness, we mean that the act could be taken as a representative symbol of the concept of goodness, not that goodness has taken earthly form. Likewise, when we say that a person is the embodiment of innocence, this is an attribution, not an attribute that we should expect to find instantiated in their corporeal frame. You will not find any more truth in the body of someone who speaks truths than in the body of someone who speaks lies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In a recent discussion with a neuroscientist and advocate of the Embodied Mind, he</span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> claimed that physiological sensations of guilt etc. are "100% instantiated in emotional somatic markers in the body." Putting aside the question of what emotional somatic markers might actually be, let's imagine that my young son unwittingly does something widely regarded as bad. If everyone agrees and tells him so, but he does not </span><i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">accept</i><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> this, then according to our advocate of the Embodied Mind, my son's action cannot be bad because he will not have the requisite embodied markers of guilt. Something is very obviously wrong with this conception of wrongdoing because the criterion for the determination of guilt or innocence etc. is taken to be a personal possession (or lack of) rather than a publicly negotiated rule or convention. Our concepts are not private possessions. My son cannot choose to define his conceptual world by fiat, but must accept social codes that are instantiated in public practices, not somehow somatically inscribed in the bodies of individuals. Our abilities to use concepts are not instantiated in us. We are <i>not</i> the embodiments of our minds, our actions are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Embodied Mind theories have emerged in opposition to various forms of Cartesian dualism. As commendable as this opposition is, it comes at a price, the price of coherence. To suggest that our minds are to be found distributed throughout our bodies is to suggest that our minds are somehow contained in the body in the way that we might mistakenly take the potential for my hand to dissolve in acid to be instantiated in my hand. Philosopher, Peter Hacker, identifies this as transcendentalism:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>One tempting misconception is transcendentalism, i.e., the fallacious reification of powers, according to which they are conceived as occult entities mysteriously contained within the possessor of the power.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In their reification of the mind, embodied theories fail to recognise and to clarify that the mind is neither a thing nor a non-thing. Abilities are not to be found by examining the body, no matter how precisely. We are <i>not</i> the embodiments of our minds, our actions are.</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-7103360529497675252015-11-25T16:31:00.000+00:002017-11-07T14:00:44.960+00:00Semiotics Denatured<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VajEs07l0ys/VlXhjcbwlHI/AAAAAAAAByE/oDf6IvgoL6I/s1600/Semiotics.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VajEs07l0ys/VlXhjcbwlHI/AAAAAAAAByE/oDf6IvgoL6I/s400/Semiotics.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
theory of the sign (Semiotics) is perhaps most closely associated with the work
of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce. Over the last century, semiotics has had a very significant
influence in numerous fields of research from the arts and literary criticism
to biology and cognitive neuroscience. This post is intended to expose what I
think is a major flaw in the theory of the sign, a flaw that continues to
beleaguer scientific research and philosophical enquiry often in quite far
reaching ways.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
Wikipedia entry on signs distinguishes between “natural” signs (or what Peirce
called “indexical signs”) and “conventional” signs (“symbols”). In an
influential paper from 1955 H. P. Grice makes a similar distinction between
what he calls "natural" and "non-natural" meanings. Grice's
distinction can therefore be seen in the same light that I aim to shed upon the
concept of natural signs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">On
the subject of the sign, Wikipedia states: “A natural sign bears a causal
relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or medical
symptoms signify a disease.” I hope it is already evident that something isn't
quite right about this formulation. Symptoms are caused by disease but they are
not signals produced by disease. Likewise, thunder is caused by storms but its
influence upon the world is not a consequence of its possible status as a sign.
Such a status is not a property of thunder but can only be ascribed to the
sound of thunder in much the same way that the function of a tool is assigned
to it through use. This is not to suggest that nonverbal creatures cannot be
influenced by regularly occurring states of affairs and develop efficacious
responses as a consequence. But what I do want to suggest is that Pavlov’s
dogs, for example, did not salivate because they interpreted the bell as a sign
for dinner but because they had developed an autonomic response to the sound of
the bell. Autonomic responses do not function by way of interpretation,
unconscious or otherwise. Such a suggestion would undermine the important
distinction we typically assume between intentional behaviours (actions) and
the many non-conscious processes and responses that support, enable and
propagate the vast majority of life on Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;">Discussing
C.S. Peirce's theory of the sign, Noble and Davidson (1996) state: "A
mouse rustling in the undergrowth is producing an indexical acoustic sign of
itself." If this is true, then every effect would have to be a sign of its
cause and the entire universe must be a teeming mass of communicating representations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>According to Semetsky (2005 p.232) this is
precisely what Peirce believed: “Everything is a sign: the whole universe, for
Peirce, is perfused with signs.” Interestingly, Semetsky also identifies a paradox in Peirce’s
thinking since he also claimed that: “nothing is a sign unless it is
interpreted as a sign.” Indeed it should be obvious that the universe is only
composed of signs to the extent that we sign users are capable of interpreting
it as such. So when someone states: <a href="http://bit.ly/1Nl0rAu" target="_blank">"A footprint... can communicate a message."</a></span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"> this is either just a handy metaphor or the attribution of communicative agency where none is warranted. Such marks are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpretable</i>
by someone capable of extrapolating from them in causal terms, but without a skilled
interpreter—moreover a symbol user capable of making meaningful attributions — the
marks are merely whatever they are: a cluster of properties. Interpretable things are not
communicators, but become interpretable only by being <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">treated</span>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as if</i> they are part of practices of use </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">— most commonly as part of practices of communication</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">. Treating things in this way has significant predictive and retrodictive efficacy, so much so in fact, that we regularly
assume (mistakenly of course) that all life must be capable of the same skills of attribution.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">An
advocate of semiotics might wish to interject here by denying that natural
signs are representations at all. This is the move that biosemiotician,
Marcello Barbieri (2013) makes when he claims that a natural sign “cannot show
or inform, it can only point to an object as if to say: ‘There it is!’” But
this is misconceived. What is pointing after all if not a form of showing?
Pointing is precisely equivalent to holding something up, presenting it or
nodding towards it. Likewise, if nothing is pointed to or shown when we exclaim
“There it is!” the utterance is unintelligible. Barbieri continues: “A
thermometer and a footprint are natural indices.” The suggestion that a
sophisticated instrument of numerical (i.e. symbolic) measurement is a natural
sign is simply absurd. But it gets worse. Barbieri claims:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Any
metabolic process presupposes a goal directed organism and as such it is a
semiotic process, since the organism selects and evaluates environmental
stimuli with respect to their adequacy or inadequacy for the purpose of the
organism’s survival. </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;">(2013)</span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Barbieri
is by no means alone in the attribution of goal directed action to the most
simple of forms of life:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
discovery and use of natural signs is a required prerequisite of existence for
any living system because they are indispensable to movement, the search for
food, regulation, communication, and many other information-related activities. (Sukhoverkhov 2012)</span></span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sukhoverkhov
and Barbieri evidently agree that even the most simple organisms necessarily <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">treat</i> the world <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as if</i> it were composed of signs that they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">direct</i> their
behaviour. More astonishingly still, Peirce agrees: “The microscopist looks to
see whether the motions of a little creature show any purpose. If so, there is
mind there.” On this view then, not only is the universe perfused with signs,
but all life is perfused with mind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The
assumption that mind is a prerequisite for any living system should be rejected
as both implausible and wildly extravagant. And the conclusion drawn by Peirce
on the basis of the movements of a microorganism is in obvious need of
revision. The point of error lies in the unjustified assumption that efficacious
movements constitute purposeful (i.e. goal directed) behaviour: actions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If
the most simple organisms require minds to survive and propagate then there can
be no explanation of how mindedness could ever have evolved. A scientifically
parsimonious explanation of the evolution of intelligent life must therefore distinguish
between efficacious behaviour on the one hand and its more highly evolved
and genuinely purposeful cousin (action) on the other. When a microorganism
moves along a food gradient it is not propelled by a goal; it is propelled by
the causal influence of the food gradient. This sophisticated but nonetheless
predictable behaviour has been honed by millions of years of evolution in which
innumerable less well adapted creatures have perished. And whilst this
behaviour may resemble action, one thing should be certain: microorganisms are
not capable of producing representations of any sort, let alone goals.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There
is nothing natural about so called “natural signs”. Nor is interpretation a prerequisite
of life on Earth. Sensory discrimination is certainly a prerequisite of all life,
but it is certainly not a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sign</i> of
mind, not even incipient or rudimentary mind. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">If
we want to understand the evolutionary emergence of mindedness, we first need
to be clear about what it takes for a creature to treat an object as if it has
properties that it does not actually possess. Such skills are certainly not to
be found amongst microorganisms. Mind is born of culture.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US" style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In
the case of non-linguistic signs there is always the danger that their meanings
will seem natural; one must view them with a certain detachment to see that
their meanings are in fact the products of a culture, the result of shared
assumptions and conventions. But in the case of linguistic signs the
conventional or ‘arbitrary’ basis is obvious, and therefore by taking
linguistics as a model one may avoid the familiar mistake of assuming that
signs which appear natural to those who use them have an intrinsic meaning and
require no explanation. (Culler 1975, p.6) </span></span></blockquote>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-88064389489369776252015-11-02T14:40:00.001+00:002015-12-17T19:07:55.890+00:00Mute Witnesses<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8eZftMM85ow/Vjd1xchVKJI/AAAAAAAABx0/7twMrSUa4aI/s1600/Lies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="315" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8eZftMM85ow/Vjd1xchVKJI/AAAAAAAABx0/7twMrSUa4aI/s400/Lies.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph." Lewis Hine (1909)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A few days ago I presented a paper at a conference at the University of California Berkeley on the subject to the image. One of the other speakers gave a presentation beginning with the above quote from the early 20th Century social documentary photographer Lewis Hine. The quote reminded me of Picasso's famous remark: "“Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.” Like Picasso and Hein, many people hold the view that images — photographs in particular — are truth bearers, that they provide meaningful testimony and have what philosophers sometimes call "factive", as opposed to fictive, status. I aim to explain why such talk about images has the effect of misleadingly reducing them to linguistic tokens. Furthermore, doing so overlooks, misunderstands or worse still ignores, the essentially mute but nonetheless powerful effectiveness of images as substitutes for the things they represent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As any linguist will confirm, all well formed sentences contain a subject and a predicate. Language is thus a system of procedures by which we ascribe attributes to things through the use of arbitrary symbols. Only the most intelligent creatures can do this because only the most intelligent creatures are capable of following the rules necessary to engage in practices of predication: of the socially negotiated attribution of abstract linguistic tokens to objects and states of affairs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It should be clear to everyone that images are not linguistic entities, yet quite evidently it is not in the least clear. Almost all theories of representation refer to images as "signs" or "signifiers", as "readable" objects or "messages" that require "decoding", "deciphering" or "interpreting." In everyday use, we talk of how images "convey meaning", "have content" and are "about" the things to which they "refer." We also talk of what images "tell" us, what they "describe", "articulate", "suggest", "explain" and "imply." And it is not impossible to find reference to images as oracles and chronicles or soothsayers or that they predict the future, commentate on the present and narrate the past. It might help to exemplify the absurdity of such thinking by noting that we can say exactly the same of tea leaves or the lines on one's hand. That we can do so, reveals far more about our infatuation with language than it does about the nature of images or the susceptibilities and skills that enable their use.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Any student wishing to understand the question of <i>how images actually work </i>(this was the title of my presentation at the conference by the way) will be met by an impenetrable thicket of confused and over complex theorisation about these profoundly simple but powerful tools. They will have to assimilate and understand numerous technical terms like "denotation", "connotation", "punctum", "studium", "icon", "index", "symbol", "sign", "referent", "veridicality", "verisimilitude" etc. And with each step along this path they will be no closer to the answer they seek. In fact, with each step, they will descend deeper into a convoluted labyrinth from which there is little hope of return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Depictive images work because they can be mistaken for the things they represent in certain ways and in certain respects. It is as simple as that. There are ways to make images resemble the things they depict because there are ways and respects in which they can be made more or less indiscriminable from them, ways that fully exploit the potential for illusion. You simply cannot do this with words — words do not look anything like the things they stand in for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So when we say that images "tell" "truths" or "lies" we ignore their essential nature and instead treat them as linguistic items. In ordinary usage this is fine, but strictly speaking (which is what we should require of all serious theories) lying and telling truths are the exclusive preserve of language users. Of course, images can depict things that never did, could or will ever happen. But nonverbal misrepresentation does not reduce to verbal misrepresentation: to lying. Images are not texts and the skills necessary to use them for communicative purposes are by no means reliant upon (although they are massively assisted by) our skills as language users.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">There are two fundamental questions we can ask of any image: "What is it of?" and "What is it about?" The first is always more basic than the second because the second relies to a very significant degree on the first. If it were not a matter of some importance what images are actually of, then we could indeed replace them with abstractions, with symbolic tokens, with words. We can do this of course, but not without significant loss.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Recognising what an image is of, is usually effortless, whereas the answer to the question of what an image is about — what it means — is almost never so. In fact the answer to the question of meaning is about as straightforward as the answer to the question of the function of a length of string. If you do not know how to use a length of string, then it has no function. The same is true of meaning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Images can neither lie nor tell the truth. They can be used in acts of lying and they can be used to corroborate truths, but just as a nonverbal human witness can point to the perpetrator of a crime with no recourse to language, so too do images gain their fundamental efficacy from factors that are entirely independent of linguistic competence. Images can be deceptive but they cannot deceive. They can mislead and misguide but they cannot cheat. They can be clear but they cannot be honest. They can distort but they cannot feign. They can simulate but they cannot pretend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Images are powerful because they trigger many of the same embodied responses as the things they represent — just as words do in fact. But, unlike language, they do not require elaborate skills in symbolic substitution and rule following to do this. So it is simply mistaken to suggest or conclude that images are bearers of truth, tellers of tales or descriptions of the world. If someone shows you a view through a window, they are not showing you a lie and nor are they showing you the truth. Likewise, a view of the moon through the distorting lens of a telescope is neither factive nor fictive. When we present evidence of the truth, the evidence does not constitute the truth. Truth is not something that can be perceived. When we say "I see the truth" we do not mean to suggest that the truth is something that can be seen. We mean that the truth is something that can be <i>understood</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">During the conference, another of the presenters mentioned something that struck me as relevant to this analysis. Apparently the root of the word "epiphany" is to be found in the Ancient Greek term: <i>phanein</i>, meaning "to show." Images are used in acts of showing. It is what we do with images, and more specifically, the communicative practices within which images are integrated, that transforms them into such extraordinary and useful tools. Language enables us to use images in extraordinarily sophisticated ways, but language also significantly obscures our understanding of these essentially mute witnesses.</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-32938955826405880732015-09-23T19:00:00.002+01:002015-10-02T11:24:27.229+01:00Bewitched by Language<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Towards the end of his life, the Austrian British philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein wrote: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our
intelligence by means of language." In his earlier and perhaps most famous
work, "The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus", Wittgenstein expressed
the view that language is a kind of "picture" of the world that
frames and encapsulates experience. He remarked: "The limits of my
language are the limits of my world." Wittgenstein later rejected the metaphor of language as a kind of picture of the world preferring instead
to focus on the ways in which different usages of language lead us into
philosophical confusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">One of the leading and certainly one of the most prolific scholars of
the work of Wittgenstein is Peter Hacker. Hacker does an outstanding job of illuminating
and elaborating on Wittgenstein's analysis and of exposing numerous conceptual
confusions that continue to beleaguer not merely philosophy but cognitive
neuroscience also. He is not without his critics of course, but having
encountered his work after first arriving at several of the same conclusions
through the theories of Donald Brook, I find a great deal of Hacker's
theorisation to be extremely congenial. Nonetheless, there are times when I
think his emphasis on language leads him astray. The following passage is from
his book "The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature." (2013)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">It is because we can think, that is reflect, that we
can have an "inner life". Animals who lack language do not. They are
conscious, and are conscious of features of their surroundings; they have and
pursue ends; they feel pain and pleasure; but that does not suffice for an
inner life. They cannot reflect upon their experience, cannot think thoughts
and reflect upon them. They cannot dwell, in joy or sorrow, upon their past
experiences. They cannot reason, reflect upon reasoning or weigh its
conclusions. They have no imagination, and cannot fantasize, wonder about
possibilities or imagine how things might have been. This is one kind of reason
why we should not follow Cartesians in identifying having a mind with mere
consciousness or conscious experience. Only if one can think thoughts and
reason from what one thinks, imagine things and dwell upon what one imagines,
enjoy and suffer experiences and reflect on one's joys and sufferings, can one
be said to have a mind. Only creatures with a mind can be said to have an inner
life.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Consider the following. Otto is a nonverbal human child who likes to play
with toys and to act the part of different animals and individuals. Otto is a
gifted mimic. He can draw and likes to watch animated cartoons. He also likes
to play hide and seek and is very skilful in hiding himself in unexpected
places. He likes to make things with Lego and modelling clay and commonly
invents fantastical figures and participates in and understands sophisticated
and elaborate forms of pretend play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">None of these skills requires language. Prior to the acquisition of
language, many human infants show clear competence in many of these skills and
it is implausible in the extreme to suppose that these could not develop
further with practice and in the continued absence of language. In light of
this evidence it is clearly mistaken to argue that an individual such as Otto
has no imagination and cannot fantasize.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">If it is true, as Hacker rightly acknowledges, that nonverbals can
"have and pursue ends" then it falls on Hacker's shoulders to explain
how these ends can be <i>had</i> and pursued in the absence of mind. If an end
cannot be thought of, then how exactly can it be <i>had</i>? It makes no sense
to say that a language user <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has</i> her
ends absentmindedly or mindlessly and that she cannot communicate them when
appropriately prompted. Nor does it makes sense to say the same of a nonverbal.
Hacker seems to be of the opinion not only that nonverbals are incapable of
communicating their ends but that they are unaware of their ends too. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">To pursue a goal is to be capable of calling it to mind, moreover, it is
to be capable, at least in principle, of communicating it. If language were the
only form of creaturely communication, then Hacker would be right to regard
language as exclusive to mindedness. But language is by no means the only form
of communication.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Ends and goals are typically things that we <i>think</i> <i>of,</i> that
are "called to mind", that we "have in mind" or "on
our mind." If we forget our goals we have to retrace our steps until we
are <i>reminded</i> of them. These are not linguistic skills (although they may
be assisted by language), they are procedural skills that presuppose memory and
the ability to recall past events.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Hacker would probably want to point out here that many acquired
efficacious behaviours need not be the result of having anything in mind. Such
behaviours are not goal-directed and thus do not threaten to undermine
Hacker's thesis. But if a nonverbal agent performs an action with the <i>aim</i>
of eliciting a response on the part of another perceiver, then it is reasonable
to suppose that it must have an <i>end in mind </i>and must, at least in
principle, be capable of<i> performing </i>or otherwise <i>publicly
representing </i>this anticipated outcome. Communicative actions are <i>intentional</i> precisely
because they are driven by goals but not all communicative actions are verbal
and nor are the goals that drive them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">To be "put in mind" of an earlier event or to "bear
something in mind" is to have a memory but it is not necessarily to have a
word, concept or utterance at the ready. And when sufferers of global aphasia
lose their linguistic abilities they do not lose their ability to imagine or to
fantasize (although these capacities may also be diminished as a consequence of
the same affliction causing the aphasia). So whilst I agree with Hacker that it
is impossible for a nonverbal to reason, to make judgements or to draw
conclusions, I think it is mistaken to suppose that nonverbals are necessarily
incapable of imagination or fantasy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">As we have already seen, acquired behaviours need not always involve
mindedness. Hacker draws a line at the capacity to use language, but I hope the
preceding evidence and arguments are persuasive in explaining why I think
Hacker remains to some degree under the spell of language. If Hacker were to
spread his net a little further to include nonverbal communicative practices,
then I think his theorisation would benefit significantly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Wittgenstein was right to give up on his notion that the limits of our
language are the limits of our world. If instead he had claimed that the limits
of our communicative capacities are the limits of our world, then perhaps this
would have left us with a far more revealing and enduring picture of what it
actually is to be a minded creature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7206373238418288113.post-26135866181038910642015-09-15T17:10:00.000+01:002016-01-27T16:33:31.845+00:00Pretending to Ourselves<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-13rqwrnqsIQ/Vfbytj0su8I/AAAAAAAABxU/JjrpXUQklVs/s1600/Lemon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-13rqwrnqsIQ/Vfbytj0su8I/AAAAAAAABxU/JjrpXUQklVs/s400/Lemon.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>"You only live twice</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Or so it seems</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>One life for yourself</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>And one for your dreams."</i></span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The purpose of this post is to challenge the view that imagined episodes qualify as experiences of the things imagined. Do those who claim to have a rich imagination live a life in addition to the one they actually live? Fortunately for most of us, actual life and imaginary life are clearly not the same. My aim is to explore some of the differences and to explain why we might sometimes be led to the mistaken conclusion that our lives are divided between the public world of perception and a private realm of what Sartre called "quasi observation" or quasi experience.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Many people would <i>rightly</i> argue that imagining a traumatic event can be a deeply unsettling experience, so it would seem that my argument must necessarily fall at the first hurdle. I don't deny that imagined episodes are experiences, but what they are experiences <i>of</i>, are not experiences of the things and states of affairs imagined but rather they are <i>experiences of imagining</i> those things and states of affairs.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now it might be objected that I am twisting language, but my aim is to do precisely the reverse. When we pretend to eat a lemon we are not eating a lemon. The experience is simply an experience of pretending. And whilst this may share much in common with the actual experience, there is one obvious missing component that must be taken into account. Eating a lemon involves the <i>perception</i> of an actual lemon. When we pretend to eat a lemon, we elicit many of the same embodied responses — for example we might salivate more. And when we imagine eating a lemon these same responses are also triggered to some degree.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So my argument is simply this: imagining is a species of pretending. And in the same way that pretend experiences are not experiences of the things pretended, nor are imaginary episodes experiences of the things imagined.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Unlike imagining, pretending is typically an interpersonal activity. Pretending and performing are thus intimately intertwined in a way that imagining and performing are not. To pretend is to <i>act</i> <i>as if</i> something is the case when in fact the pretend condition or object is absent. To imagine is to <i>know how</i> to pretend. It is to know how to perform in such a way as to elicit (in oneself and others) the embodied responses that accompany perceptions of the things imagined. Just as we learn to read out loud before we learn to read in silence, so too I suggest, do we first learn to pretend in public before we learn to pretend to ourselves: to imagine. This is why I believe that it makes good sense to view imagination is a species of pretending, because imagination is parasitic upon our skills as performers; as producers and consumers of communicative actions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It might be objected that I am neglecting something important about imagining. When we conjour up remembered episodes, colours, sounds, tastes etc. the experience (of imagining) might be thought by many to be more fulsome, more rich and more substantial than a mere deceipt, dissimulation or act of feigning. Some philosophers might even argue that imaginings have what they describe as "phenomenal character"; a term that refers to the "feel" of imagined experiences. But the point that needs to be borne in mind is that an imagined colour, texture, sound or flavour etc. has no sensory component and cannot therefore be "felt." What we might be tempted to treat as the felt component of such imagined experiences is precisely the embodied responsiveness already outlined above. Whenever we ordinarily perceive objects and states of affairs, we are subject to a whole variety of causally generated responses. And when we imagine or pretend to experience objects and states of affairs we are also subject — though to a lesser degree of course — to many of the same causal influences. Imagining and pretending are thus skills of expectation, of having learned and not forgotten what Gilbert Ryle called "perceptual lessons." Julia Tanney puts it like this:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Imaging or picturing involves knowledge how things look or sound and not having forgotten. But it does not require, what Hume seems to have thought, that in imagining Vinzelles’s gooseberry green eyes, his eyes have left a visual sense impression that occurred when my eyes were open which cause or bring about a faint sort of impression (or representation).</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Tanney continues with a quote from Ryle:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">All that is required is to see that learning perceptual lessons entails some perceiving, that applying those lessons entails having learned them, and that imaging is one way of applying those lessons.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Professor Adam Zeman of Exeter University has been in the media recently in relation to his coining of the term "aphantasia." Aphantasia refers to a reported inability to produce mental images, a condition (although Zeman is careful to emphasise that it is "not a disorder") that has been documented for more than a century at least. A portion of people — around 1 in 50 Zeman estimates — are subject to aphantasia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As a scientist, Zeman's research clearly garners a fair amount of credence, but if my analysis is not mistaken then there may be reason for skepticism regarding his conclusions. Many of the people who report aphantasia are understandably distressed at their incapacity to perform the feats of imagination that others seem to be readily capable of. One aphantasiac put it like this: </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“I was devastated... Actually, it put me into a depression, realizing that everyone saw the world in a different way — like suddenly discovering you’re blind.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I think these people have been misled. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like many artists, I would say that I have a vivid imagination. I spend a lot of my time visualising ideas, daydreaming and thinking about how things look. And like most art teachers, I have no difficulty imagining the </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">images and objects </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">that students discuss on a daily basis and I would say that I am quite skilled in making suggestions of how these plans might be improved or how the associated pitfalls might best be avoided. But in spite of these pleasures and skills, I have never once mistaken my imagination for perception and not do I expect to. The two are so unalike that there is no question of confusing one for the other. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like many people I have spoken to on this subject, I have never regarded the term "mental image" as anything other than a convenient metaphor for the ability to think of how things appear. Taken literally the term simply mischaracterises imagination by reference to a class of very specific tangible cultural contrivances that cannot possibly be formed in the mind or brain. There are no "pictures in the head," just as there are no "inner eyes" to see them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Imagining is not an inner display of any sort. It is a skill of knowing what to expect in acts of looking, listening, tasting etc. It is the capacity moreover, of effortlessly <i>having</i> expectations (perceptual lessons learned) and being surprised whenever these expectations are thwarted. When we imagine eating a lemon, we do not find ourselves surprised that the imagined flavour is not as we expected. We might be disappointed that it does not have the zest of experience but that of course is one of the characteristic differences between imagining and perceiving. </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">We can pretend to compare lemons, but only actual lemons bear comparison.</span></div>
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Jim Hamlynhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16488331333061422244noreply@blogger.com0