Perception Defined

Q: What would you say is the most important thing to establish as a basis for explaining perception?

A: A definitive theory of representation. There are countless theories of perception, yet only one—and I’ve researched this field extensively—is based on a fully fledged theory of representation. Donald Brook, an art theorist working in Australia since the 1960’s, has developed a theory of representation that I think deserves to be much more widely disseminated, debated and applied than it has. His interest in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin led him to reject much Continental philosophy at a time when the influence of thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida was at its height. I suspect that this is in part responsible for the paucity of response to his work despite its fairly wide dissemination internationally.

Q: What do you see as the importance of Brook’s work?

A: Brook’s theories offer several vital critical distinctions and conceptual tools that help to explain a number of longstanding philosophical perplexities. His theory of representation in particular provides a thorough account of the ways that shared sensory fallibilities enable representational practices to emerge and develop. It also clarifies the difference between practices of denotation or signification, which are by no means fundamental to nonverbal representation, and practices of efficacious substitution that are. By situating representation in an evolutionary context and by paying close attention to nonverbal procedures of representation, Brook has also fleshed out a powerful account of the emergence of language. Without wanting to sound grandiose, I think that his work offers important insights that have the potential to help significantly in the pursuit of a theory of consciousness. Moreover, without a theory of representation, the like of which is to be found in much of Brook’s work, I very much doubt that even the less daunting but nonetheless significant questions of perception will be settled any time soon.

Q: So I guess you'd recommend that readers wanting to follow this discussion should probably start by reading our last dialogue on the subject of representation.

A: That wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Q: So, on the basis of Brook’s work, how would you define perception?

A: Perception is an evolved form of responsiveness—a knowhow we might say—constituted by dispositions to represent the things with which we are causally engaged. It is an immediately available capacity to substitute one thing for another, because there are respects in which these things are sensorily indiscriminable from one another—at least for members of a community of perceivers sharing similar sensory strengths and weaknesses.

Q: Could you explain what you mean by a disposition to represent?

A: I mean a behavioural pre-disposition or pre-conditioning to indicate, name, describe, draw, construct, mimic or select a matching, simulating or symbolizing object that is usefully substitutable for one or more things that are currently stimulating our senses.

Q: But surely the capacity to represent things is learned? Are you saying that perception only emerges as we become capable of drawing or describing things?

A: Drawing and describing are highly evolved skills that have only been available to humans in relatively recent evolutionary time, so no, I think the capacity to select a matching or simulating object relative to the originally encountered object is a more fundamental skill.

Q: Is this also a learned skill then?

A: We certainly get better at all forms of representation through practice but it may be the case that some rudimentary perceptual skills are genetically inherited. Simulating is a more plastic and manipulable practice than matching, although both are genetically inheritable.

Q: Does this mean that animals might also qualify as perceivers?

There's a great deal of evidence, particularly among social species, that animals communicate with one another in simple ways. Communication relies on representational practices, so yes, I think we have every reason to suppose that many animals qualify as perceivers.

Q: And insects?

A: To the extent that insects are capable of acts of communication, we have good reason to consider them as perceivers, yes.

Q: So, if a creature is not capable of representing anything in any shape or form, then you would say that it's not a perceiver?

A: That's right. But bear in mind that creatures may be capable of producing representations, despite the lack of overt evidence of their doing so that we would regard as persuasive.

Q: Then, how could we ever be sure they are perceivers?

A: Well we couldn't, but that's where neuroscience might help by developing ways to trigger and detect these causally influential dispositions to represent.

Q: What about things that we don’t perceive but that influence us anyway, things like UV light for instance?

A: Yes, there are many. Perception is really just the tip of an iceberg of sensory responsiveness. Our bodies are involved in countless ongoing sensorily mediated processes that are either completely inaccessible to perception or are only accessible when we turn our attention to them.

Q: Is all perception conscious then?

A: To be unconsciousness is to be incapable of perception, yes.

Q: What about dreaming?

A: Dreaming is an unconscious or semi-conscious state in which various dispositions to represent are triggered by ongoing brain activity of a sort that is largely or perhaps wholly uninfluenced by sensory input.

Q: So, dreaming would only qualify as a perceptual state if it involved sensory input, which it rarely if ever does?

A: That’s right.

Q: Psychologists often conduct experiments using optical illusions because these are thought to indicate something about perception. Can you shed any light on the perplexities of optical illusions?

A: This is something I have researched quite a lot recently. If we return to our previous discussion about practices of representation, we will find that many optical illusions exploit culturally acquired skills of image-recognition and simulation. In the 1960's, for example, several studies were undertaken to examine whether individuals living in different cultures were differentially susceptible to optical illusions. Individuals living in cultures where pictorial representations were rarely used—even otherwise literate cultures—were found to be unaffected by optical illusions. The perplexity created by many optical illusions is simply due to the fact that our biologically as well as culturally evolved skills enable us to represent what we see in two equally viable ways. Other optical illusions expose related fallibilities of colour or motion perception, some of which we have learnt to exploit through the use of filmmaking techniques and others of which we may perhaps find new ways to systematically exploit in representational terms in the future.

Q: So do you agree that optical illusions are deceptive because they lead us to make inaccurate judgements?

A: Apologies, but of all the misconceptions about perception, what you have just said is probably the most prevalent and the most obstructive to insight. Most optical illusions have nothing whatsoever to do with ratiocination or other forms of conceptual thought. Optical illusions exploit mistakes—or fallibilities—yes, but the fallibilities are on the level of sensory discrimination, not intellect. Knowing that we are looking at an illusion doesn’t make it any less illusory. And this is because neither our conceptual knowledge nor our ability to rationalise play any part in the underlying sensory discriminations that characterise perception. Our procedural knowledge, on the other hand—our knowledge of how to use representations—does have an influence on our perception, as I mentioned. Noticing what philosophers call “elusive appearances” or “vilibilia” is a non-conceptual knowhow that has developed through culture.

Q: Could you elaborate?

A: Sure. The fact that we are able to conceive of visibilia has been enabled by pictorial techniques that have been developed over thousands of years and that have found their most familiar apotheosis in the invention of photography. Indeed, only very recently has it become clear the degree to which our procedural knowledge and visual concepts are informed by culturally evolved skills of representation. Guy Deutsche’s 2011 book “Through the Language Glass” eloquently describes how people in simple cultures have no concept of blue but only develop the concept as a consequence of practices of pictorial representation and representationally informed language use.

Q: You often mention evolution. Do you have a theory of how perception, as contrasted with regular behavioural responsiveness, evolved?

A: I do. Practices of representation are social by their very nature and their evolution is undoubtedly the consequence of long histories of social coexistence amongst similarly sensorily endowed organisms. Organisms have evolved to respond to the environments in which they live, but in doing so they have also developed the capacity to respond to one another. The behaviour of other organisms has the capacity to provide valuable cues that, if responded to in the right way, could make the difference between survival and extinction. Similarly, the ability to respond to the behaviour of another individual by behaving likewise is the basis of mimicry, a skill we see widely in the animal world and one that I suspect is centrally implicated in the emergence of representational practices and the perceptual capacities that these practices enable.

Q: I'm not sure I understand. Surely these practices of representation are public, whereas perception is a mental process.

A: To an extent you’re right—perception is indeed a mental process but it would be a mistake, I think, to assume that representing practices are purely public. For an organism to deliberately produce a representation, even of the most basic kind, it must direct its actions by way of biological mechanisms, many of which are private. I suggest that these dispositions to produce publicly perceptible representations form the basis of what we know as perception.

Recognition

Language has to be learned, but what of images?

In recent decades, research using functional brain imaging techniques has shown conclusively what many people already suspected; namely, that when we re-encounter something, our brain activity corresponds closely to that of earlier encounters of the same kind. There really couldn't be a better word to describe this than "recognition". We also know from related studies that representations also trigger corresponding recognition networks to the things represented, and even linguistic representations—nouns for instance—which bear nothing in common with the things they nominate, activate many portions of the brain associated with the things named, as well as others involved with language processing and conceptual understanding. Image recognition on the other hand, although it may trigger language associations, is not reliant upon language. Pictures, photorealistic pictures especially, are recognised because in certain respects and in certain circumstances they share much in common with the things they depict.

Last week, in a BBC programme devoted to the work of artist Michael Craig-Martin, the artist' final words are:

If you go back to the books that children are taught words in, you will have a picture of a ball and then there's the word "ball". And the reason for the book is to teach the child to know the word ball. But it's based on the idea that they already know what the picture is, because there isn't a ball there. There's a picture of a ball. So the child already has learned how to read pictures of things as though they were the things. Now, we do that so early, we are probably doing that at about two or three months. That's the foundation of language, not the words - it's the pictures of things that are the basis of our understanding.

We could quibble over the finer logic of Craig-Martin's thinking here but the general point is correct: we recognise representations as representations long before we learn to speak or read. What is less clear though, and what research has yet to confirm, is at which developmental period infants and animals become capable of responding differentially to representations as opposed to the things they represent. In other words: we don't yet know at what point infants learn that representations are representations, i.e. when their brain activity switches from the simple recognition of things in depictions to a recognition of depictions as depictions—as tools. It seems likely that this emergence is gradual, as gradual as the emergence of consciousness itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the ability to discriminate between a representation and whatever is represented lies at the very heart of consciousness.

Black from White

When I was around the age of seven, my parents had close friends who lived a few doors away from Camberwell School of Art, where I think they had studied some years earlier. They had a daughter, Esmie, who was three years my junior and I remember she once said something that struck me as obviously wrong - she claimed that white was not a colour. I tried to disabuse her of this misconception only to be gently corrected by our dads. I don't recall their explanation or if they even gave one but ever since I have always harboured a distrust of white.

Strictly speaking, Esmie was right that white is not a colour, at least not a chromatic colour. Look in the Chambers English Dictionary though, and the first entry you will find states: "White /wīt or hwīt/ adj of the colour of snow, the colour that reflects the maximum and absorbs the minimum of light rays." As we will see, getting to grips with white, turns out to be a little more difficult than might at first seem the case. White, as it turns out, is a bit of a grey area.

When the dads stepped into my dispute with young Esmie over the subtleties of colour definitions, perhaps they responded with something like: "White is actually a combination of all the colours." That, and the fact that I was obviously in the minority, might have shut me up for a while but a quick visit to a set of poster paints would soon have demonstrated the inadequacy of this explanation. No amount of deft colour mixing—at least of the kind that I was familiar with—would ever have generated white. Why otherwise was there a block of white in all the sets of paint I had ever owned if not for the fact that it is impossible to concoct such a non-colour from a combination of all the colours? Were my parents trying to taunt me with my obvious inability to blend colours in precisely the right formulation? Was the art of colour combination simply too sophisticated for a mere child equipped with a set of cheap paints? When in later childhood I discovered that watercolour sets standardly include no white, my worst suspicions seemed confirmed. Quite how the four-year-old Esmie could have understood such complexities escapes me. Perhaps her collection of felt-tip pens revealed a deeper secret.

Of course the answer to this conundrum lies in the distinction between subtractive and additive techniques of colour-mixing. Dyes or pigments are the components of the subtractive system because, when mixed, they subtract from white or—strictly speaking—they absorb more wavelengths of light. The additive system on the other hand mixes coloured light - the equal combination of red blue and green (yes green) combining to form white (for humans that is).

So far so good, whiteness consists of the combination of equal quantities of visible spectra. But the problems really only start here because although we have established that white is not a chromatic colour, we haven't yet established much else besides. Indeed, if it weren't for the fact that we can easily select instances of white in the world then the challenge of exemplifying the concept would be almost impossible. One possible strategy might be to say that white is the opposite of black. This is helpful but we're not out of the woods yet, far from it, in fact we're heading straight into a thicket and by the time we're through to the other side I hope to have convinced you that, in certain circumstances and without changing its chemical composition or intensity at all, white can become a perfectly serviceable simulation of black.

All we need for this thought experiment is a dimmish room, a white screen and a projector. So long as the environment isn't too bright then we should be able to see any image cast into the screen by the projector. First imagine that the projector is off. Every normally sighted human capable of expressing a rational opinion about what they see, would describe the screen in this state as white. For the sake of accuracy let's also check the intensity of light reflected from the screen to determine that it is currently reflecting an exposure value (EV) of 5 which is perfectly good for reading etc. but isn't too bright for our purposes.

Now let's turn the projector on and cast a blank rectangle of light into the screen. The physical properties of the screen haven't changed so it seems likely that everyone would still agree that the screen remains white—though the illuminated parts are now obviously brighter than the unlit parts. If we take another light-measurement of these dark portions of the screen we will find that they remain at an EV of 5 (i.e. what everyone agreed was white).

Now, let's project a simple greyscale image into the screen, an image of a room with black and white floor tiles and let's ask the audience whether the tiles look black and white. Once again everyone will agree - the tiles in the image look black and white. We can also take another light-measurement of the black tiles and once again we will find that it remains at 5, or even possibly slightly brighter.

So, what's going on? How can an objectively white thing seem so uncontentiously black? Philosophers and psychologists, like well-meaning dads, are tempted to jump in at this point to inform us that the phenomenon is the result of an illusion in which we misjudge, misread or miscalculate the white as black. Essentially they take the view that illusion is dependent upon a failure of cognition of some kind. Failure does indeed play an instrumental role in the explanation of what is going on, but the failure is definitely not one of reason (judgement), literacy (reading) or computation (calculation), nor in fact is it a failure of perception: it is a failure of sensory discrimination.

So, let's set the question of illusion aside here and start instead with a simple explanation of sensory discrimination. All organisms are engaged with the world by means of their senses. If senses are triggered, organisms respond. Brains then, are part of sophisticated systems of responsiveness in which organisms possess both genetically acquired and learned responses to the things they encounter. Some stimuli will inevitably be more important than others and it will therefore be in each organism's interests to respond advantageously to relevant stimuli and to be unresponsive to irrelevant stimuli. Sensory discrimination then, is a vital capacity that enables organisms to respond in different ways to different stimuli.

Equipped with this understanding of sensory discrimination, we can return to the projected image scenario and discover that we need not assume any failures of reasoning at all. All we need to assume is that the depicted black tiles trigger many of the same sensory responses as would actual black tiles seen from the depicted viewpoint. On a perceptual level we would have no difficulty in differentiating between the simulated black and an actual instance of black. And if we were practiced in skills of rational judgement there is no reason why these could not enable us to recognise the differences between simulation and reality. Nonetheless it is important to repeat that nothing hangs on these skills. Nor would any improvement in our skills of judgement make the slightest difference to our susceptibility to discrimination failure, to the seeing—in this case— of white as black.

The Discovery of Blue

Around a year ago I spoke with several painters about my hunch that it would never have occurred to ancient peoples to say that distant mountains "look blue". They were unconvinced, "Everyone sees distant mountains just like we do," they told me, "so there is no reason why distant mountains wouldn't have been described as looking blue." I argued that, whilst our sensory capacities have indeed remained the same, we can only say that distant mountains look blue because we are acquainted with pictorial techniques (and their associated terminology) that were completely unknown to our distant ancestors and even to recent cultures unfamiliar with these innovations. I had nothing to back up my claims except further argument and the near certain knowledge that there is no evidence anywhere in the world of ancient depictions of hazy blue mountains. 

Last week, with the help of another friend, I came across some very persuasive evidence in support of my claims.

In 2010 the linguist Guy Deutscher, published a book entitled "Through the Language Glass" which discusses the research of W. E. Gladstone, who in 1858, a decade prior to taking up office as British Prime Minister, published a 3 volume study of the work of Homer. Gladstone noted that Homer's entire oeuvre contains not a single mention of the colour blue. Hundreds of references are made to other colours but blue is entirely absent. Soon after the publication of Gladstone's work, a German philologist by the name of Lazarus Geiger, discovered that this absence of blue is characteristic of ancient texts the world over and is a notable instance of many similar cultural variations in the description of colours. Following Geiger's discoveries, the most obvious explanation — that the cause was attributable to colour-blindness — was immediately ruled out. Even Gladstone had initially concluded that this was the case but to his credit he also offered another more insightful explanation:

"The art of painting was wholly, and that dying was almost, unknown...The artificial colours with which the human eye was conversant, were chiefly the ill-defined, and anything but full-bodied, tints of metals. The materials, therefore, for a system of colour did not offer themselves to Homer's vision as they do to ours. Particular colours were indeed exhibited in rare beauty, as the blue of the sea and of the sky. Yet these colours were, so to speak, isolated fragments; and, not entering into a general scheme, they were apparently not conceived with the precision necessary to master them. It seems easy to comprehend that the eye may require familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate any one among them."

Deutscher describes several 20th Century anthropological studies in which many indigenous cultures have been found to have similarly limited vocabularies of colour. He discusses the commonplace theoretical explanations for these findings and how that mistakenly assumed various forms of physiological cause. Only very recently has it been confirmed that Gladstone's alternative explanation was correct: differences in the vocabulary of colour across cultures are the result of cultural developments (of acquired skills, tools and materials), not biological changes.

In order to elucidate the issues Deutscher invents a brilliant fantasy that deserves to be quoted at length:

"Imagine we are sometime in the distant future when every home is equipped with a machine that looks a bit like a microwave but in fact does far more than merely warm food up. It creates food out of thin air-or rather out of frozen stock cubes it teleports directly from the supermarket. Put a cube of fruit stock in the machine, for example, and at the touch of a few buttons you can conjure up any imaginable fruit: one button gives you a perfectly ripe avocado, another button a juicy grapefruit.
      But this is an entirely inadequate way to describe what this wonderful machine can do, because it is by no means limited to the few “legacy fruits” that were available in the early twenty-first century. The machine can create thousands of different fruits by manipulating the taste and the consistency on many different axes, such as firmness, juiciness, creaminess, airiness, sliminess, sweetness, tanginess, and many others that we don’t have precise words to describe. Press a button, and you’ll get a fruit that’s a bit like an avocado in its oily consistency, but with a taste halfway between a carrot and a mango. Twiddle a knob, and you’ll get a slimy lychee-like fruit with a taste somewhere between peach and watermelon.
      In fact, even coarse approximations like “a bit like X” or “halfway between Y and Z” do not do justice to the wealth of different flavors that will be available. Instead, our successors will have developed a rich and refined vocabulary to cover the whole space of possible tastes and consistencies. They will have specific names for hundreds of distinct areas in this space and will not be bound by the few particular tastes of the fruit we happen to be familiar with today.
      Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective?
      Let’s try to help her. Suppose you are one of those natives and she has just given you a cube that tastes like nothing you’ve ever tried before. Still, it vaguely reminds you of something. For a while you struggle to remember, then it dawns on you that this taste is slightly similar to those wild strawberries you had in a Parisian restaurant once, only this taste seems ten times more pronounced and is blended with a few other things that you can’t identify. So finally you say, very hesitantly, that “it’s a bit like wild strawberries.” Since you look like a particularly intelligent and articulate native, the anthropologist cannot resist posing a meta-question: doesn’t it feel odd and limiting, she asks, not to have precise vocabulary to describe tastes in the region of wild strawberries? You tell her that the only things “in the region of wild strawberry” that you’ve ever tasted before were wild strawberries, and that it has never crossed your mind that the taste of wild strawberries should need any more general or abstract description than “the taste of wild strawberries.” She smiles with baffled incomprehension.
      If all this sounds absurd, then just replace “taste” with “color” and you’ll see that the parallel is quite close. We do not have the occasion to manipulate the taste and consistency of fruit, and we are not exposed to a systematic array of highly “saturated” (that is, pure) tastes, only to a few random tastes that occur in the fruit we happen to know. So we have not developed a refined vocabulary to describe different ranges of fruity flavor in abstraction from a particular fruit. Likewise, people in primitive cultures-as Gladstone had observed at the very beginning of the color debate-have no occasion to manipulate colors artificially and are not exposed to a systematic array of highly saturated colors, only to the haphazard and often unsaturated colors presented by nature. So they have not developed a refined vocabulary to describe fine shades of hue. We don’t see the need to talk about the taste of a peach in abstraction from the particular object, namely a peach. They don’t see the need to talk about the color of a particular fish or bird or leaf in abstraction from the particular fish or bird or leaf. When we do talk about taste in abstraction from a particular fruit, we rely on the vaguest of opposites, such as “sweet” and “sour.” When they talk about color in abstraction from an object, they rely on the vague opposites “white/light” and “black/dark.” We find nothing strange in using “sweet” for a wide range of different tastes, and we are happy to say “sweet a bit like a mango,” or “sweet like a banana,” or “sweet like a watermelon.” They find nothing strange in using “black” for a wide range of colors and are happy to say “black like a leaf” or “black like the sea beyond the reef area.”
      In short, we have a refined vocabulary of color but a vague vocabulary of taste. We find the refinement of the former and vagueness of the latter equally natural, but this is only because of the cultural conventions we happen to have been born into. One day, others, who have been reared in different circumstances, may judge our vocabulary of taste to be just as unnatural and just as perplexingly deficient as the color system of Homer seems to us."

Cyanometer, 1789, for measuring the colour of the sky by Swiss physicist
 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt

Actions Louder Than Words

In a recent article for the New York Times, Adam Grant investigates the psychology of moral education and discusses various research suggesting that children are more responsive to praise aimed at the self as opposed to praise aimed at the act. He cites a research study in which researchers praised child generosity in one of two ways, either by targeting the act by saying: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” or else by targeting the self: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.”

Two weeks later when the researchers gave these same children more opportunities to give and to share, they found that the second group of children were much more generous than the children whose actions alone had been praised. When only their actions were praised, children tended to make no association between their actions and their own moral character whereas when they were praised for being generous this encouraged them to think of themselves as generous people.

Although the article makes no mention of the closely related research on motivation, it should be noted that praise without content (i.e. praise with no information about what the praise is actually for) has been found to be of limited long–term value no matter how it is targeted and it has also been shown in some cases to do long–term harm to intrinsic motivation (I have written of this previously here, here and here).

Grant also mentions the flipside of praise and the research of June Price Tangney which distinguishes between shame on the one hand (the feeling of being a bad person) and guilt on the other (the feeling of having done a bad thing). Grant writes: “Shame is a negative judgment about the core self. […] In contrast, guilt is a negative judgment about an action, which can be repaired by good behaviour.”

Appropriately targeted, informative, positive judgments reinforce the development of a child's moral character, whilst disappointment – as opposed to punishing disapproval – is regarded as the best response to poor behaviour (once again protecting the child’s self-image). This seems to be the message, but Grant also points out that there appears to be an optimum period – between the ages of 5 and 10 – where this strategy has greatest influence, outwith this 5 year window the impact is negligible.

Grant also mentions a classic study by J. Philippe Rushton in which 140 children were given tokens for winning a game. They then watched a "teacher" play the game either selfishly or generously, followed by a pronouncement from the same teacher on the value of taking, giving or neither. They then had the option of donating some of their tokens to a child with none. The results were startling. In every case the children were significantly influenced by the actions of the teacher but not the teachers words. Even when the teacher preached selfishness but gave generously, 49% more than the norm gave generously also. Two months later, Rushton returned to see if any residue of these effects remained. To his surprise, the most generous children were those who had previously watched the teacher give generously whilst saying nothing.

Should we be surprised that these children were more likely to match the behaviour of the teacher when this was not accompanied by verbal exemplification of the underlying moral principles? Although we commonly say that "actions speak louder than words", it seems reasonable to suppose that actions plus speech would be even more effective. Certainly in the praise-case, mentioned earlier, there wasn't anything for the researcher to actually model in behavioural terms and therefore it seems fair to conclude that the information accompanying the praise provided the means for each praised child to generate a self-conception: to be able to describe themselves as "nice and helpful".

The two examples discussed present us with two quite different forms of learning and it might be worthwhile to distinguish between these in a little more detail. Psychology provides two terms — two types of knowledge in fact — that might be useful here: "declarative knowledge" and "procedural knowledge", or what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, called "knowing that" and "knowing how".

When children in the first study were praised for their generosity, their actions were already demonstrative of generosity: of knowledge of the procedure of generosity. Targeted praise reinforced this knowledge with additional declarative information that seems to have disposed these children towards further acts of generosity. On the other hand, the children who learnt generosity by example were not provided with any declarative understanding of how to represent themselves, yet they behaved more generously than their verbally instructed peers. How should we interpret this?

We should be careful not to make the mistake of supposing that by emulating generous actions, children simultaneously acquire the declarative knowledge necessary to describe themselves as generous. If that were so, then the self-defining information contained in the praise-case would be of no consequence. It seems far more likely that the token-sharing children simply copied the teacher because they wished to fit-in or because they assumed that giving tokens away was the done thing. Perhaps they hadn’t yet formed any form of “self image” in this regard but were simply behaving in a mimetic mode that might later be galvanised, i.e. explicitly represented (with the help of a guide or teacher) as a character-trait as opposed to a mere unreflective form of mimicry.

This is not to say that unreflective actions are mindless reflexes, but what it does strongly imply - if not confirm - is that such actions are not driven by any form of conceptual knowledge. In other words, they are procedural capacities whereas morals, on the other hand, are abstract concepts that we attribute to our own and other peoples' actions and are therefore not an intrinsic nor necessary part of prosocial behaviour. Nonlinguistic humans and animals are not immoral, they are amoral - they simply do not have the conceptual tools necessary for moral reasoning (or reasoning of any kind). But even a piranha doesn't eat its own kin. 

One outstanding question remains: why are children more generous when generosity is exemplified in the absence of verbal reinforcement? The most obvious answer is probably the right one: they take their cues wherever they can find them, but if cues of different kinds are available they will emulate procedural forms of exemplification over declarative ones. The simpler the representation the better. In fact, verbal representation (declarative conceptualisation) would appear to distract significantly from procedural exemplification by introducing competing behavioural options.

The point is this: moral action is enabled by conceptual capacities that we acquire through language. Prosocial behaviour, on the other hand, is conceivable in the absence of language by virtue of nonverbal procedures of exemplification that must have preceded language - including during human infancy. 

Representation Defined

Q: What is representation?

A: It's the substitution of one thing for another. Representations are stand-ins.

Q: So, if I replaced a cat with a dog, would that be a representation?

A: That depends on several things – the respects in which you want the dog to represent the cat, the strategy of representation you use and the skills and especially the perceptual weaknesses of the person or creature you're offering the representation to.

Q: So you're saying that it's possible but only in certain ways and for certain perceivers?

A: That's right.

Q: So, could I use a dog to represent a cat in respect of its being a furry, four-legged house pet?

A: Sure you could, because in those specific respects dogs and cats are alike.

Q: So something has to be like something else to be usable as a representation?

A: Only in this specific kind of representation. There are two other kinds of representation where the representation doesn't have to be like the represented thing at all.

Q: Could I use a dog to represent a cat using these other kinds of representations?

A: Yes, but let's try to keep things simple. The strategy I’ve just outlined is what the theorist Donald Brook calls "Matching". Matching representations trade on our ability to match attributes. Other species' might perceive differences between things that humans find identical, so representations of this kind are dependent upon shared perceptual limitations. If things were never like one another in any respects then Matching would be impossible.

Q: What about approximate matches then?

A: Sure, you can have approximate matches. Some approximations are better than others obviously.

Q: Ok, I get it that Matching representations must seem objectively the same or approximately the same in some way as the things they represent. But what about these other kinds of representation? How can I represent a cat with a dog?

A: Well the easiest way to represent the cat with a dog is to tell someone that this is what you intend. We actually do this all the time with language: we substitute sounds or words for things. The word “dog” doesn't share anything in common with dogs but because we know the rule that assigns the word “dog” to a particular species of animal we can use the representation with other rule users.

Q: It's symbolic then isn't it?

A: That's exactly what it is.

Q: So, what about the third type of representation, the one where the representation doesn't have to be objectively like the represented thing?

A: This strategy requires careful control of the way the representation is presented in relation to the perceptual skills of the person or creature you are producing the representation for. You couldn’t very easily use a dog to represent a cat with this strategy so I won’t even try. Let’s concentrate on some simple examples. Let’s say you have a blue piece of paper and you hold it up to the sky and find it to be indiscriminable from the sky. The assumption might be to say that the paper Matches the sky but this would be incorrect. A bee, for instance, probably wouldn’t perceive both colours to be the same because bees are sensitive to a wider range of colours that than we are.

Q: Isn’t it just an approximate match then?

A: Actually no. Let’s take another example that might help. Imagine you have a colour-blind friend who cannot discriminate between red and green. Say you want to represent a green field to them but you only have red paint. For you the red painting would look completely wrong but for them it would look exactly the same as if it were green.

Q: So, the red doesn’t actually match the green at all, yet my friend would perceive that it does?

A: Precisely.

Q: But in the case of the sky and blue paper, wouldn’t it be possible to get the blue sheet to reflect the exact hue, saturation and brightness as the sky so that  all possible perceivers would find it impossible to discriminate between the real and the represented blue? Wouldn’t this be a matching representation?

A: In principle, maybe, but you’re missing the point. The point is that when we “simulate” – as Donald Brook would say – the sky with a sheet of blue paper we exploit the fact that the perceptual capacities of normally sighted humans have regularly occurring limitations. These limitations make it impossible for us, under certain circumstances, to discriminate between one thing and another in a respect or respects in which they are objectively different.

Q: Can you give me another example?

A: Sure. Imagine you have a circular object – a coin say. You can easily use this to match other circular objects in respect of their shape – by matching them – but  you can also use it to simulate the size of other circular objects too, depending on how you present it.

Q: I don’t follow.

A: Think of it this way. If you hold a coin at the right distance from your eye you can get it to look like it’s the same size as other circular objects despite the fact that these are different sizes. You can even get it to look the same size as the moon if you want.

Q: Well yes, but only in a sense. Its obviously not really the same size as the moon.

A: No, of course not. But the point is that it looks like it is.

Q: So you’re saying it’s an illusion?

A: No. I’m saying that under these precise circumstances of presentation, the coin is indiscriminable from the moon in respect of its size.

Q: I’m still not getting it. I don’t see how these examples add up to a form of representation. They just seem like cases where we mistake one thing for another thing.

A: These are just examples of the principle. Such mistakes are systematic characteristics of our sensory capacities and because we’re all subject to them to the same degree we have learnt to exploit this. The discovery of perspective was a case in point. Simulating representations of this kind are a very sophisticated form of representation which has been discovered only gradually - although our ancestors have no doubt been susceptible to it since early prehistory.

Q: So are images simulating representations of this kind?

A: In the main yes. The problem though is that images also contain aspects of matching and symbolisation, which is no doubt why the question of representation has been so vexed for so long. It’s also handy to think of sculpture as predominantly a form of matching representation and language as symbolic – as you already guessed.

Q: Are you sure that there aren’t any other forms of representation? Three seems a bit limited.

A: Well, there are countless representations and representational media but there are only three distinct procedures for creating them: Matching, Simulating and Symbolising. There are also many sub-categories of the main three, like indicating and referring for example, which are both forms of symbolisation. But if three seems limited to you then it might be worth thinking of computer code. From a simple combination of ones and zeros we get an infinite variety - and let’s not forget that numbers are symbols too.

Memory and Exemplification

In a just-published paper, Dan Hutto discusses the commonplace interpretation of the brain as a vast storehouse of content, a memory bank of images, ideas and impressions. He finds this characterisation to be as unilluminating and inconsistent as it is antiquated and he suggests that this misconception continues to hinder insights in both philosophy and cognitive science. He remarks that there are better ways to conceive of memory, especially in the case of basic minds and he claims that simple kinds of memory — he cites rats as an example — might only require the ability to "re-enact embodied procedures" by using "local landmarks".

When a rat "re-enacts" its route around a maze, there is no doubt that certain features of the maze have causal influence over the behaviour of the rat — change the features of the maze and you change the behaviour of the rat. And Hutto is right to question whether we need to invoke mental charts, maps or schemas etc. to explain such successful navigation. All that need be assumed is that during the initial investigation of the maze, certain dispositions form in the rat that cause it to respond in certain ways on encountering these features again. The question of whether these dispositions constitute representations is simply more extravagant than is necessary.

Hutto argues that in the case of more sophisticated minds, it is the mastery of socially supported narrative practices that permit the 'reconstruction of past experiences' (i.e. memory) but he makes no indication of the more rudimentary practices that must have preceded narrative. Dance and procedural guidance in particular suggest themselves as obvious antecedents to the skills of narrative description, and it is puzzling therefore that Hutto makes no mention of these. Perhaps his earlier work (2008) on narrative practices and their importance for the development of 'folk psychological' skills — for inferring the thoughts and intentions of others — continues to dominate his thinking. However, applying this same argument to the case of memory is unconvincing to say the least. The engine simply doesn't fit the chassis.

Is it plausible that dance only ever emerged as a consequence of our linguistic powers? And what about tuneful vocalisations? I find it hard to believe that these preeminently social, embodied and enactive behaviours didn't precede the practice of storytelling. And mimicry? Of all the intelligent memory-implicating behaviours that we commonly observe on the part of animals, mimicry must be one of the most obvious. How, I wonder, might a creature successfully mimic a sequence of behaviours enacted by another animal if not by virtue of capacities significantly in excess of the simple behavioural responsiveness of the maze-navigating-rat?

In a 2011 book entitled "Words and Images" Christopher Gauker provides a simple description of the sequence of operations involved in fixing an ordinary tap (though he neglects to mention first switching the water off at the mains). He points out that whilst he is able to find words to describe the procedure, he could just as easily have imagined it without using any words at all. This is surely right — we "find" words to describe our memories and imaginings, not the other way around. If we wish to argue that words precede such imaginings, then infinite regress looms — as Gauker is quick to point out.

Gauker argues that animals and nonlinguistic human infants do not think conceptually but that they do think "imagistically". Imagistic cognition has also been discussed by Hutto in the past so it might be worth examining what is meant by the term. Neither Gauker nor Hutto take imagistic thinking to be literally pictorial, yet precisely what they do take it to be, they give no clear indication. Gauker states that mental imagery is "similar" to the things it represents whilst Hutto claims that it "resembles" (2008, p.81). The two terms (resemblance and similarity) are interchangeable in their vagueness and, like all blunt instruments, they are far more likely to do harm than good in the elucidation of the vexed issues of imagination, memory and consciousness. What I have found to be far more illuminating in this regard is to think of mental imagery in terms of what we could call latent exemplification. So, to imagine or remember something is to engage the cognitive component of skills that allow us to demonstrate, enact, perform, indicate, simulate, picture or select the things with which we are causally engaged. Questions of resemblance or similarity are immaterial in his context. What matters is that such imaginings involve — indeed are constituted by — many of the same brain/body responses (though in diminished form) as would arise as a consequence of actually encountering the thing or circumstance imagined. This also explains why tests of the actual accuracy and detail of imaginings invariably turn out to be disappointing in comparison with their reported vividness and why theorists like Gauker so often assume imagination to be representational. The assumption is understandable but unnecessary (though, admittedly, it is extremely convenient to regard capacities of exemplification as representations). 

We must be careful though. Imagination is not an inner module, theatre or "similarity space" for the private display of representations and resemblances. It is the evolutionary consequence, over countless generations, of a history of exemplification and more recently, as Hutto correctly observes, of linguistic and narrative practices. Moreover, these forms and practices of exemplification have emerged in the context of evolving inhibitory capacities that suppress physical actions of exemplification whilst allowing other associated brain processes to proceed as normal. It is these brain processes — linked inextricably to practices of exemplification — that must be considered as primary candidates in the constitution of thought and consciousness.

Ultimately I think Hutto gets a lot right about memory and I think his rejection of theories of mental content especially is well grounded and well argued but I think his focus upon narrative practices — derived from his earlier research — limits his view of a more extensive history of practices of exemplification.