Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show that the widespread opinion, according to which functional role theories of representation fail to account for content explanations of human and animal behaviour, cannot be confirmed with respect to each type of functional role theory. Functional resemblance theories (as referred to by O’Brien and Opie in Representation in mind, Elsevier, 2004) allow for content explanations of successfully performed cognitive abilities as much as for explanations of systematic errors resulting from misrepresentation. How functional roles do their explanatory work in actual scientific research examples is shown by a detailed exploration of model assumptions about homing performances based on path integration mechanisms in humans and animals.
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Notes
Cummins remarks that, for him, the reason to use the term‚ conceptual roles’ instead of‚ functional roles’ is that “we think of concepts as the things that make it possible for cognitive business to go forward” (Cummins 1996, p. 30). His analysis of CRS in the following does not depend on that restriction, thus we can take it to apply to ‘functional roles’ not restricted to conceptual states.
It would be premature to conclude that other animals are generally better at path integration than humans are. Path integration abilities of different species of birds or insects very often appear to be more impressive than those of humans. However, it should be noted that direct comparisons between species are problematic, as they do not adequately control for the different sensory sources available. To give an example: while humans are most often tested while navigating without any exteroceptive (i.e. vision, audition, olfaction) sensory information, insects or birds are normally allowed to make use of different sources of ambient information (e.g. optic and acoustic flow information, azimuthal reference to the sun or other stars at night, polarization field of sun or other light sources, magnetic field of the earth and others). Systematic comparisons between species with experimental control of sensory information are widely missing in the literature and difficult to conduct. Humans seem to show path integration abilities that are comparable to those of other mammals (e.g. cats, dogs, hamsters) when sensory information has been adequately controlled for (see Loomis et al. 1999 for a discussion).
The encoding functions that are calculated on the basis of the EEM do not completely determine the nature of the underlying representational or processing mechanisms. There has been a recent debate whether the path mechanisms described by the EEM should be conceptualized as moment-to-moment processing of a homing vector (e.g. continuous updating of position information in form of cartesian or polar coordinates), or whether they should be thought of as a process of configural encoding of the geometry of the navigational route (e.g. intermittent calculation of a survey representation of the route layout). Animal research speaks in favour of history-free mechanisms of moment-to-moment updating, in humans configural updating mechanisms seem to play a role (Loomis et al. 1999). Further research will be needed to find out whether humans use both moment-to-moment and configural mechanisms at the same time, or whether configural encoding is a specific strategy provoked by the dominant use of regular pathways consisting of a small number of straight segments while using triangle-completion tasks in research with humans (May and Klatzky 2000; for a comparison of visual and proprioceptive encoding functions see Péruch et al. 1997).
The best explanation of the fact that the neurons fulfil their specific cognitive role would use only ‘relevant’ properties of the neurons.
We should not forget here that in real scientific cases we have to do with functional role assumptions. Thus, it is important to find physical mechanisms that are able to realize the assumed functional roles. Empirical findings on the level of mechanisms can lead to corrections or even revisions of functional role assumptions. Our knowledge of functional roles is no a priori knowledge; therefore, the (micro-) level of realizations should not be neglected from a philosophical point of view.
For a clear functionalist explication of the notion ‘design’ see Krohs (2005).
Misrepresentation, as discussed in the “Case study: path integration in animals and humans” comes about by erroneous encoding of spatial distances and directions, that is, by malfunctioning of some components of the cognitive system. With the background of that case study, the sort of ‘misrepresentation’ we consider in “Problems with the functional analysis approach” is ‘malfunction’. There are other sorts of misrepresentation—originating, for instance, from deception of the system by changes in outer conditions—that cannot be classified as malfunctions. Our thesis is that misrepresentation, in the form of malfunction of some components of the cognitive system, can be understood within Cummins’ functionalist approach.
That Cummins functions are normative in this sense, depending on specified normal conditions that distinguish between allowed and not allowed inputs into the system, is also admitted by Ruth Garrett Millikan (2002, p. 120), when she says that, Cummins’ systems cannot be said to fail or malfunction as such, but they do have to be specified in relation to delimited possible background conditions and delimited possible inputs […]. Cummins’ systems correspond to ideal types, not to actual historical tokens or kinds”. On the other hand, Millikan argues that Cummins’ (bio)functions are ‘open-ended’ (p. 139), since there is no natural limit as to how systematic or accidental a contribution to the “maintenance or reproduction of an organism” (p. 134) has to be in order to be interpreted as a Cummins function. We think that Millikan is right that in order to rule out bizarre accidental realisations, we have to evaluate biofunctions within the context of natural selection (cf. p. 135). But this does not decide the case for ‘proper functions’ (cf. Cummins 2002)—it simply means that the explanatory context used for functional analysis in biology is the context of natural selection.
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Acknowledgments
We thank two anonymous reviewers as well as Jack Loomis for their very helpful comments on this article.
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Bartels, A., May, M. Functional role theories of representation and content explanation: with a case study from spatial cognition. Cogn Process 10, 63–75 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-008-0226-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-008-0226-y