Abstract
I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended.
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Notes
I say “late 1950s” because his earliest use of cybernetic theory is from 1960; contrast this with his behavioristic psychology (Sellars 1948).
For Sellars’s commitment to the unity of science, what he calls “the scientific image”, see Sellars (1960/1963a).
Sellars introduces picturing in “Being and Being Known” (1960/1963b). He also discusses picturing in “Truth and ‘Correspondence’” (1963c), chapter five of Science and Metaphysics (1967), “After Meaning” in Naturalism and Ontology (1979), and finally a late trio: “More on Givenness and Explanatory Coherence” (1988), “Mental Events” (1980), and “Behaviorism, Language, and Meaning” (1980).
My intent here is to reconstruct how Sellars understood Thomism and Cartesianism. Whether his understanding is historically accurate is beyond the scope of this paper.
Sellars follows Kant in claiming that the intellect discovers itself in a discursively articulable world; see O’Shea (2016b).
As DeVries (2011) puts it, “transcendental structures must be reflected in causal structures, even if there is no reduction from the transcendental to the causal” (61–62).
If the manifest and scientific images are themselves conceptual frameworks that, according to the scientific image, function by way of picturing, then the scientific image of the scientific image must explain the epistemic priority of the scientific image over the manifest image in terms of more adequate picturing. However, explaining the manifest and scientific images in terms of picturing is beyond the scope of the present paper. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.
In a footnote Sellars adds, “May I call them pictures?” The difficulty of interpreting this passage lies in understanding how reliable cognitive maps, as scientific posits, are related to likely-to-be true judgments, as elements of our discursively structured self-understanding. I return to this crucial point in the conclusion of § 4.
One may think that discursive relations are themselves a source of cognitive friction; one cannot endorse two (or more) incompatible assertions. However, incompatibility at best discloses modality, not actuality. Thanks to Willem deVries for asking me to clarify this issue.
This is not to say that treating representations as structural resemblances is unique to cognitive neuroscience, since there are classical cognitivists who also do so. I focus on Williams and Colling because (a) they emphasize structural resemblances as iconic representations, not symbolic representations and (b) they do so to build a theory of how cognitive functions are realized in neurophysiological structures. In both respects they are close to Sellars’s account of picturing, though they do not notice this. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to be clearer on this point.
Churchland takes these premises to be empirically confirmed. Assessing his argument in light of contemporary developmental psychology is beyond the scope of this paper.
In rejecting both “a stable, universal experience and a stable, universal logic” (ibid., 141) Churchland echoes Rorty’s (1979) neo-pragmatist argument that traditional epistemology is incoherent once we have reject the Myth of the Given with Sellars and analyticity with Quine. For a deeper connection between Churchland and the American pragmatists, see Rockwell (2014).
She notes additional differences between Sellars and herself: (1) Millikanian picturing is not isomorphic in function; (2) all empirically true descriptive sentences picture, and not just all observation sentences; (3) no schematic world story is required for picturing. (119n3).
Price (2011a) argues that analytic metaphysics never fully addressed Carnap’s critique of metaphysics.
This line of thought led Fodor (1975) to insist that there must be an innate language, a language of thought, prior to learning any public, natural language; according we must (contra the late Wittgenstein, Sellars, et Brandom) separate semantics from pragmatics. The present paper attempts to show that if one begins, contra Fodor, with pragmatist and Wittgensteinian views about discourse and then turned to cognitive science, one need not (pace enactivism) dispense with representations altogether.
Briefly, “left-wing Sellarsians” emphasize the social normativity of language, the inseparability of semantics and pragmatics, and the conceptual irreducibility of norms to non-norms, whereas “right-wing Sellarsians” emphasize the priority of the scientific image and the need to explain the manifest image in terms of the scientific image. See O’Shea (2016) for the history of this distinction and its contemporary usefulness.
Conversely, if McDowell is correct and intentionality is a relation, then we do not need picturing; see McDowell 2009.
Cf. “a structure A counts as a representation of a structure B just in case A is homomorphic with B, the homomorphism is causally mediated by a channel of information between A and B, and the manipulation of A allows the system of which A is a part to interact successfully with B” (p. 12)
The question would then be whether a social pragmatist theory of intentionality can itself be naturalized. See Rouse (2015) for a superb example of this strategy, though Rouse’s Heideggerian anti-representationalism leads him to align himself with anti-representationalism in cognitive science. The point of the signifying/picturing distinction is to disentangle these commitments: we can be Wittgensteinian/Heideggerian pragmatists about intentionality and representationalists about cognition.
See Huebner (2014) for an alternative suggestion as to how we understand cognitive representations in non-linguistic terms.
If predictive processing showed that cognitive systems had no grip on its environment at all, then predictive processing would not only entail external world skepticism but undermine itself. See Zahavi’s (2017) criticism of Hohwy, though not of Clark; for a critical response to Zahavi, see Piekarski (2017).
For the Kantian roots of PP, see Swanson (2016).
Whether predictive processing is biologically plausible is beyond the scope of this paper.
But see Dolega (2017) for an argument that Gladziewjewski’s emphasis on structural resemblance requires a teleological account of function. See also Kiefer and Hohwy (2018) for a more sophisticated treatment of structural resemblance in terms of prediction error minimization with a focus on how to explain misrepresentation within that framework.
Clark builds on his previous work (e.g. 1997) where he brought anti-representational embodied cognitive science into conversation with representational cognitive science.
Williams (2018) argues that the use of the free-energy principle in predictive processing vindicates a long-standing theme in American pragmatism: the function of cognition is maintaining homeostasis, not mirroring the world. In this regard Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing clarifies those themes and their connection to cognitive neuroscience.
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Acknowledgements
The idea of using predictive processing and discursive interactions to track Sellars’s distinction between picturing and signifying comes from Bryce Huebner, “Racist Robots Playing Racist Games”, presented at Sellars's Legacy: Consequences, Ramifications, New Directions at the American University of Beirut, 26 May 2015. I am grateful to Bryce for his encouragement in my attempt to make explicit this connection between Sellars and cognitive science. In addition to Bryce I would also like to thank Brandon Beasley, Daniel Brunson, Andy Clark, Stefanie Dach, and David Roden on comments on previous versions of this paper and Willem deVries for his extensive and helpful feedback. A short version of this paper was presented at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on 15 September 2017. I would like to thank David Beisecker, William Ramsey, and James Woodbridge for their criticisms and comments.
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Sachs, C.B. In defense of picturing; Sellars’s philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 669–689 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9598-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9598-3