Abstract
This paper presents an argument for the realism about mechanisms, contents, and vehicles of mental representation at both the personal and subpersonal levels, and showcases its role in instrumental rationality and proper cognitive functioning. By demonstrating how misrepresentation is necessary for learning from mistakes and explaining certain failures of action, we argue that fallible rational agents must have mental representations with causally relevant vehicles of content. Our argument contributes to ongoing discussions in philosophy of mind and cognitive science by challenging anti-realist views about the nature of mental representation, and by highlighting the importance of understanding how different agents can misrepresent in pursuit of their goals. While there are potential rebuttals to our claim, our opponents must explain how agents can be rational without having mental representations. This is because mental representation is grounded in rationality.
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Notes
Simultaneously, there exist non-computational perspectives on the mind, such as those inspired by ecological psychology, that greatly depend on the concept of mental representation. For instance, consider Mark Bickhard’s (Bickhard 1993, 2009) interactivist model. However, the applicability of our argument to non-representational dynamical views of the mind falls outside the purview of our paper, despite our optimism regarding this possibility.
We do not assume semantic externalism in our arguments below, however.
We interpret Premise 2 as an instance of material implication. Consequently, the antecedent of the conditional is regarded as a sufficient condition for the truth of the consequent.
Donald Davidson (1982) famously denies representational capacities to non-linguistic animals, a view critiqued as potentially question-begging and over-intellectualized by Tyler Burge (2010). In contrast, comparative psychology provides ample evidence of animals’ capability for practical inference. Bence Nanay refers to this as ‘pragmatic inference’ and aligns with Burge’s perspective. Nanay’s theory would ascribe ‘pragmatic representations’ to the dog seeking for the bone (Nanay 2013). However, terminological and semantic disputes persist, complicating the issue of whether these capacities in animals are truly underwritten by representation. For an exploration of possible criteria of ascribing mental representations to animals in comparative psychology, see Buckner’s (2014).
We do not mean to suggest that representational accuracy is the only relevant factor in the success or failure of one’s actions. In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. For example, we can have a perfect understanding of the causes of climate change, but have very little, if any, practical means to halt it. Our argument holds only for scenarios in which the agent (or a device) can act in accordance with the contents of the representation. Of course, their actions can also be (sometimes) successful without representation.
While we champion naturalism, we acknowledge the clear fallacy in deriving normative advice directly from the description of scientific practice, particularly when focusing on a single, albeit vast and diverse, field of inquiry such as neuroscience. This is especially pertinent when this field may itself require conceptual engineering. Despite the apparent success of the representational research program (Bechtel 2016; Thomson and Piccinini 2018), skepticism regarding the concept of mental representations remains widespread among neuroscientists (Brette 2019).
This also implies that subpersonal processes can enter “the space of reasons”, in contrast to the Sellarsian claims to the contrary (Drayson, 2014).
While the structure of biological functions served by various mechanisms in a biological individual can be analyzed in terms of a web of interdependencies, a full examination of this complex structure and subpersonal communication processes falls outside the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that our view implies that not only brains but also biological individuals and distributed systems are massively representational, or contain enormous numbers of representations (see also Rupert, 2011).
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue.
We thank the anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this point.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Paweł Gładziejewski, Tomasz Korbak, Wojciech Mamak, Daniel Piecka, and Wiktor Rorot, as well as five anonymous reviewers of this journal for their extensive comments to the earlier draft of this paper.
Funding
The work on this paper was funded by National Science Center from research project 2016/23 D/HS1/02205 (PI: Krystyna Bielecka).
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Bielecka, K., Miłkowski, M. Representationalism and rationality: why mental representation is real. Synthese 203, 161 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04540-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04540-z