Abstract
Correctly understood, teleosemantics is the claim that “representation” is a function term. Things are called “representations” if they have a certain kind of function or telos and perform it in a certain kind of way. This claim is supported with a discussion and proposals about the function of a representation and of how representations perform that function. These proposals have been retrieved by putting together current descriptions from the literature on neural representations with earlier explorations of the features common to most things we are inclined to call representations (… maps, graphs, human language, signals between animals, stop signs … etc.) as these were assessed in Millikan (Language, thought and other biological categories. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984 and following). Of interest is the degree to which these independent sources converge. I conclude that there is no need to employ any new or technical sense of the term “representation” for it to play an important role in neuroscience.
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Notes
See, for example, the references given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under “Teleological Theories of Mental Content.”
An exception: unless they are intended as illustrations, intended to be instructive, depictions such as drawings are not defined as such by any particular use but they are called “representations”. This sense of “representation” was one that Ramsey was especially concerned to exclude from talk of representations in the brain and it does seem a very different sense from that in which sentences and even, say, maps are representations. In any event, this sense of "representation" has been excluded from contemporary discussions of representations in the brain.
Including fact-stating sentences, maps, diagrams, animal signals and so forth (Millikan 1984).
… [a representation] serves to adapt the cooperating interpreter
device to conditions such that proper functions of that device can be performed
under those conditions (Millikan 1984, p. 98).
Unless, of course, the function is performed instead by some sort of lucky accident.
Current literature sometimes requires of mental representations that they are normally caused by their representeds.
… there is an emerging consensus that the best way to understand representation in the context of cognitive explanation … includes four elements: (I) a homo-morphism (partial isomorphism) between a system of internal states and their target, (ii) a causal connection from the target to the internal states, … (Piccinini 2018, p. 3).
Certainly any producer of representations of facts has to have a method or methods, reliable or unreliable, of detecting those facts, but there are many kinds of natural information about things to be drawn from besides information gathered from their effects. True and well-evidenced representations can be of future events, the direction of the North Star carries information about the direction of the North Pole, and so forth (Millikan 2017 §10.2).
Representational systems can be very small. The system with lanterns (one if by land and two if by sea) that the Sexton of the Old North Church used to tell Paul Revere when and how the British were coming could have said “by land” or “by sea” and could have said it on any day the British began approaching. However many days one supposes Paul and the Sexton would have waited, two times that many days is the total number of possible messages that that system could have carried.
Roughly, because if A is to B as C is to D then A is to C as B is to D.
This particular example from Fodor (2008) has produced a complex literature. The excitation in the frog’s optic nerve is produced by any small black particle that moves in certain ways across the frog’s line of vision. The question has been raised whether the tongue-snapping reflex that is guided by the time of the optic nerve excitation could be said to represent presence at that time not of a fly but merely of a black particle. The truth of the representation would then figure in an explanation of the success of the tongue reflex as follows. Given where frogs hunt, it is statistically probable that any black particle moving in that certain way is a fly. So if the frog ingests a black particle it is statistically probable that it injests a fly. Further, the tongue reflex is not malfunctioning when it injests a black particle that is not a fly. So, it is argued, whether the optic nerve excitation means fly here now or black particle here now (or any of a number of other things) is indeterminate.
The major mistake made here is that the explanation is not a causal explanation of success as is required but a statistical explanation. A minor difficulty is the failure to distinguish between malfunction and failures that are owed to other conditions.
For a discussion of the employment of self-signs in a variety of human communication systems see (Millikan 2017, Ch. 9).
Following Bechtel 1998, the height of the arms of a working Watt governor do represent the pressure in the engine’s cylander. There is nothing ethereal about representations. They are merely pieces or properties of things that are put to use in a mechanism that operates in accordance with a certain principle.
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Millikan, R.G. Neuroscience and teleosemantics. Synthese 199, 2457–2465 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02893-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02893-9