Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that contents of structural representations cannot be explanatorily relevant in constitutive mechanistic explanations of cognitive phenomena. After introducing structural representations, I argue that while there are superficial differences in structuralist theories of representational content, the paradigm cases of structural representation are best understood if the content-determining relation is viewed liberally as simple second-order resemblance. I then argue that contents based on second-order resemblance are not local to cognitive phenomena, because, paradigmatically, second-order resemblance is a relation between a neural assembly and the environment. This is especially pronounced in cases of surrogative reasoning, where the represented objects are absent, and in cases of misrepresentation, where the representing neural assembly does not in fact resemble the target domain. On the other hand, I argue that contents of structural representations are mutually dependent with cognitive phenomena. I also discuss the special case of neural emulators representing other brain areas or other parts of the organism. I conclude that these may be explanatorily relevant in constitutive mechanistic explanations as their contents are local to the explanandum phenomenon. However, this does not generalise to other types of structural representation.
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Notes
- 1.
In the case of maps, there is typically an aspect of conventionally assigned contents. However, a map-maker or someone using a map without a legend would have to rely on the congruence between represented relations.
- 2.
Swoyer (1991) refers to domains which have the same number of n-ary relations for each n defined over them as sharing the same similarity-type.
- 3.
One might worry that the coarse-grained lesions performed by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky are not sufficiently surgical, since they do not target just place-cells. However, as long as the hippocampus as a whole is the representing system, these interventions will do. New optogenetic techniques might deliver a more controlled experimental procedure.
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Kohár, M. (2023). Structural Contents. In: Neural Machines: A Defense of Non-Representationalism in Cognitive Neuroscience. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26746-8_6
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