Mikio Akagi (Texas Christian University)
William Ramsey (2007) and others worry that cognitive scientists apply the concept “representation” too liberally. Ramsey argues that representations are often ascribed according to a causal theory he calls the “receptor notion,” according to which a state s represents a state of affairs p if s is regularly and reliably caused by p. Ramsey claims that the receptor notion is what justifies the ascription of representations to edge-detecting cells in V1, fly-detecting cells in frog cortex, and prey-detecting mechanisms in Venus flytraps. However, Ramsey argues that the receptor notion also justifies ascribing representational states to the firing pin in a gun: since the state of the trigger regularly and reliably causes changes in the state of the firing pin, the firing pin represents whether the trigger is depressed. The firing pin case is an absurd consequence. He concludes the receptor notion is too liberal to be useful to scientists.
I argue that something like the receptor notion can be salvaged if being a receptor is contextualized in terms of construal. Construals are judgment-like attitudes whose truth-values can vary licitly independently of the situation they describe. We can construe ambiguous figures like the Necker cube as if it were viewed from above or below, and we can construe the duck-rabbit as if it were an image of a duck or of a rabbit. We can construe an action like skydiving as brave or foolhardy, depending on which features of skydiving we attend to. On a construal-based account of conceptual norms, a concept (e.g., “representation”) is ascribed relative to a construal of a situation.
I describe a minimal sense of what it means to construe a system as an “organism,” and how ascriptions of representational content are made relative to such construals. Briefly, construing something as an organism entails construing it such that it has goals and mechanisms for achieving those goals in its natural context. For example, frogs qua organisms have goals like identifying food and ingesting it. I suggest that ascriptions of natural representations and their contents are always relative to some construal of the representing system qua organism. Furthermore, the plausibility of representation-ascriptions is constrained by the plausibility of their coordinate construal-qua-organism. So the contents we ascribe to representations in frog visual cortex are constrained by the goals we attribute to frogs.
Absurd cases like Ramsey’s firing pin can be excluded (mostly) since guns are not easily construed as “organisms.” They have no goals of their own. It is not impossible to ascribe goals to artifacts, but the ascription of folk-psychological properties to tools generally follows a distinct pattern from representation-ascription in science.
My construal-based proposal explains the practice of representation-ascription better than Ramsey’s receptor notion. It preserves Ramsey’s positive examples, such as the ascription of representations to visual cortex, but tends to exclude absurd cases like the firing pin. Since cognitive scientists do not actually ascribe natural representations to firearms, I submit that my account is a more charitable interpretation of existing scientific practice.
