REPRESENTATIONS: RICH OR PARTIAL?

This article focuses on how the idea of mental representations is understood in an influential modern research program in cognitive science - the program of predictive processing or predictive coding. It is pointed out that, as with earlier programs of classical cognitivism and connectionism, the idea of mental representations is also a crucial element of the program of predictive processing. According to the key assumption of this program, cognition is based on a rich internal generative model of reality that produces predictive perceptual and motor representations of what the organism can interact with at the next moment. The article considers possible challenges to this understanding of mental representations, coming from research in modern vision science and externalist approaches to memory, both in perception and in human practices, mediated by special intellectual artifacts. It is argued that there are no fundamental contradictions between these frameworks, which opens up opportunities for their interaction and integration.

Belief and Cognitive Architecture

Considerable debate in philosophy of psychology has recently focussed upon two central themes. One concerns the ontological status of propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires, the other on the proper computational account of cognitive architecture. In the ontological debate, the two most prominent positions are eliminativism, which claims that commonsense psychology is false because there are no such things as beliefs and desires; and versions of intentional realism, which counters that beliefs and desires actually do exist in the mind/brain. In the cognitive architecture debate, there are again two outstanding views: classical cognitivism, which holds that cognition is something closely akin to symbol manipulation; and parallel distributed processing (or connectionism), which roughly maintains that cognition is the distributed activation of several simple, non-symbolic processing units. Furthermore, in spite of their different topics, the two debates have been linked by a number of authors who suggest that where you stand in the cognitive architecture debate should help determine where you stand in the debate over prepositional attitudes. So, for example, writers like Jerry Fodor have used the plausibility of classical cognitivism to defend a realist interpretation of propositional attitudes, while writers like Steve Stich and myself have argued that certain forms of connectionism support eliminativism.