Towards an Ecological Epistemology

Wrote this real quickly for an assignment that required I create something that was related in any way to the environment, completely open ended. This article came out. The environmentalism stuff is sort of fluffy and tangential to the epistemological stuff, and not really something I’ve thought about too deeply, but I thought it turned out pretty good regardless. It was nice not having to cite anyone for once.

_______________________________________________________

In this article, I aim to first critique the standard epistemological situation as given in traditional philosophical frameworks as being radically hostile to ecological perspectives on the human situation. Then, utilizing philosophical work done in the 20^th century, I will lay out an alternative sketch of our epistemological relationship with the environment in which our knowledge concerning the external world is direct and relational. I will then argue that this perspective on epistemology can help frame the environmentalist perspective and give credence to the notion of ourselves as being deeply embedded into the particular environments we inhabit; socially, cognitively, and emotionally.

The Standard Framework and its Problems

If you look at the history of philosophy, you will see a long tradition of separating our essential human nature from the external, physical environments we live in. By proposing that, epistemically, we are shut off from the real world, and subsequently have to build up a systematic mental representation from “given” sensory inputs, philosophers have barricaded themselves within a “veil of ideas.” From this epistemic situation, it follows naturally that there is an internal realm different in kind from the external world of physical worlds and public behavior. To account for the difference between inside and outside, philosophers constructed the notion of a mind that is distinct from the physical environment.

In my mind, this stipulation of mental life as distinct from physical life has created a philosophical atmosphere that breeds contempt for environmentalist endeavors. If we take this standard framework seriously, it alienates our true nature from the ecological niches we inhabit. If, so goes the standard theory, we are epistemically shut off from the external world, then whatever makes us essentially human – be it mind, soul, spirit – is not of the world, and our humanity becomes defined in terms of thinking and not being; that is, being in a physical world. This, at least, was Martin Heidegger’s great critique of cognitivist philosophical schemes: they cut us off from the environment and stipulate a go-between mental representation in its stead, and then from this axiom, go on to conclude that what makes us human is not the fact that we are embedded in a familiar world, but rather, separated from this world by our thoughts.

The Ecological Alternative

The epistemic alternative to the standard framework involves a perceptual theory in which the knowledge we have concerning the environment is much more direct. Not direct in the sense that perceptual knowledge somehow avoids going through different brain filters, but rather, in the sense that there is no representational mediation between the environment and our perception of it. In contrast to this representational framework, the ecological perspective is much more pragmatic in that our perception is tied up with behavior and opportunities for behavior. For example, when perceiving a chair, we do not have a sensation input and then infer that the chair is for sitting, but rather, we directly see that the chair is available for sitting. James Gibson, considered the founder of ecological psychology, dubbed this aspect of perception affordances.

Thus, according to this ecological theory of perception, we are not estranged from the environment epistemically, but rather, intimately entangled with it due to our pragmatic orientation with our ecological niches. In our homes and our cars, our offices and our places of play, we are at home epistemically. Our knowledge concerning the external environment is immediate and direct; it guides us toward different behaviors which enable pragmatic know-how. So in the case of perceiving a chair, our epistemic situation – due to developmental learning and years of experience – is that of familiarity. We know what a chair affords, and this knowledge guides our behavior so that we may cope with the environment sufficiently.

Implications for Environmental Philosophy

The philosophical implications of this ecological framework can be extended from philosophy of mind to philosophy of the environment. While this new epistemological framework provides a clear motivation for abandoning traditional dualisms between mind and world, subject and object, it also provides a backdrop for modern thinking in regards to issues surrounding the environment. When perceptual theories take seriously our epistemic embeddedness within an environment, we arrive at a position readily adapted for environmentalist concerns. By placing the essence of humanity into an ecological niche cashed out in terms of pragmatic coping, we get rid of the traditional bias against seeing ourselves as somehow tied up with the physical world. This philosophical perspective enables a conception of humanity that is intimately connected with the surrounding environment.

Subsequently, once a philosophical system takes into account the profound interrelationship between ourselves and the environment, the philosophical problems surrounding environmentalism fade. Thus, from the ecological perspective, a motivation to preserve the environment naturally emerges. Because we no longer feel estranged from the environment, but rather, wrapped up in it due to our everyday coping, the environmentalist urge to reach out and protect the environment becomes another way of reaching out to ourselves, or at least, to an aspect that is just as important to defining humanity as humanity itself. In other words, the ecological perspective implicitly incorporates a conception of humanity that is at odds with the idea that what makes humans human is not our attachment to the environment, but rather, our detachment form it.

By divorcing itself from this theory of detachment, ecologically oriented philosophy offers a reconceptualization of humanity that has the potential to change the way we perceive ourselves as related to the environment, allowing for a newfound enthusiasm concerning environmentalist issues. By taking our minds out from the abstracted space of Reason, ecological theory puts humanity right back into the social, cultural, pragmatic milieu that structures our experience and guides our behavior. This conception of ourselves is at odds with our traditional Western intellectual heritage, but I believe that our species as a whole is ready and waiting for just such a theory to come along and encourage rampant environmentalism as a way of protecting something that is not just apart from ourselves, but profoundly intermingled with us as humans: the environment.

Thoughts on qualia and phenomenology

It seems to me that the only way qualia can emerge as a legitimate philosophical question is for there to be an assumption of dualism. For qualia to make sense conceptually, there needs to be a subject, as apart from the world, experiencing the incoming flux of sensory data. This seems obvious since the whole idea of qualia sprung out of the phenomenology of subjects looking out upon the world, with a particular first-person perspective.

In the same vein, even the notion of intentionality, the directedness of mental life towards objects, depends upon the subject being distinct from the object. Without this metaphysical gap, there could be no epistemological intuition guiding our inherited supposition of dualism between subject and object. Spelled out in such plain terms, one might feel this is a strawman, but nevertheless, the metaphysical implications of such language are clear.

But, hear me out, if the fundamental division between self and world rests merely on a philosophical assumption, why should we not explore the implications of an alternative ontological framework? Historically, this alternative has been called “being-in-the-world.” I won’t go into the details right now, but I think I’ve discussed it elsewhere several times. Nevertheless, important for my purposes here, the human being is still capable of separating himself from the world, despite his fundamental orientation of ontological familiarity, through the use of conscious thought – which is representational. The ontology of thoughts seems clear: subject and object. According to the Heideggerian perspective, the ontology of people is not so clear cut.

So, with this alternative ontological framework of being-in-the-world in mind, what sense can we still make out of the notion of qualia? There is an experience of the world. We can strip this experience of its existential import through deliberation. We can think to ourselves about our own experience and contemplate what it is like to see the world. In such deliberation, we might think of ourselves as a separate – mental – entity that stands alone in the world of objects and people. After such contemplation, we might try our hand at constructing an ontology that includes ourselves as separate mental entities, and the world of objects that we reach out to through intentional consciousness. We would be basing our ontology, supposedly, on the phenomenology of experience – gathered through our very own cognitive contemplation upon experience as philosophers.

The mistake here would be to take this contemplation-driven ontology and immediately claim, “This is it! This is the way things are!” From a Heideggerian perspective, one could just as well claim from the start that there is no ontological wedge between subject and object, saying that instead, subject and object are replaced by being-in-the-world. If you fail to do this, and instead press on with a dualistic ontology, the language of phenomenology results in a subject intentionally directed towards an external world, which impinges its sensory data upon our minds, giving us the famous first-person experience of “qualia.”

By challenging the ontological assumptions implicit in this representationalist perspective, we can dismantle the philosophical scaffolding which supports the very notion of qualia, and subsequently, all of the derivative non-sense which has swollen contemporary philosophical journals.

Perhaps, if we are interested in spelling out the ontology of our total personality, and not just the conceptual web of belief in our heads, we should attempt to do phenomenology from a non-Cartesian perspective. After all, why should we expect an analysis of cognition, as distinct from a phenomenological understanding of absorbed coping, to reveal to us an ontology that gives due justice to the total phenomenon of our embodied, enacted situation?

Atheism and Faith, part II

In my last post I sketched out an existential perspective in which an atheist could take spiritual comfort in, without losing his anti-supernaturalistic principles. This vision of man, as embodied and existentially engaged in the environment, is one which has resonated with many modern and contemporary philosophers, philosophers who struck out to enrich the human vocabulary in such a way as to re-orient the human mind towards his or her own experience. It is the anti-optimistic and anti-pessimistic spirit to these writings which paints the human experience in richer colors, infusing their language with a curious and highly relevant mix of metaphorical expressions of that which matters to us: our own finitude, anxiety, and the absence or presence of God.

As an atheist and has a naturalist, I do not feel the “sensus divinitas” of Calvin and the reform epistemologists. To feel otherwise, would be to beg the question against naturalism and the naturalistic interpretation of divine phenomenology. I say this because such a subjective argumentation for the presence of God in man’s heart is the only escape from the rationalistic perspective, a perspective which rules out the proposition “God exists” as meaningless. What is left is a shell of experience, filled with meaning for those surrounded by Christian imagery and symbolization, but empty for those of us who reject the divinity surrounding such religiosity. For us, it is impossible to have faith in the propositions of God’s existence, for our rationality compels us to reject metaphysical speculation in the same way that we reject Zeus, Ra, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn. We see Christian belief in terms of psychology and irrationality, despite the attempts of Christian theologians to present their system of beliefs in terms of “rational epistemic rights” and other philosophical cop-outs. For atheists, it isn’t the rational coherence of a system which compels us to believe in it, it is the truth which drives our search for knowledge and understanding.

Some would say this is a faith in science and a faith in the finite, yet hungry, man as man. But this is not my faith. My faith cannot be described in terms of a single propositional object, such as “science.” No, this will not do at all, for my faith is an ultimate concern with my own being, my life as lived through a physical body in a physical environment. I am nothing but the motion of matter and yet I am more than this, because I have an experience, an experience which is rich phenomenologically. Through this experience I have understoodd the essential importance of existence, as a human, as a philosopher, an atheist, a friend, and a lover. I live my life with a dynamic faith which places my ultimate concern in the hands of the present moment, a moment which jumps through time and space, compelling me forward towards my death.

Such a perspective might sound morbid for the Christian who has visions of heaven, but my bliss will be in the silence of non-being, satisfied with a life well lived. This faith of mine is rooted in physicality, in the reality of my own being, situated and embodied. It doesn’t require knowledge, it only requires existence, which is the essence of man.

Being human: take two

In an earlier post, I tried to get at a Heideggarian “definition” of the being of humans. I don’t think I did a very good job, so I am going to try again, taking some cues from William Blattner’s excellent reader’s guide on Being and Time.

Proximally and for the most part we are immersed in the word. The importance of this observation is hidden from the philosophical tradition, because it has been focused on the self-consciousness and moral accountability, in which we experiences ourselves as distinct from the world and others. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the self focuses first on a basic form of self-disclosure: I am what matters to me. Seen thus, I cannot disentangle myself from those around me and the world in which I live. In a phrase, we are being-in-the-world.

Thus, according to Heidegger, the philosophical tradition since Descartes has been fundamentally misguided on what it means to be a human. We are not res cogitans, locked behind the theater of our head, looking out at the world from behind a subjective veil, but rather, we are fundamentally familiar with the world. This familiarity is the basic constitution of being-in-the-world, and thus, the basic constitution of humans. If I understand Heidegger right, self-consciousness, intentionality, and all those phenomena of modern philosophy are, if anything at all, residual and derivative from the more basic familiarity with the world. They result when we are in a reflective mood, stepped away from the world, utilizing the modern cognitive faculties evolution has given us. Otherwise, we “reside amidst” the world.

This might all sound like phenomenological mumbo-jumbo, and I agree that it can sound kind of arbitrary, but if you understand Heidegger’s reaction to the western “History of being”, as he calls it, you will realize that this mumbo-jumbo is really a sophisticated methodology for getting at the root phenomena of human activity. By dismissing the subject-object paradigm as irrelevant for phenomenology, Heidegger recasts the subject matter of philosophical inquiry and sets the stage for fruitful hermeneutic interpretation. And that is all Heidegger essentially is, an interpretation. He didn’t really “get at” the phenomena in any systematic way, due to the circular constraints of interpretation, but I feel like that merely makes his philosophical project open and dynamic, as opposed to stale and rigid. He acknowledged the circularity involved in trying to uncover the ontology of being, but this is no matter, because humans already have a “pre-ontological” understanding of being. It is the goal of phenomenology to articulate this pre-ontological understanding into a conceptual form in order to uncover the salient features of the phenomena of being.

Heidegger is satisfied with mere “descriptive phenomenology” for a simple reason: to look for anything else, would be to presuppose a form of psychologism, which states that the structure of meaning is a real, causal property of minds and/or the world. However, if this isn’t the case, and meaning isn’t going to be uncovered in any “deep structures”, or combinatory semantics, then all that can be done with meaning is description. To do otherwise, would be to try and complete some form of constructive theorizing. Meaning isn’t something “produced” by minds, which can be understood by general theorization, but rather, meaning-structures are latent in experience, and the only proper way to get at their ontology is through some sort of interpretation. That interpretation doesn’t necessarily have to be Heideggerian, but Heidegger did a pretty good job of laying down the essential phenomena of being, at least when it comes to human Daseins. And for that I am grateful.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

“Respecting” Religious Beliefs?

Lots of bloggers have been commenting on this paper by Simon Blackburn, called “Religion and Respect”. Everyone seems to be commenting on one paragraph in particular:

We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one. We would prefer them to change their minds.

Most bloggers that I have seen commenting on the Blackburn paper seem to disagree with him on this particular point, and I thought I would share my opinion. To start off, one blogger said:

This is where I take issue with Blackburn’s stance. Blackburn cannot respect a person who holds a false belief, because he operates under the assumption that if someone believes something different than he does, then she must be wrong.

I think Lindsey completely misses Blackburn’s point in the quoted paragraph above. He wasn’t saying that he doesn’t respect religious people, but rather he can’t respect someone in a “thicker sense”. I take this thicker sense to mean that he can’t respect someone for holding an irrational belief, not that he can’t respect them at all. After all, he says: “We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not that one.” On this point I agree with Blackburn and I can’t understand the antagonism towards this paragraph. If someone told you that they believed a celestial teapot was orbiting Jupiter and it was impossible to verify that it existed, would you respect that person for holding that belief? No, you would think it was irrational to hold such a belief and for precisely that reason, you could not respect them for holding the belief. This doesn’t mean that you don’t respect them for other reasons, such as being moral or intelligent in other areas of inquiry. It is just that on that particular matter, you wouldn’t respect their specific philosophical beliefs and I think the analogy holds for the belief in God.

Let me come right out and say it, as an atheist, I think that it is irrational to hold a belief in any sort of deity. I think that atheism is the default position on whether or not there are any Gods and therefor it requires some intellectual leap, whether provided through indoctrination or some more subjective thought process, to believe in a god. I believe that either way, this thought process is erroneous and irrational, leading to a belief that is very likely to be false. This is why I have to disagree with blogger Lindsey when she says:

Personally, I respect a person (and the part of that person) who I think legitimately came to believe what she did, or is being sincere and honest about what she believes and for what reasons she believes. That sort of belief I can respect, regardless of whether or not I agree with it. It’s the type of respect I have for my atheist and agnostic friends. I don’t agree with them, but I don’t have to. I recognize that they have some good reasons to believe what they do (even if those reasons doesn’t sway my own beliefs). That’s the type of respect that is important to have. It’s about appreciating how a person came to have her set of beliefs, and how she lives out those beliefs. Is she being honest with herself? Is she living out her beliefs with integrity? That is what counts.

Going back to the celestial teapot, one of my favorite examples, does it make sense to respect the “part of the person” that believes in something that can’t be verified in any way? Clearly, it is irrational to believe in the teapot, so why should I respect the part of the person responsible for instilling them with an irrational belief? The only way to counter Blackburn’s point here is to argue that believing in a deity is rational, and I think you will inevitably fail in this regard, for numerous reasons. As I said above, atheism is the default position when it comes to believing in a god, and any deviation from the default must be seen as irrational.

There is, of course, a difference between tolerating an irrational belief and respecting it. Obviously, I tolerate people who believe in irrational metaphysical beings, but I don’t see any reason why I should respect those beliefs, in the sense of intellectual respect. If I sincerely believe that it takes an irrational thought process to come to believe in something, how can I respect that process in the 21st century?

In summary, I can respect a theist for many different reasons, but I can’t respect them on account of them holding an irrational belief. The only way that I could respect someone on account of their holding a belief in a deity, is if they provided an account of their intellectual thought process that wasn’t grounded in subjectivity or irrationality. This is a debate I would willingly have, so if anyone wants to argue that believing in a deity is not irrational, go ahead. Until I am convinced otherwise, I will agree with Blackburn.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Reconciling Direct Realism?

Sometimes I sit in class and think about the nature of perception and reality. That sounds cliche, but I often find myself wondering whether I am really perceiving the professor as they give a lecture. What am I looking at? Am I merely perceiving representations, or ideas, in my head, or am I really looking at the external world? How can I reconcile the fact that visual information from the environment must be filtered through my nervous system before it is perceived with the sensation that I am directly looking at the world. On one hand, the representational theory of perception makes sense because it seems like there is always going to be this “gap” between my perception and reality, mediated through my sensory organs. On the other hand, it makes evolutionary sense that animals would develop a direct perceptual system in order to save cognitive resources. “Perception is cheap, representation is expensive.”

So what am I looking at when I perceive the world? Ideas in my head or real objects? James Gibson proposed a solution that he thought solved these dualistic paradoxes when he came up with the concept of the ambient optic array. Light is bouncing all around the environment, reflecting information about surfaces and textures, eventually settling into invariant “visual angles”. It is the information in this ambient optic array that we perceive. We don’t perceive the world. We don’t perceive representations in our head, projected onto a Cartesian theater. We directly pickup information from the invariant visual angles of light in the ambient optic array.

This is a mind/body/world system. It embedded and embodied. It is confusing to talk about sense-data stimulating the retina, and the brain “perceiving” this data, as if it was projected onto our cortex and the mind just mysteriously “reads” the data. This leads to conceptual muddles such as mind/body dualism and the representational theory of perception. Gibson thought it made more sense to talk about a ecologically embedded perceptual system picking up information directly from the environment. The distinction between this information pickup and the representational theory of perception is subtle. The difference lies in the fact that with the representational theory there is this impossible divide between between “internal” world of the mind and the “external” physical world. Somehow information crosses this metaphysical gap. Gibson thought it was much more parsimonious and evolutionarily sound to talk about perception in terms of direct pickup by a holistic agent in the environment. The information in the ambient optic array is structurally isomorphic to the firings of the nervous system, which is embedded in a whole body, capable of moving about in the world. By utilizing this ecological approach to perception, Gibson was able to drop the conceptual muddle of a “mind” perceiving ideas driven by the sense organs, but rather, a Self perceiving the environment through invariant structures in the light reflected in the environment. This is why the phenomenology of perception always puts the environment “out there”, in the world, as opposed to “inside” the internal chambers of the mind.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Berkeley, Idealism, and Heidegger

In his Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Bishop Berkely famously argued that matter did not exist. Only ideas in the mind. Idealism was born. What was he arguing against? He was primarily arguing against the representationalist dualism of Descartes and Locke, that claimed that the mind consists of representations of the external world. He thought that such a representationalist paradigm leads to skepticism because it is possible that our representations don’t correspond to any reality. Berkeley had several arguments against this representationalist philosophy, but what is more interesting is his argument against those who deny the premises of representationalism. To this, Berkeley offered what is sometimes called the “master argument”:

… I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause…. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and doth conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind; though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in it self.

So, while this argument was designed to work if you are a direct realist, what happens when you deny the framework of direct/indirect realism? I can’t help but view this argument through a Heideggarian lens and wonder what Philonous would say to someone who denied the subject/object distinction and thus the perceiving ego altogether. I think Heidegger would have denied the premises upon which Berkeley’s argument stood. If you deny that humans have subjective minds that perceive the world, then it doesn’t matter whether the “world” perceived is immaterial or not. Heidegger would still go with the parsimonious, scientific materialism but what matters is that the world of humans is imbued with significance through the pragmatic interactions of everyday life. The subjective mental realm that Berkeley works with is primarily a metaphorical holdover from the popular philosophy of the times. Berkeley couldn’t help but frame his philosophy in terms of a mental subject interacting with the world, either material or immaterial. However, thanks to 20th century thinkers like Heidegger giving us a new vocabulary to work with, the philosophical problems of the 17th century seem antiquated in the same way that ptolemaic astronomy is outdated to modern astronomers.

So, it isn’t that Berekey’s argument are wrong per se, it is just that the philosophical framework that they rest upon has been cast aside in favor of new metaphors and vocabularies.

The Contingency of Language

I love Richard Rorty. A lot. That is why I am devoting this post to quoting some juicy sections from the first chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.
…
The world does not speak. Only we do.
…
From our point of view, explaining the success of science, or the desirability of political liberalism, by talk of “fitting the world” or “expressing human nature” is like explaining why opium makes you sleep by talking about its dormitive power.
…
Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually, it is implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.
…
To see the history of language, and thus of the arts, the sciences, and the moral sense, as the history of metaphor is to drop the picture of the human mind, or human languages, becoming better and better suited to the purposes for which God or Nature designed them, for example, able to express more and more meanings or to represent more and more facts.
…
The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat everything – our language , our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance. To reach this point would be, in Freud’s words, to “treat chance as worth of determining our fate.”

Heidegger: Life and Philosophy

This is an interesting documentary mainly on Martin Heidegger’s life, with a little bit of his philosophy thrown in.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Thoughts on Representation

I just read an interesting paper by Eric Dietrich and Arthur B. Markman entitled “Discrete Thoughts: Why Cognition Must Use Discrete Representations.” In the paper, they first give a definition of general mental representations and make a distinction between discrete and continuous representations. Then they outline seven arguments for why they think discrete representations are necessary for any system that discriminates between two or more states.

Their definition of general mental representation is I think robust and conceptually useful. They define a representation to be any internal state that mediates or plays a mediating role between a system’s inputs and outputs in virtue of that state’s semantic content. They define semantic content in terms of information that is causally efficacious and in terms of what that information is used for. What this means is that representations have to be a part of mental causation. This approach reminds me a lot of Hofstadter’s work, which I have talked about here. Hofstadter emphasizes how mental representations, which mediate between the environmental stimulus and the behavioral output by virtue of being causal at the appropriate level of analysis. I take Dietrich and Markman to mean the same thing when they say that mental representations must be “psychologically real”. In Hofstadter’s terminology, the symbols must be active.

Next, the authors offers a definition of discrete representation. “A system has discrete representations if and only if it can discriminate its inputs.” If a system categorizes, then it has discrete representations. In contrast, a continuous representation would be more tightly bound to its correspondence with the environment. It would be coupled in such a way that it wouldn’t have the ability to make distinctions between its inputs. This is illustrated by the examples of a watt governor and a thermostat. In a watt governor, the arm angles of continuous representations of the speed of the fly wheel, and in contrast, a thermometer must make an on/off discrimination of the continuous representation of the varying bimetal strip. The discrete representation supervenes on the continuous representation.

Finally, the authors give seven arguments why cognition requires discrete representations. I won’t go over the arguments in detail, I will just list a brief summary taken from the text.

1. Cognitive systems must discriminate among states in the represented world.
2. Cognitive systems are able to access specific properties of representations.
3. Cognitive systems must be able to combine representations.
4. Cognitive systems must have some compositional structure.
5. There are strong functional role connections among concepts in cognitive systems.
6. Cognitive systems contain abstractions.
7. Cognitive systems require non-nomic representations.

In their conclusion the authors discuss the claim that it follows from the presence of discrete representations in the cognitive system that the best paradigm for cognitive science must be computationalism. They argue that any system that utilizes discrete representations must be finite and has deterministic transitions between states which can be constructed into an algorithm. Thus, the mind can be described as a computationalism system. I think this is a clever argument and places computationalism into its proper role as the dominant paradigm in cognitive science. Until conflicting evidence shows that when it comes to general mental phenomena there is a better methodological framework, we shouldn’t deny computationalism’s place as the best explanatory paradigm.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::