Recent publications


Haselager, W.F.G., de Groot, A.D., & van Rappard, J.F.H. (2003)
Representationalism versus anti-representationalism: A debate for the sake of appearance.
Philosophical Psychology, 16(1), 5-23.

Abstract

In recent years the cognitive science community has witnessed the rise of a new, dynamical, approach to cognition. This approach entails a framework in which cognition and behavior are taken to result from complex dynamical interactions between brain, body, and environment. The advent of the dynamical approach is grounded in a dissatisfaction with the classical computational view on cognition. A particularly strong claim has been that cognitive systems do not rely on internal representations and computations.
Focusing on this claim, we take as a starting point a question recently raised by Cliff & Noble (1997): "... if evolution did produce a design that used internal representations, how would we recognize it?" We will argue that cognitive science lacks a proper operationalization of the notion of representation, and therefore is unable to fruitfully discuss whether a particular system has representations or not. A basic method to detect representations in a physical system, grounded in isomorphism, turns out to be quite unconstrained. We will look at a practical example of this problem by examining the debate on whether or not Van Gelder's (1995) controversial example of the Watt Governor is representational.
We will conclude that cognitive science, as of yet, has no empirically applicable means to answer Cliff & Noble's question unequivocally. This makes the recent representationalism vs. anti-representationalism debate a debate for the sake of appearance.