Representation from bottom and top

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 523-542

  Shapiro, Lawrence A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748208661     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1996.10717466     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. 1993. A briefer version of this paper was presented to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Vancouver (June, I wish to thank Fred Dretske for his comments at that meeting and also Malcolm Forster and Gary Hatfield for discussion on several points.
2. Williams, George. Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1966), 269
3. French, P., Uehling, T., and Wettstein, H., eds. 1977. “ ‘Toward a Causal Theory of Linguistic Representation,’ in ”. In Midwest Studies in Philosophy II 42–63. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. See also Dennis Stampe Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1987); Mohan Matthen, ‘Biological Functions and Perceptual Content,’ Journal of Philosophy85 (1988) 5–27.
4. Dretske, Fred. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in the World of Causes Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (
5. Pittendrigh, Colin. 1958. “ ‘Adaptation, Natural Selection, and Behavior,’ in ”. In Behavior and Evolution Edited by: Roe, A., and Simpson, G., 390–416. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
6. Genetic mutation and recombination will produce variance in the success of individuals' responses to particular selection pressures.
7. 1987. Drosophila: 529–32. Pittendrigh's discussion of the mechanisms by which fruit flies prevent desiccation turns out to be greatly oversimplified. More recent work, e.g., Marvin Seiger and Joseph Kertesz, ‘The Effect of Relative Humidity on Photoresponse in Sympatric Species of Short Term Exposure to Desiccating Environments,’ Journal of Insect Physiology 33 (1987) 477–80 and Marvin Seiger and David Woodruff, ‘The Effect of Relative Humidity on Photoresponse in Sympatric Species of Drosophila: Long-term Exposure to Desiccating Environments,’ Journal of Insect Physiology33 suggests that fruit flies do not simply seek out the most humid environments. When exposed to desiccating environments in the short term they are able to maintain their water balance by means of transpiration and so their behavior may not exhibit any photosensitivity. In the long term they will display photonegative behavior in environments with extremely low relative humidity (e.g. 5%) but photopositive behavior in environments with higher relative humidity (e.g. 50%). Photopositive behavior may expose the fruit fly to a dryer environment but can enable the fly to find a source of water with which to réhydraté itself. In the following I intend to ignore these complications. However, I recommend the reader keep these complications in mind, because they only reinforce the point I shall make later about the trade-offs that must figure into the selection of indicators.
8. Explaining Behavior For example, in, Dretske says, ‘electrically operated fuel gauges indicate not only the amount of fuel left in the tank but also the amount of electrical current flowing in the wires connecting the gauge to the tank, the amount of torque on the armature to which the pointer is affixed, and the magnitude of the magnetic field surrounding this armature. Given the way these gauges operate, they cannot indicate (i.e. have their behavior depend on) the amount of fuel in the tank without indicating (exhibiting at least the same degree of dependency on) these related conditions.’ Despite the number of conditions an electric fuel gauge indicates, it represents only that condition it has the function to indicate: the amount of fuel in the tank. (59)
9. 1986. 17–36. Sometimes a token of the type indicator of F (when broken, or removed from the environment in which it evolved), will not indicate F. However, it may still retain the function to indicate F, because it is still the indication of F that explains why this kind of indicator has been given the control duties it now has. When a token of the kind indicator of F ceases to be an indicator of F, it will misrepresent those conditions it now does indicate as F. For more on misrepresentation see Dretske, Explaining Behavior, 64–70 and his ‘Misrepresentation,’ in R. Bogdan, ed., Belief: Form, Content, and Function (Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. 1991. Others have sought to refine Dretske's indication relation in various ways (see, e.g., Peter Godfrey-Smith, ‘Signal, Decision, Action,’ journal of Philosophy 88 [] 709–22; and Malcolm Forster, ‘How Neural Networks Develop Meaningful Representations Through Learning,’ [unpublished manuscript]) and I do not claim that the following argument is applicable to every understanding of indication. However, I will argue that it is not correlation that lies at the heart of representation.
11. Explaining Behavior In Dretske distinguishes between ‘mere’ representations and beliefs. When an indicator of F acquires the function to indicate F because of its selection history, it represents F (see 94). But, Dretske claims, selection cannot provide an account of the control duties of indicators within individual organisms (92). Evolution, he thinks, can't explain why this particular organism is wired the way it is. Rather, this particular organism is wired the way it is because of the genes it carries. So, Dretske distinguishes between representations and beliefs. When an indicator of G acquires the function to indicate G within the lifetime of an individual, it comes to be the belief that G. Dretske appeals to associative learning to explain the recruitment of indicators within single life spans.
12. 1989. Meaning and Mental Representation 162Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. In addition to Godfrey-Smith and Sober, Robert Cummins, and Daniel Dennett, ‘Evolution, Error, and Intentionality,’ in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1987) 304 raise this objection. Godfrey-Smith, however, develops the objection most effectively, and it is his paper that brought to my attention the passages in Cummins and Dennett.
13. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 1992. ‘Indication and Adaptation,’. Synthese, 92: 283–312.
14. Godfrey-Smith and I differ on our readings of indication. Godfrey-Smith assumes that indication can be a ‘more or less’ reliable relation. However, I believe that Dretske is quite explicit that C indicates F if and only if state C is present only if F obtains. As we will see, it is because Dretske has this strict definition of indication in mind that he is forced to introduce in addition to indication a weaker notion of correlation. Godfrey-Smith's objection to Dretske, however, can be made with either understanding of indication. And, to keep my analysis consistent, I will reframe Godfrey-Smith's objections using my characterization of indication.
15. Millikan, Ruth. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (‘Biosemantics,’ Journal of Philosophy86 (1989) 281–97; ‘Compare and Contrast Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan on Teleosemantics,’ Philosophical Topics18 (1990) 151–61; ‘On Mentalese Orthography,’ in B. Dahlboom, ed., Dennett and His Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1993) 97–123
16. Explaining Behavior In, Dretske summarizes the Sober point like this: ‘for selection to take place all that is needed is for the triggering state to be better correlated with the appropriate season than are the corresponding states in competing plants. A state need not be reliably correlated with spring— hence need not indicate the arrival of spring— in order to be correlated sufficiently well with the arrival of spring to confer on its possessor a competitive advantage.’ That Sober's and Godfrey-Smith's observations are connected is fairly obvious. Both point out that selection will not always favor an indicator of what, following Pittendrigh, we may call the adaptively significant condition. Depending upon the costs and benefits involved, selection might favor a tree with a mild-weather indicator to a tree with a spring indicator. It is not, then, because trees have spring indicators that trees blossom in the spring, but because trees have indicators of something else that is correlated, correlated sufficiently well to be favorable, with spring. I do not wish to debate exactly how similar Sober's and Godfrey-Smith's points are. It suffices for what follows that Dretske is aware that selection will not always favor an indicator of an adaptively significant condition. (90)
17. Dennett, in ‘Evolution, Error, and Intentionality,’ has argued that there is an indeterminacy involved with function ascriptions and, accordingly, he might object that the kind of top down analysis of content I'm advocating here would confront similar problems of indeterminacy. However, there is a fact of the matter about which environmental conditions posed adaptive problems to members of a species. It is with this fact that the determinacy of functions and the content derived from these functions is anchored.
18. ‘Content, Kinds, and Individualism in Marr's Theory of Vision,’. 489 Lawrence Shapiro, The Philosophical Review 102 1993–513
19. Dretske denies that he assigns the wrong content to the states of the stickleback's detector (personal communication). He claims that it is implausible that sticklebacks are capable of representing things as male sticklebacks. However, the sense of representation Dretske here employs, viz. representation as, is more sophisticated than the sense I have in mind and, I think, than is needed for much of cognitive psychology (e.g. the theory of vision developed in David Marr, Vision [San Francisco, CA: Freeman 1982]). For present purposes, I intend representation in its intuitive ‘stands for’ sense (for more on this sense of representation as it appears in Marr's theory, see Gary Hatfield, ‘Representation in Perception and Cognition: Connectionist Affordances,’ in W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart, eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1991] 163–95). Hence, I do not have the difficulty Dretske does in conceiving that sticklebacks have states that represent male sticklebacks. Indeed, I find this claim more plausible than Dretske's denial that a stickleback, when responding to a fire truck, is misrepresenting.
20. Not only is this a tacit alternative, but it is one that Dretske would not, I think, want credited to him.
21. 1994. The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz 163–81. For an extended discussion of this distinction between conceptions of naturalization see Gary Hatfield, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). See also William Epstein and Gary Hatfield, ‘Gestalt Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind,’ Philosophical Psychology 7 In Hatfield's vocabulary, metaphysical naturalism (in philosophy of mind) is the view that mental states are natural only if they can be reduced to physiology and, subsequently, physics. Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, is the position that mental states are natural if their study is amenable to the investigatory standards of a natural science. For a more thorough criticism of the view of naturalism I call Lego Naturalism see my ‘The Nature of Nature: Rethinking Naturalistic Theories of Thought’ (unpublished manuscript).