Transcript person2.sol.lu.se

Enactive Representationalism?!
A Springboard for discussion.
Premises
1. Despite all the technical and theoretical
advances that have been made, it is still
difficult to construct an artefact that is
engaged with its environment in the rich
sort of way required by an enactive
approach.
...Nevermind one that qualifies as a
concept-possessing, concept-using agent.
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Even with get-your-hands-dirty robotics,
we're still working out what an enactive
approach really means.
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Nonetheless, one might well wish to
construct artefacts with which to better
understand cognition and conceptualization.
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2. Understanding cognition requires
more than recognizing the role of
context.
 Many GOFAI researchers were aware of the
importance of context.
Not just that agent is embedded and
embodied in certain way.
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3. More apparently “human” forms of
cognition build upon simpler, more clearly
shared forms of cognition.
Abstract thinking builds upon dynamic
physical engagement with the world.
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Knowing how knowledge underlies knowing
that knowledge.
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So, too, conceptual knowledge and
experience are built upon the nonconceptual.
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4. What I take as an enactive view is
necessary to understanding cognition.
Cognition is the result of dynamic, physical
engagement with the environment.

Boundary of organism/not-organism or
organism/environment becomes blurred.
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5. Pace Noë, a representational account (of
some kind) is necessary to understanding
concepts.
Concept = sub-propositional component of
thoughts.
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Concept = mental representation.
Concept = something that meets
something like Evans' Generality Constraint.
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6. Experience and concepts go, at least
to some extent, hand in hand.
Difficult to conceive of experience that is
fully non-conceptualized.

Experience is more than sensory experience
(e.g., visual experience), and sensory
experience is more than current sensory info.
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At least part of the something extra seems to
be concepts/conceptual expectations.
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7. To talk about representations, you
need to be clear what a representation is.

Dictionary definition: “a likeness or image”.
That which is able to stand in place of
something else, by virtue of, often at some
highly abstracted level, some perceived
resemblance.
 ...As opposed to symbols, where the
relationship of the symbol to the referent is
assumed to be arbitrary or at least
unimportant.

8. Representationalism is not per se
incompatible with enaction.
Ron: probably a naïve representationalism falls
afoul, sure, but a counterfactual representationalism
(what sensory experiences would I expect to have,
were I to engage in certain sorts of actions, such as
eye movements?) need not.
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So what I experience as being “over there” may
be what I would expect to see were I to foveate
over there, because of, perhaps, what I saw the
last time I foveated over there.
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Clarifications
1. How's this different from Noë's approach?
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Noë sees himself as anti-representational.
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This avoids a Grand Illusion-type argument.
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Noë's approach more strictly forward looking.
Ron's and my approach, at least as I'm
looking at it, places more emphasis on the
role of past experience.

So: e.g., we see what our experience
leads us to expect to see, hear what we
expect to hear, etc.
2. The work to date has focused solely on
specifying the non-conceptual content of
experience.
...Insofar as one can make any sort of clearcut conceptual/non-conceptual distinction.

But: I think some of the same methods can
be used for specifying conceptual content in
a non-conceptual way, which I think is
needed for avoiding a certain vicious
circularity.
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3. I'm not a (un?)reconstructed
definitionist, honestly!
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But concepts look like definitions for a reason.
Sure, conceptual knowledge is not a
collection of dictionary-style definitions.
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...Nor is it a process of collecting such
definitions.

...Even if you allow the definitions to be
dynamically updated in interaction with the
environment.
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But that's getting warmer!
Though concepts may look like definitions when we
try to explain them, they are nonetheless the result
of our dynamic engagement both with our
environment as a whole and with the society of
which we are members: so I have my personal
concept DOG, which may vary in greater or lesser
ways from the next person, or from my own concept
DOG at different points in time; and I have the
concept DOG that is part of the social space in
which we all share.
The Questions
I want to build some kind of
implementation to demonstrate the
potentials and pitfalls of the theory of
concepts I'm trying to develop as an
extension of Gärdenfors' work.
Doing this and constructing something
that qualifies as a concept-using,
concept-possessing agent at the
same time is seriously impractical!
What looks much more tractable is an
implementation that might on the surface
at least not be so different from a
traditional AI application: i.e., a computer
model that one interacts with by keyboard
and screen.
Where does enaction come in?
Question One
How much of the cognitive and enactive
requirements of such a model be put off onto
a user (e.g., a test subject) dynamically
engaged with the artefact and with the
subject's environment?
Question Two
There's a lot of existing GOFAI applications
out there that are, for what they do,
successful applications. How might an
enactive approach allow us to re-interpret
and re-conceptualize the nature of those
applications – to “see them in a different
light”?