Posted by alexandra_k on September 1, 2005, at 16:10:56
In reply to Re: teleological semantics? » alexandra_k, posted by zeugma on September 1, 2005, at 6:32:08
> Now we are on to the hard stuff :-)
I wondered if you were kidding...
IMO Kaplan is the hard stuff :-)
> > Lets have a look at some rudimentary aboutness...Okay. So what we want is to start with the small stuff and then build up to the sorts of concepts that people have. Just need 'rudimentary aboutness' in the same way that whatever prevents a lobster eating itself may be considered to be 'rudimentary self-hood'.
> > Frogs snap their tongues at moving dark spots.
> > A mental representation is what occurs between the stimulus and the response.
> > Presumably the stimulus gets represented in the frogs brain and that representation produces the tongue snapping response.
> a neural circuit directs the snapping process.. is it a 'representation'... i don't know.I think it is supposed to be a 'rudimentary representation'. But in order for something to count as a representation misrepresentation must be possible. I think that latter point has something to do with the content of the representation being able to be delineated with respect to truth values across possible worlds. There has to be something that counts as true (accurate representation) and false (misrepresentation) in order for it to count as a (contentful) representation.
(But then tautologies and contradictions might pose a problem... I'd rather not go there).
> well, the frog's picture of the stimulus (to anthropomorphize) doesn't have sufficient resolution to discriminate between pellets and flies.Hmm. Are you sure? Maybe some behaviourist could find out whether frogs can discriminate the two... If thats right then the content is starting to look like FLY OR BEE BEE or MOVING DARK SPOT or something like that... (Fly would be ruled out if it can't discriminate between flies and non-flies).
> In particular nothing naturalistic could explain the representation, other than as an exercise of a representational capacity that humans have evolved that can make any x represent y (language is largely arbitrary yet has tremendous capacity to represent).
How about representation in thought? Is the connection there arbitrary? There are causal / informational theories of representation. Dretske in particular goes on about x represents cat so long as x tends to be caused by cats. But then there is a problem as to how misrepresentation is possible. And how we can think x in the absence of cats.
> i don't want to say the frog has concepts at all, but an ability to identify, and snatch flies with its tongue. A bee bee pellet triggers the process despite the fact that the pellet is not edible.Hmm. So was the frog mistaken when it snapped at the bee bee? I think you are saying that it is supposed to snatch at flies and it shouldn't really be snapping at bee bees. But... Why not? Why not say the frog has an ability to snatch at MOVING DARK SPOTS or at FLIES OR BEE BEES. Why flies?
>i prefer saying it has an 'ability' to locate and snatch flies than to say that it can conceptualize flies. the ability can confer a selectional advantage for the frog, without requiring the ability to generate concepts which are of dubious survival value even for humans who are much better at concept-forming.
You behaviourist you!!!!!
An ability to snap at FLIES
An ability to snap at FLIES OR BEE BEES
An ability to snap at MOVING DARK SPOTS
Would confer the same selectional advantage in a world where those three things are correlated more often than not.
And I just have to say this again:You behaviourist you!!!!!
Yes, the frog has an ability.
But the million dollar question resurfaces when you want to cash out what that ability consists in a little more. How on earth does the frog have that abillity? There is a mechanism that represents things in the world and connects to an appropriate response. At this stage in the day we are dealing with a pretty simple (rudimentary) concept. So we have Stimuli -> Representation -> Response. Things get much more interesting when representations get decoupled from particular responses.... They start interacting with other representations / goals etc in various ways...> concepts might also be useful in generating counterfactuals. for instance i might think 'if i stand here then i have a better chance of not getting eaten by this tiger.' but this could have evolved as an ability present in frogs on a non-conceptual level (i.e. it becomes motionless when a predator comes by, because of some random mutation that promotes such behavior, then the frogs who become motionless survive to reprodice at higher rates, so the behavior becomes prevalent. But is representation or concepts necessary at all? )
At this point... Probably not. I think it would be pointless (and inaccurate) to attribute 'if I stand here I'll be less likely to be eaten by a tiger' because this is attributing too much. An understanding of probability, etc. With the frog... Saying it has a mental representation isn't necessarily to commit oneself to the view that the frog is aware of the representation.
Maybe it is dodgey whether the frog has a representation at all. But if we can't even figure out the content or, if you like, the function of the mechanism, what the behavioural ability amounts to then what hope of explaining human concepts and behaviour?????
> i don't think there is content, just an ability to perform a certain action that in some environments confers selectional advantage for the frog.>if one wants to offer a naturalistic account then the environmental input, since it constantly varies, supplies little need for concepts or content. Since humans have a greater capacity to stabilize their environments (still limited though) concepts might have more of a rationale to evolve. For instance concepts are useful when designing artifacts.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:541758
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050807/msgs/549704.html