Enactive Representationalism?!

A Springboard for discussion.

Premises

1. Despite all the technical and theoreticaladvances that have been made, it is stilldifficult to construct an artefact that isengaged with its environment in the richsort of way required by an enactiveapproach.

...Nevermind one that qualifies as a concept-possessing, concept-using agent.

Even with get-your-hands-dirty robotics, we're still working out what an enactive approach really means.

Nonetheless, one might well wish to construct artefacts with which to better understand cognition and conceptualization.

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.

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.

Knowing how knowledge underlies knowing that knowledge.

So, too, conceptual knowledge and experience are built upon the non-conceptual.

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.

5. Pace Noë, a representational account (of some kind) is necessary to understanding concepts.

Concept = sub-propositional component of thoughts.

Concept = mental representation.

Concept = something that meets something like Evans' Generality Constraint.

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.

At least part of the something extra seems to be concepts/conceptual expectations.

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.

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.

Clarifications

1. How's this different from Noë's approach?

Noë sees himself as anti-representational.

This avoids a Grand Illusion-type argument.

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 clear-cut 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.

3. I'm not a (un?)reconstructed definitionist, honestly!

But concepts look like definitions for a reason.

Sure, conceptual knowledge is not a collection of dictionary-style definitions.

...Nor is it a process of collecting such definitions. ...Even if you allow the definitions to be dynamically updated in interaction with the environment.

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”?