Abstract
According to radical versions of embodied cognition, human cognition and agency should be explained without the ascription of representational mental states. According to a standard reply, accounts of embodied cognition can explain only instances of cognition and agency that are not “representation-hungry”. Two main types of such representation-hungry phenomena have been discussed: cognition about “the absent” and about “the abstract”. Proponents of representationalism have maintained that a satisfactory account of such phenomena requires the ascription of mental representations. Opponents have denied this. I will argue that there is another important representation-hungry phenomenon that has been overlooked in this debate: temporally extended planning agency. In particular, I will argue that it is very difficult to see how planning agency can be explained without the ascription of mental representations, even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that cognition about the absent and abstract can. We will see that this is a serious challenge for the radical as well as the more modest anti-representationalist versions of embodied cognition, and we will see that modest anti-representationalism is an unstable position.
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Notes
This formulation is sufficiently general and precise in order to set the scene, as it were. According to a more general version, all instances of cognition and agency, including non-human cognition and agency, are to be explained in terms of mental representations. According to a less general version, core cases of human cognition and agency are to be explained in terms of mental representations.
There is an alternative minimal characterization, according to which mental representations are agent-internal physical states that are the vehicles of content. There is no apparent advantage in appealing to content, as opposed to aboutness, as those two notions are very closely related and as they are both as much in need of explanation as the notion of mental representation itself. Some may prefer the formulation in terms of an internal stand in, as opposed to a physical vehicle, because it avoids the explicit commitment to physicalism.
Davidson gives the example of an agent who adds spice to a stew with the intention of improving the taste, and he claims that what is required for this to be an intentional action is only that “he must have attitudes and beliefs from which, had he been aware of them and had the time, he could have reasoned that his action was desirable” (1978, p. 85).
In a similar proposal, Clark (1997) introduced the notion of “action oriented representations”: representations that “simultaneously describe aspects of the world and prescribe possible action, and are poised between pure control structures and passive representations of external reality” (1997, p. 49). They are assumed to be both belief-like and desire-like, and their primary explanatory import is to explain the smooth and effortless execution of the motor skills that are characteristic of skilled coping. Others posit similar representational entities, such as “motor intentions”, “motor representations”, or “goal representations”. See Pacherie (2008), Adams (2010) and Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2012).
Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) appealed to systematicity and compositionality in order to argue for a classical symbol processing account of representationalism and for the language of thought hypothesis, in particular. My point here is much more modest: the complex hierarchical systematicity of planning agency seems to call for a representational theory of cognition and agency. No further claims about symbol processing or about a language of thought are implied.
This is how I understand Clark and Toribio’s (1994) challenge. They took themselves to have identified a serious challenge, not an unassailable proof that establishes an impossibility.
This is traditional behaviorism, according to which the ascription of mental states can be analyzed in terms of the ascription of behavioral dispositions. This view is untenable for well-known reasons. In this section, I argue that it is untenable for further and independent reasons concerning planning agency.
I do not mean to suggest that behavioral dispositions are entirely inflexible. It must be acknowledged, on all views, that particular manifestations of behavioral dispositions can be sensitive to the particular constraints of the situation and that they can exhibit some flexibility in the expression of the type. But this does not ground the ascription of the kinds of contents under consideration here.
No doubt, some anti-representationalists will deny this (in particular, enactivists such as Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009). I will not attempt here to bolster the arguments from Tomasello (and colleagues), but note instead that my main objection is the point that follows.
Hutto and Myin (2013, pp. 137–138) also appeal to scaffolded abilities, but they appear to reject the view that such abilities become internalized. On their view, mental arithmetic, and other cases of mental agency, are “decoupled” and “independent of context” (pp. 152–153). It has not become clear to me why this is supposed to show that mental abilities are not internalized in a way that raises a representation-hunger challenge. But, in any case, the important point here is that denying internalization is of no help in the present context, because only the internalization of linguistic and socially scaffolded abilities has the potential to explain planning agency.
Kaplan and Craver (2011) argue that dynamical system descriptions are explanatory only if they indicate how the system parameters correspond to the interacting parts of an underlying causal mechanism. If correct, this undermines the view of most proponents of the dynamical systems approach, because they usually hold that the parameters correspond to emergent properties of system-environment couplings (not to the components of an underlying mechanism). I tend to agree with Kaplan and Craver, but I assume, for the sake of argument, that dynamical system descriptions can provide explanations independently of identifying causal mechanisms.
Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2012) point out that such explanations face a difficult “interface problem”: how do the propositional contents of intentions interface with the non-propositional contents of motor representations (at the sub-personal level)? They consider a solution in terms of “translation”: a sub-personal mechanism may translate the contents of intentions into the more specific format of the contents of motor representations (see also Pacherie 2008). But as we have currently no direct evidence for the existence of such a mechanism, they advance an alternative explanation in terms of “deference”: intentions refer to specific motor actions by deferring to motor representations.
According to Dreyfus, “there can be two distinct kinds of intentional behavior: deliberative, planned action, and spontaneous, transparent coping” (2002b, p. 417). This raises the obvious question of how skilled coping can be in the service of planning agency, and Dreyfus realizes that he cannot allow guidance by higher intentions and plans (because this would be guidance by mental representations). Dreyfus finds himself forced to propose that higher intentions and plans “simply trigger” instances of skilled coping. But this is highly implausible. It flies in the face of common experience, which suggests that instances of skilled coping are often also guided, modulated, and constrained by higher intentions and plans during their execution. Moreover, even a mere triggering has clearly explanatory import: if skilled coping is triggered by higher intentions and plans, then it is to be explained, at least in part, in terms of mental representations.
As noted (footnote 4), the appeal to action-oriented representations serves the same purpose as the appeal to motor schemata, motor programs, and the feedback-comparator system of motor control.
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Schlosser, M.E. Embodied cognition and temporally extended agency. Synthese 195, 2089–2112 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1320-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1320-4