Materialism and Representationalism

The following article presents a dilemma that takes aim at contemporary Materialism’s recourse to “representationalism”—a ghost which, so far as I can see, has long been laid to rest in the history of philosophy.

According to contemporary Materialism, we cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature unless it is a “content” of our nervous systems’ representations—said representational states being parts or regions of our nervous systems. However, the relationship between a representation and its “content” is perplexing. For, we cannot arrive at an understanding of the “content” of a representation, X, without having an understanding of X as being the “representation of something” (and this involves having an understanding of X and characteristics of X); indeed, (a) both what is, and is not, the “content” of a representation (i.e., What a representation is a “representation of,” and what a representation is not a “representation of”) is determined by the characteristics and relations of said representation, (b) a representation’s “content” need not exist, (c) a representation need not “correspond” to its “content,” and (d) the relation obtaining between a representation and its “content” is not, and cannot be, merely one of “similarity,” “resemblance,” “co-existence,” or “effect” to “cause.” However, since we cannot arrive at an understanding of the “content” of a representation, X, without having an understanding of X as being the “representation of something” (and this involves having an understanding of X and characteristics of X), it follows that if we cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature unless it is a “content” of our nervous systems’ representations, then we cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature without having an understanding of our nervous systems’ representations. However, since our nervous systems’ representations are themselves parts or regions of our nervous systems, it follows that if we cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature unless it is a “content” of our nervous systems’ representations, then we cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems. This is the first horn of the dilemma.

This horn can be defended in several additional ways.  Indeed, in his Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, Josiah Royce decisively refutes the view that the relation between a representation and its “content” either is, or could be, merely one of “similarity,” “resemblance,” “co-existence,” or “effect” to “cause.” Rather than including Royce’s entire discussion on the relationship between a representation and its “content,” I’ve include a passage that I found to be particularly germane:

“For consider: An object, as we have seen, has two relations to a [representation]. The one is the relation that constitutes it the object meant by that [representation]. The other is the sort of correspondence that is to obtain between object and [representation]. As to the first of these two: An object is not the object of a given [representation] merely because the object causes the [representation], or impresses itself upon the [representation] as the seal impresses the wax. For there are objects of [representations] that are not causes of the [representations] which refer to these objects, just as there are countless cases where my [representations] are supposed to have causes, say physiological or psychological causes, of which I myself never become conscious at all, as my objects. Nor is the object the object of a given [representation] merely because, from the point of view of an external observer, who looks from without upon [representation] and object, and compares them, the [representation] resembles the object. For the sort of correspondence to be demanded of the [representation] is determined by itself, and this correspondence cannot be judged merely from without. Again, my [representation] of my own past experiences may resemble your past experiences, in case you have felt as I have felt, or have acted in any way as I have acted. Yet when my [representations], in a moment of reminiscence, refer to my own past, and have that for their object, they do not refer to your past, nor to your deeds and sorrows, however like my own these experiences of yours may have been. One who, merely comparing my [representations] and your experiences, said that because of the mere likeness I must be thinking of your past as my object, would, therefore, err, if it was my own past of which I was thinking. Neither such a relation as causal connection nor such a relation as mere similarity is, then, sufficient to identify an object as the object of a given [representation]. Nor yet can any other relation, so far as it is merely supposed to be seen from without, by an external observer, suffice to identify any object as the object of a given [representation].” (Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. I, 297)

I’ve also included several passages outlining contemporary views as to the relationship between a representation and its “content.”

“[If] awareness of an external object is constituted by having an internal representation of it; [then] the perceiver is not aware of the representation itself, but of what it represents (its content). Thus, one perceives the tomato (the object of awareness) in virtue of possessing an internal representation of it (the vehicle of awareness). This move satisfies some philosophers that perception is direct in the traditional sense, yet on this view, the perceiver experiences the content of a representation rather than the living tomato. The representation must somehow be derived from the visual input by a process that establishes its content….If perceptual awareness consists of having representations, how does the perceptual system determine the environmental entities to which they correspond? Without some independent, extrasensory access to the world, there appears to be no way to establish which internal states indicate which environmental properties, or which representations stand for tomatoes and which for elephants. The perceiver is trapped in a closed universe of sensory phenomena or uninterpretable representations. The indirect solution is inference to the best explanation: The perceptual system infers a representation of the world that best accounts for the order in sensory input....However, as Hermann von Helmholtz understood by the mid-19th century, this inference process presumes that the perceptual system already possesses knowledge about (1) the structure of the world, including the sorts of entities that exist and predicates to describe them, and (2) how the world structures sensory input, such as a theory of image formation and transduction. The trouble is that such prior knowledge must somehow be acquired, again, in an extrasensory manner....The [representationalist] position thus appears to be circular. There is a further problem with treating perception as a process of inference. Inference is a logical relation that holds between conscious mental states (beliefs, thoughts, statements) corresponding to premises and conclusions. But as we have just seen, if we are to avoid the representationalist fallacy, perception cannot be based on conscious awareness of internal states. If the perceptual process is unconscious, then whatever else it may be, it cannot be inferential; the same goes for related terms such as hypothesis, clue, evidence, and assumption. The notion of perception as unconscious inference, originally suggested by Helmholtz, is thus inconsistent. Computational theories seek to avoid this objection by treating perception as a process of computation over representations, but this leaves [the semantic or grounding] problem unresolved.” (Warren, Entry on “Direct Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 367-368) 

To help illustrate the importance the importance of the above passage. I have included a diagram showing an image projected on the retina of the eye (i.e., the representation) and the infinitely many possible sources (i.e., the “content”) that the projected retinal image can map onto.

 

“The states of a computer can be given many different semantic interpretations; indeed, the same symbolic states are sometimes interpreted as words, sometimes as numbers, chess positions, or weather conditions….What determines what a given (syntactically articulated) state represents? [What] causes certain mental events to have certain contents? [According to some theorists], at least some mental contents represent certain things because they resemble them. An image of X represents X precisely because the conscious mental representations, or images, look like X. Such a view probably is not far from the common notion of visual imagery. If you were to ask a group of people how they know their image of a duck actually represents a duck, rather than, say, a rabbit, they might reply that the image looks like a duck. For several reasons, however, this answer does not explain why the image is a representation of a duck. For example, even in the introspectionist approach, the image need not closely resemble a duck for people to take it as a duck since it is their image, they can take it as virtually anything they wish; after all, the word duck refers to a duck without in any way, resembling a duck. As Wittgenstein points out, the image of a man walking up a hill may look exactly like the image of a man walking backward down a hill; yet, if they were my images, there would be no question of their being indeterminate—I would know what they represented. The relation of resemblance is not well defined. Whether one thing resembles another is not a physically (or geometrically) definable property; resemblance depends on what the viewer knows or believes. To me, most birds closely resemble one another, but to a birdwatcher friend they are as different as ducks and rabbits. Resemblance cannot be specified except in relation to a viewer….Resemblance provides no basis for specifying the semantic content of mental representations.” (Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition, 40-41) 

“Mediational behaviorists and certain speculative neurophysiologists take the position that a brain event can be said to represent something if that event is sufficiently like (possesses a subset of the properties of) the event that takes place when that something actually is perceived. Another, more radically behaviorist version requires that the mediational event evoke an internal “preparatory response” that is sufficiently like the response that would have been evoked by the corresponding stimulus. Neither position is satisfactory, because of the properties of representations we have already noted (for example, we can think about objects we have neither perceived nor have any disposition to behave toward, such as, perhaps, quarks). In any case, the only mechanism behaviorism provides for explicating the representing relation is that of association. Association, in turn, must be established by such principles as contiguity and evoked by the activation of other associated items (otherwise we would not have provided the naturalistic account of the semantics of the functional states sought by behaviorism). A chain of continuous events mediating between a brain state and an object, however, cannot form the basis of representation, for reasons discussed above, namely, that it is neither necessary nor sufficient that the state of an organism be linked by a series of contiguous events to the object that the state represents. Not only can I think of things to which I obviously am not in this sort of relation (for example, nonexistent things), but when I do think of X, I do not thereby think of associates of X; indeed, I need not think of properties that are necessarily coextensive with X, such as shape, size, weight, color, and so on. The basic problem is that representing is a semantic relation, that semantic relations, like logical relations, appear not to be causally definable…” (Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition, 41-42)

I have also included a diagram from M.D. Vernon’s Psychology of Perception, that illustrates the problem of under-determination. For, two representations may be nearly indistinguishable with respect to their characteristics as “vehicles” and nevertheless have drastically different “content.” 

 

Let’s return to our argument by outlining the second horn of the dilemma:

Our nervous systems—and their parts—are themselves parts of Nature.

The Materialist cannot, on pain of inconsistency, deny or reject the second horn of the dilemma. Taken together, the first and second horns are the following: 

A) We cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems.

B) Our nervous systems—and their parts—are themselves parts of Nature.

The Materialist is thus caught in a snare : 

We cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature without having an understanding of something that could never be understood by us.

If the dilemma doesn’t make itself explicit at first glance, it can be brought to light in the following way:

We cannot arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(1). However, our nervous systems, N(1), are themselves parts of Nature; and so we cannot arrive at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(1)—the having of which is necessary for our arriving at an understanding of any part of Nature—without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(2). However, our nervous systems, N(2), are themselves parts of Nature; and so we cannot arrive at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(2)—the having of which is necessary for our arriving at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(1)—without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(3). However, our nervous systems, N(3), are themselves parts of Nature; and so we cannot arrive at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(3)—the having of which is necessary for our arriving at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(2)—without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(4). However, our nervous systems, N(4), are themselves parts of Nature; and so we cannot arrive at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(4)—the having of which is necessary for our arriving at an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(3)—without having an understanding of parts of our nervous systems, N(5)…and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. Our arrival at an understanding of any part of Nature is thus thwarted by a vicious, downward spiral of mutually-presupposing terms.

In other words, a vicious regress would render it impossible for us arrive at an understanding of any part of Nature. However, since Materialism asserts that we do have, and indeed have arrived at, an understanding of some parts of Nature, it follows that Materialism is inconsistent with itself. Indeed, the truth of Materialism is incompatible with our knowledge of its truth.

The above argument is inspired by several passages in Chapter 22, “Nature,” of F.H. Bradley’s 1893 magnum opus, Appearance and Reality. Bradley’s argument receives an analysis in W.J. Mander’s article, F.H. Bradley and the Philosophy of Science. I have included Mander’s overview of Bradley’s argument below:

“Bradley has one further objection to physical nature which is rather unusual and worth quoting in his own words. In order to state the problem, says Bradley: 

“We may here use the form of what has been called an Antinomy. (a) Nature is only for my body; on the other hand, (b) My body is only for Nature…the outer world is known only as a state of my organism….And yet most emphatically…my organism is nothing but appearance to a body. It itself is only the bare state of a natural object….[This] gives us one thing as qualified by the state of another thing, each within that known relation being only for the other, and, apart from it, being unknown and, so far, a nonentity….Nature is the phenomenal relation of the unknown to the unknown; and the terms cannot, because unknown, even be said to be related, since they cannot themselves be said to be anything at all.” 

The puzzle is, that nature can only be understood through our sense organs, but our sense organs can only be understood as part of nature, which as before can only be understood through our sense organs. Thus, the physical world turns out to be an unknown relation between two mutually presupposing elements in a vicious downwards spiral. This is a curious argument, which might at first appear to be making a very obvious mistake. Surely Bradley should have referred not to our sense organs, but our experience. Is it not the case that nature, including our sense organs, simply comes to us in experience, in which case where is the circle? But in fact, this objection concedes precisely Bradley’s point. For what he is attacking is the notion of a purely physical world, and experience in order to do the task that it is being given here, must be something more or other than the physical world. His point is that a purely physical world, whatever else it may be able to explain (e.g. facts about us and our behaviour) can never account for its own cognition—that requires something more of a wholly different order. Within that restriction it seems reasonable to say that a knowledge of nature depends on an understanding of our sense organs. Since it is only filtered through them that cognition can take place, we have to understand the sense organs in order to understand what they give us. This is true in the same sense that we have to understand what a Geiger counter is doing in order to understand what it is telling us. But in that case, since our sense organs are part of nature, they too can only be understood in the same way, launching us on a regress. The only solution is to move to something outside of physical nature, like “experience,” for we do not have to understand experience in order to understand what it tells us. Its data comes already interpreted. Thus understood, I would maintain that this argument of Bradley’s is a valid and sound reductio of the idea of a purely physical nature.” (Mander, F.H. Bradley and the Philosophy of Science, 70)

E.E. Harris outlines Bradley’s argument in a similar fashion in his article, Bradley’s Conception of Nature:

“Although the word “Nature,” Bradley tells us (and rightly), has more meanings than one, when he discusses it in Chapter XXII of Appearance and Reality, he takes it in the sense of “the bare physical world.” “Abstract from everything psychical, and then the remainder of existence will be nature.” This forms the object of purely physical science and, we are told, “appears to fall outside of all mind.” It is obvious that such a conception is, as Bradley maintains, a pure abstraction….[We] construct a notion of [the physical world] as independent of our thought, consisting of things with primary and secondary qualities. It is the same for all observers and we regard our bodies with their sense organs as the media of observation which should convey it to us as it is and as it exists apart from them….But this view is full of confusion….Everything revealed to us of such a physical world can be so only as an affection of our own organisms; yet these again are physical things and so must be reduced to affections of themselves. We cannot infer from our affections to the causes which affect us, for to do that would be to conclude to some “thing-in-itself” which is in the nature of the case unknowable and could not therefore help us, nor could it conceivably be related causally to what is knowable so as to validate the inference. Accordingly, the physical world as the complex of relations between physical things turns out to be “the phenomenal relation of the unknown to the unknown.” Bradley develops this paradox at more length, asserting that inevitably the outer world exists only for my organs. If this means only that my perception of the physical world is so dependent, it can hardly be gainsaid; and, of course, my organs can be perceived as physical objects only on the same condition. In these terms any attempt to explain our experience of the world must lead to vicious regress and circularity. But what if we were to say that the world and our organisms are self-existent apart from any affection we may suffer and apart from our perceiving? That could help us in no way at all to comprehend the physical world, to explain what we know of it, or to say how we come to experience it. So, we are brought, Bradley concludes, to an unavoidable result: “The physical world is an appearance; it is phenomenal throughout. It is the relation between two unknowns, which, because they are unknown, we cannot have any right to regard as really two, or as related at all.” But this circular connection and contradictory interrelation between ourselves and nature is no mere mistake to be discounted. It is a necessary and unavoidable feature of our experience giving nature phenomenal reality as a grouping of facts, coexistence of objects and a sequence of events holding good within a section of what appears to us.” (Harris, Bradley’s Conception of Nature, 187-189)