Representation And Behavior

Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT), the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. Representation is a fundamental concept within cognitive science. Most often, representations are interpreted as mental representations, theoretical entities that are the bearers of meaning and the source of intentionality. This approach views representation as the internal reflection of external circumstances—that is, as the end station of sensory processes that translate the environmental state of affairs into a set of mental representations. Fred Keijzer stresses, however, that representations are also the starting point for a set of processes that lead back to the external environment. They are used as theoretical components within an explanation of a person's outwardly visible behavior. In this book Keijzer investigates the usefulness of representation for behavioral explanation, irrespective of mental issues. Viewing representation solely in terms of its contribution to explaining behavior allows him to build a serious case for a nonrepresentational approach and to evaluate representation's role in cognitive science. Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT). AT is the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. He proposes an alternative to AT called Behavioral Systems Theory (BST), which explains behavior as the result of interactions between an organism and its environment. Keijzer compares BST to related work in the biology of cognition, in the building of animal-like robots, and in dynamical systems theory. Most important, he extends BST to the difficult issue of anticipatory behavior through an analogy between behavior and morphogenesis, the process by which a multicellular body develops.

Representation and Understanding

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The topic of this book is mental representation, a theoretical concept that lies at the core of cognitive science. Together with the idea that thinking is analogous to computational processing, this concept is responsible for the "cognitive turn" in the sciences of the mind and brain since the 1950s. Conceiving of cognitive processes (such as perception, reasoning, and motor control) as consisting of the manipulation of contentful vehicles that represent the world has led to tremendous empirical advancements in our explanations of behaviour. Perhaps the most famous discovery that explains behavior by appealing to the notion of mental representations was the discovery of 'place' cells that underlie spatial navigation and positioning, which earned researchers John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard I. Moser a joint Nobel Prize in 2014. And yet, despite the empirical importance of the concept, there is no agreed definition or theoretical understanding of mental representation. This book constitutes a state-of-the-art overview on the topic of mental representation, assembling some of the leading experts in the field and allowing them to engage in meaningful exchanges over some of the most contentious questions. The collection gathers both proponents and critics of the notion, making room for debates dealing with the theoretical and ontological status of representations, the possibility of formulating a general account of mental representation which would fit our best explanatory practices, and the possibility of delivering such an account in fully naturalistic terms. Some contributors explore the relation between mutually incompatible notions of mental representation, stemming from the different disciplines composing the cognitive sciences (such as neuroscience, psychology, and computer science). Others question the ontological status and explanatory usefulness of the notion. And finally, some try to sketch a general theory of mental representations that could face the challenges outlined in the more critical chapters of the volume.

This book is nominally about linguistic representation. But, since it is we who do the representing, it is also about us. And, since it is the universe which we represent, it is also about the universe. In the end, then, this book is about everything, which, since it is a philosophy book, is as it should be. I recognize that it is nowadays unfashionable to write books about every thing. Philosophers of language, it will be said, ought to stick to writing about language; philosophers of science, to writing about science; epis temologists, to writing about knowing; and so on. The real world, however, perversely refuses to carve itself up so neatly, and, although I recognize that the real w,orld is nowadays also unfashionable, in the end I judged that one might get closer to the truth of various matters by going along with it. So I have done so. lt was Wilfrid Sellars who initially convinced me of the virtues of this way of proceeding. At this point one normally says something like "The debt that this book owes him is immense". I would say it too, were it not to understate the case, From Wilfrid, I learned to think about things. If the upshot of my thinking tends, as it obviously does, to show a general con silience with the upshot of his, it is primarily because he is so very good at it - and he had a head start.

urrently a paradigm shift is occurring in for the conventional understanding of represen- which the traditional view of the brain as tions. The paper also summarizes the rationale for C representing the "things of the world" is the selection of contributions to this volume, which challenged in several respects. The present volume will roughly proceed from relatively "realist" c- is placed at the edge of this transition. Based on the ceptions of representation to more "constructivist" 1997 conference "New Trends in Cognitive Sci- interpretations. The final chapter of discussions, ence" in Vienna, Austria, it tries to collect and in- taped during and at the end of the conference, p- grate evidence from various disciplines such as p- vides the reader with the possibility to reflect upon losophy of science, neuroscience, computational the different approaches and thus contributes to b- approaches, psychology, semiotics, evolutionary ter and more integrative understanding of their biology, social psychology etc. , to foster a new thoughts and ideas. understanding of representation. The subjective experience of an outside world This book has a truly interdisciplinary character. It seems to suggest a mapping process where environ- is presented in a form that is readily accessible to mental entities are projected into our mind via some professionals and students alike across the cognitive kind of transmission. While a profound critique of sciences such as neuroscience, computer science, this idea is nearly as old as philosophy, it has gained philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science are the two fields devoted to the study and development of knowledge-based systems (KBS). Over the past 25years, researchers have proposed several approaches for modeling knowledge in KBS, including several kinds of formalism such as semantic networks, frames, and logics. In the early 1980s, J.F. Sowa introduced the conceptual graph (CG) theory which provides a knowledge representation framework consisting of a form of logic with a graph notationand integrating several features from semantic net and frame representations. Since that time, several research teams over the world have been working on the application and extension of CG theory in various domains ranging from natural language processing to database modeling and machine learning. This volume contains selected papers fromthe international conference on Conceptual Structures held in the city of Quebec, Canada, August 4-7, 1993. The volume opens with invited papers by J.F. Sowa, B.R. Gaines, and J. Barwise.