Representation

• Representation a modern concept.

• Premodern theories understood relation between appearance and reality in terms of resemblance (sharing properties)

• The rise of science made this untenable:

  • Copernicus: reality behind stationary Earth and revolving Sun is a revolving Earth and stationary Sun.

  • Galileo: effective strategies of understanding time as line lengths and acceleration as triangles … not easily understood in terms of shared properties.

Descartes invents representation with relationships between algebra (representation) and geometry (represented/reality).

• Spinoza talks better about how Descartes used representation than Descartes himself. Spinoza saw Descartes’ philosophy as being understood in terms of his innovations of relating algebra to geometry.

  • “The order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas”

  • The properties of what is representing or represented are irrelevant, only that there is a mapping between the relations in each world.

• If any things are known representationally, then some things must be known nonrepresentationally (to avoid infinite regress)

  • Representationalism gives rise to choice between epistemological skepticism vs foundationalism.

  • A Kantian insight: the real problem is semantic skepticism (can we really know something by representing it correctly?)

• Kant says Descartes was right to think in terms of representation but that he didn’t distinguish two different kinds: picture like images/sensations vs sentence-like thoughts.

  • He saw both as different ends of a spectrum, while empiricists tried to reduce thoughts to pictures and rationalists vice-versa.

• Spinoza’s interpretation of Descartes gives another view: within a representational picture, empiricists are atomists whereas rationalists are holists

• Brandom’s interpretation using orders of explanation: empiricists treat representation as a primitive and infer reason-relations in terms of it. Rationalists treat reason relations as primitive, explain representational content in terms of inferential relations.

  • Rationalist Leibniz would have us understand the content of the map as the inferences that someone who treats it as a map could make about terrain facts (e.g. a river) from map-facts (wavy-blue line).

• Sellars identifies both camps as descriptivists (to be conceptually contentful is just to describe / represent how things are).

  • Empiricists start with narrow postulate about what representing is and exclude a lot of genuinely contentful thought due to not meeting this standard (e.g. ethics, modality)

  • Rationalists take all our cognitively contentful expressions as therefore being part of the actual world, resulting in ontological extravagance (postulating objective values/universals/propositions/laws)

  • Sellars saw the Tractatus as teaching us how to get beyond this ideology with the case of logical vocabulary

  • Representation is a wider concept than description - Brandom thinks that Sellars’ anti-descriptivism is a form of anti-representationalism.

    • E.g. proper names represent without being descriptions, in Naming and Necessity.

• Representation is a holistic conception, so rationalists were right about that (think: categories, relationships over properties)

• Representation/description involve subjunctively robust relations between representings and representeds.

  • Considering the inferences of map facts to terrain facts, we also must accept that if the terrain were different, the map fact would be different.

  • Related to Fodor’s account of representation in terms of “one-way counterfactual dependencies of ‘horses’ on horses”.

• Representation has a normative dimension

  • To treat representation as concerning what inferences we can make is a normative order.

  • Hegel appreciated this: to count as representing something is to be responsible to the represented thing (what is represented provides the normative standard for correctness of representing). What is represented has an authority over what is representing.