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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2008 59(3):259-292; doi:10.1093/bjps/axl007
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Towards a General Theory of Antirepresentationalism

Francisco Calvo Garzón

Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Murcia, Edificio Luis Vives, Campus de Espinardo, 30100 Murcia, Spain

fjcalvo{at}um.es


  Abstract

This work represents an attempt to stake out the landscape for dynamicism based on a radical dismissal of the information-processing paradigm that dominates the philosophy of cognitive science. In Section 2, after setting up the basic toolkit of a theory of minimal representationalism, I introduce the central tenets of dynamic systems theory (DST) by discussing recent research in the dynamics of embodiment (Thelen et al. [2001]) in the perseverative-reaching literature. A recent proposal on the dynamics of representation—the dynamic field approach (Spencer and Schöner [2003])—according to which the alleged representational gap between DST and representational theories of cognition needs to be bridged in order to explain higher-order cognitive activity will then be reviewed. In Section 3 I shall argue that Spencer and Schöner's attempt to bridge the representational gap may jeopardize the whole (antirepresentationalist) spirit of the DST project. In order to show why, I shall introduce the key concepts of "reliability of environment" and "primagenesis", and argue that DST can account for de-coupled, offline cognitive activity with no need of positing representational resources. Conclusions and directions for future research will follow.

  1. Introduction
    1.1 Minimal representationalism

  2. The Dynamic Field Approach
    2.1 Dynamic systems theory and the continuity hypothesis
    2.2 The dynamic field approach: Bridging the representational gap?

  3. Towards a General Theory of Antirepresentationalism
    3.1 Diagonal systems and microstimulated dissociations
    3.2 Reliability of environment and primagenesis
    3.3 Towards a general theory of antirepresentationalism

  4. Conclusion


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