Representation: Psycoloquy Call for Commentators

Markman/Dietrich: Representation/Mediation The target article whose abstract appears below has just appeared in PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed journal of Open Peer Commentary sponsored by the American Psychological Association. Qualified professional biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to submit Open Peer Commentary on it. Please email for Instructions if you are not familiar with format or acceptance criteria for PSYCOLOQUY commentaries (all submissions are refereed). To submit articles and commentaries or to seek information: EMAIL: psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc AUTHOR'S RATIONALE FOR SOLICITING COMMENTARY: There has been a growing sentiment in cognitive science, particularly among advocates of dynamical systems and situated action, that traditional approaches to representation should be abandoned. Calls for the elimination of representation, as well as previous attempts to defend representation, have unfortunately talked past each other for a lack of common ground. This target article attempts to provide a common ground for the debate over representation. Many proponents of representations are searching for a single representational system to serve as the basis of all cognitive models; this paper argues that multiple approaches to representation must coexist in cognitive models. We also hope to elicit discussion about what properties of representations are critical for cognitive models. Full text of article available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?9.48 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/psyc.98.9.48.re… ----------------------------------------------------------------------- psycoloquy.98.9.48.representation-mediation.1.markman Mon Oct 5 1998 ISSN 1055-0143 (68 paragraphs, 78 references, 1297 lines) PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) Copyright 1998 Arthur B. Markman & Eric Dietrich IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION AS MEDIATION Arthur B. Markman Department of Psychology University of Texas Austin, TX 78712 markman(a)psy.utexas.edu http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/FACULTY/Markman/index.html Eric Dietrich PACCS Program in Philosophy Binghamton University Binghamton, NY dietrich(a)binghamton.edu http://www.binghamton.edu/philosophy/home/faculty/index.htm ABSTRACT: Some cognitive scientists have asserted that cognitive processing is not well modeled by classical notions of representation and process that have dominated psychology and artificial intelligence since the cognitive revolution. In response to this claim, the concept of a mediating state is developed. Mediating states are the class of information-carrying internal states used by cognitive systems, and as such are accepted even by those researchers who reject representations. The debate over representation, then, is actually one about what additional properties of mediating states are necessary for explaining cognitive processing. Five properties that can be added to mediating states are examined for their importance in cognitive models. KEYWORDS: compositionality, computation, connectionism, discrete states, dynamic Systems, explanation, information, meaning, mediating states, representation, rules, semantic Content symbols Full text of article available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?9.48 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/psyc.98.9.48.re… To submit articles and commentaries or to seek information: EMAIL: psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc