Gallagher on representationalism

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Today's readings included Gallagher's "Are minimal representations still representations?", which is a bit of a political choice: the author is visiting Montreal in three weeks. But it fell right in my preoccupations.

The general line goes this way: Wheeler's action-oriented representations (AOR), he says, simply lack the main characteristics they would need in order to qualify as representations. But Wheeler's not alone in this: Mark Rowlands, Andy Clark and Rick Grush are in the same boat. The representations they see in coupled system fail to be, among other things, strongly instructional or decoupleable; meaning they do not in themselves hold their interpretation, and do fail to make any sense outside of the tightly coupled systems on which these authors focus.

Now, Gallagher points out, you can't really have a representation that's easy to identify in a system, easy to decouple from it, and strongly instructional in itself. Dreyfus and Kripkenstein taught us better, and philosophers who dwell in cognitive science learned that lesson. So the point of Gallagher's article is that Clark and Wheeler are not the representationalist they claim to be: they hold a bit of a middle ground. They might be critical of naive anti-representationalists who make wild extrapolations from relatively jejune examples (Clark 2006), but they aren't completely spared by anti-representationalism.

So is representation the locus of the divide between traditional philosophy of mind and the new one which relies heavily on cognitive science (as I was alluding to in my previous post)? Strangely, Gallagher sees a link between the two phenomena, but he sees the causality acting in the opposite direction:

“... the commitment to some version of this idea of extended or situated cognition is what motivated anti-representationalism in the first place.” p.7

So, which way did it go? Given how he cites Dreyfus, it's quite possible Gallagher didn't think about it very thoroughly. In any case, the article doesn't answer this question.

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Gallagher, S. (2008). Are Minimal Representations Still Representations?International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 351-369. Routledge.

Clark, A., & Toribio, J. (2006). Doing Without Representing? Synthese, 101(3), 401-431. Springer. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1301