Commentary on Perruchet, P. and Vinter, A.
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Title: What sort of representation is conscious?
Authors:
Zoltan Dienes
Experimental Psychology
Sussex University
Brighton BN1 9QG UK
email: dienes@biols.susx.ac.uk
http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/Zoltan_Dienes/
Tel: (England) 1273 678550
Josef Perner
Department of Psychology
University of Salzburg
Hellbrunnerstrasse 34
A-5020 Salzburg, Austria
email: josef.perner@sbg.ac.at
http://www.sbg.ac.at/psy/people/perner_e.htm
Abstract
We consider P&V’s central claim that all mental representations are conscious. P&V
require some way of fixing their meaning of representation to avoid the claim
becoming either obviously false or unfalsifiable. We use the framework of Dienes and
Perner (1999) to provide a well-specified possible version of the claim, in which all
representations of a minimal degree of explicitness are postulated to be conscious.
*********************
P&V offer the claim that ”all mental representations are conscious” as a useful
assumption for psychologists to adopt in interpreting data from learning, perception,
language, memory, reasoning, and other areas in psychology. We will consider further
this central claim of P&V’s article. The truth of their claim, naturally, depends on
what they mean by a representation. They admit that on a common understanding of
the term (e.g. a pattern of activation coding an entity or class of entities in the world),
“most representations are fully unconscious” (p. 5, section 1.3.2). So what do P&V
mean by representation that makes their claim plausible?
Throughout their paper "the word 'representation' designates a mental event that
assumes the function of some meaningful component of the represented world (e.g. a
person, an object, a movement, a scene) within the representing world” (p. 5). This
definition does not make clear whether "representation" is supposed to designate
representational vehicles (e.g., neural states or processes that represent) or
representational content (that which is represented).
The expression "mental event" strongly suggests the latter reading. Unfortunately,
three problems arise: (1) It cannot account for thoughts about non-existing entities,
e.g., a unicorn galloping. (2) The definition uses "mental" in its definiens. Hence, it
doesn't give us what we need, namely an explanation of the mental in terms of
representations (Field, 1978; Fodor, 1978). (3) Since "representation" is defined in
terms of "mental event" and since the only way specified in the text of how we know
of the existence of mental events is "through direct and personal [i.e., conscious]
evidence" (1.4.1) P&V's central claim that all mental representations are conscious
becomes practically tautological.
If we now try the other, albeit unnatural, reading that "mental event" refers to neural
processes that have mental (representational) content, then we face the problem of
how to delineate those neural processes that have representational content from those
that don't. P&V's definition contains two suggestions in their next sentence: “At least
two functions can be envisaged (Dulany, 1997). A representation may evoke other
representations (the representation of a pencil may evoke the representation of a
pencil box, an exercise book, and so on). It may also enter as an argument into
deliberative mental episodes (the representation of a pencil may be involved in
reasoning, inference, action planning, and other mental activities)” (p. 5).
Let us look first in more detail at the function of a "representation evoking another
representation". One obvious problem with it is that it is not a function that can
typically be assumed by some meaningful component of the represented world, as the
main part of the definition requires. For instance, evoking is not a function pencils
bear to pencil cases in the real world, even though thoughts (mental representations)
of a pencil may well tend to evoke thoughts about pencil cases. Another problem is
that almost all neural activation patterns call forth other activation patterns, but neural
activation patterns per se are just the things P&V wish to exclude as representations.
Hence this functional criterion totally fails to achieve the objective of distinguishing
neural processes with mental content from those without.
We have much sympathy for seeing a close link between consciousness and P&V's
second criterial function of being able to "enter as an argument into deliberative
mental episodes". Unfortunately, two defects disqualify it for present purposes: (1) It
is useless as a criterion for distinguishing neural processes with mental content from
those without because it is no easier to distinguish neural processes that enter as an
argument into deliberative mental episodes from those that don't than it is to
distinguish neural processes with mental content from those lacking it. (2) The notion
of engaging in "deliberative processes" is meaningful for us from our conscious
experience. Hence using it as a criterion for neural processes being "representations"
makes P&V's central claim that all representations are conscious tautological and
unfalsifiable.
Without a clear notion of representation, any apparent case of unconscious knowledge
in e.g. skill learning (Vinter and Perruchet, 1999) or any other domain can be
dismissed as just based on mere activation patterns or a “processing pathway” rather
than true mental representations per se. This renders the claim that all mental
representations are conscious unfalsifiable.
One way of making sense of P&V’s notion of representation and its relation to
consciousness is to use the framework of Dienes and Perner (1999, 2002a,b), who
start with a notion of representation that is not defined in terms of the mental. They
then develop a hierarchy of representations of different degrees of explicitness. This
hierarchy offers P&V the opportunity to take only representations that are relatively
explicit as being true mental representations (resolving a minor terminological
difference). This would allow them to rule out the unwanted cases of activation
patterns as cases of representation in a principled way and show why consciousness
relates empirically to relatively explicit representations, i.e., the “true representations”
in P&V's sense that enter as arguments into deliberative mental episodes.
Dienes and Perner take functional theories (e.g. Dretske, 1995; Millikan, 1993) as the
most promising accounts of a general notion of representation. Representations in this
general sense include patterns of neural activation that have the function of indicating
e.g. inter-aural time differences, cats, or any nonconceptual content. Connectionist
weights are also representations, with the function of indicating relations in the world.
Clearly, this notion is too broad for P&V; it includes too much in the brain about
which we are not conscious.
When we know a fact, e.g., when we see that the word presented has the meaning
butter, we have a certain propositional attitude (e.g. seeing) towards a particular
proposition (“this word has the meaning butter”). In knowing the proposition, we
form a representation (in the general sense) that explicitly represents some part or all
of ones attitude and that state of affairs, resulting in a hierarchy of explicitness of
knowledge
At the bottom, (1) the representation might just make explicit a feature in the
propositional content, e.g. “butter”. At the next level, (2) the feature is explicitly
predicated of an individual, thereby explicitly representing the full proposition (“this
word has the meaning butter”). Next, (3) whether the proposition is a fact or not is
explicitly represented (“it is a fact that this word has the meaning butter”). Finally, (4)
the propositional attitude by which the fact is known can be made explicit (“I see that
[it is a fact that] this word has the meaning butter”).
Why do we have the third stage of representing factuality explicitly? This may seem
gratuitous. In fact, it is very important. Whenever a cognitive system can form
different models of the same individual (Perner, 1991) the system needs to be able to
represent factuality explicitly. A child pretending a banana is a telephone is
representing the same object as both a banana and a telephone (two models); but the
child is not deluded, only one model is labeled as a fact. Factuality explicitness is also
required for counterfactual reasoning and considering hypothetical situations as
hypothetical. Explicit inference (using representations like e.g. “If X then Y”)
requires representing that X is not actually the case, although there is an occurrent
active representation about X. This can be contrasted with procedural knowledge. “If
X then Y” can be implemented in a procedure in which a fact-implicit representation
of X is connected to a fact-implicit representation of Y. In this case, any activation of
“X” means X can be taken to be true, thus activating Y, i.e., it implements the
inference without explicitly representing it as an inference.
In sum, fact-explicitness enables inference, reasoning, planning, temporal
understanding, and executive control (Perner, 1998, in press), i.e., deliberative
episodes. It would be natural for P&V to use fact-explicitness for their definition of
"representation". In fact that is how Piaget (1936/1953) seemed to use the term. All
the abilities that require fact-explicitness tend to develop during the second year of
life (e.g., Perner & Dienes, in press) at the end of the sensori-motor period that
culminates in the acquisition of mental representation according to Piaget. This use of
"representation" also conforms to Gibson's (1960) distinction between direct
perception (transformations of completely implicit representations) and true
inferences (that represent that whenever X is the case then Y must be the case).
Consequently, P&V’s claim would be that all occurrent fact-explicit representations
in people are conscious. This is not an empty claim. In fact, Dienes & Perner (1999)
argued that an additional level of explicitness is required for conscious awareness. In
line with higher-order thought theory of consciousness (Rosenthal, 1986, 2000;
Carruthers, 2000) it is necessary to also represent explicitly the mental attitude one
has towards the fact in question. Thus, P&V’s position would amount to the opposing
claim that if a representation is fact-explicit, it will automatically be attitude-explicit
(and hence conscious) as well. In this way, the central claim of their paper – “all
mental representations are conscious” - ceases to be vacuous. (See Perner and
Dienes, in press, for further discussion on the relation between fact-explicitness and
attitude-explicitness, and Dienes & Perner 2002a,b for examples that show the
atypical case of fact-explicit representations that do not become attitude-explicit, e.g.,
hypnosis).
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