(I am resending this message, since the earlier version seemed rather garbled)
Just out:
Dan Sperber (ed.)
METAREPRESENTATIONS: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE
(Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science 10)
Oxford University Press USA, July 2000 (cloth 0195141148, paper 0195141156)
Cognitive systems are characterized by their ability to construct and
process mental representations. Cognitive systems capable of communicating
also produce and interpret public representations. Representations, whether
mental or public, are themselves objects in the world; they are found
inside cognizers and in the vicinity of communicators; they are potential
objects of second order representations or "metarepresentations". While the
term "metarepresentation" gained currency only in the late 80's, the
general idea is much older. Under a variety of other names, philosophers,
psychologists, linguists, logicians, semioticians, literary theorists,
theologians, and anthropologists have been interested in different types of
metarepresentations. Notwithstanding historical antecedents, much recent
work on metarepresentations is truly novel as a result of being pursued
within the framework of evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and of
modern philosophy of language and mind. This collection of essays reflects
these new developments. It is organized in three parts:
PART I: The evolution of metarepresentation
PART II: Metarepresentations in mind
PART III: Metarepresentations, language, and meaning
Here is a brief guide to the contents of the volume:
PART I: The evolution of metarepresentation
In "Making Tools for Thinking," DANIEL DENNETT raises fundamental
challenges. The notion of a metarepresentation cannot be clearer than that
of a representation. The notion of a representation can be understood in a
variety of senses, some shallower and wider, such that we would be willing
to attribute representations to simpler animals and devices. Others senses
are narrower and richer, such that we might be tempted to think of
representation as specifically humans. Do these richer senses of
"representation" somehow presuppose that representations are being (or are
capable of being) metarepresented? Can we conceive of the emergence in
evolution and in cognitive development of metarepresentations - and of the
type of representations that requires metarepresentation - in a purely
mind-internal way or should we see this emergence as linked to the
availability in the environment of representational tools - linguistic
symbols for instance - there to be metarepresented? These issues are well
worth keeping in mind when reading the rest of the book
In "The Mind beyond itself," ROBERT WILSON speculates on issues similar to
those raised by Dennett. He criticizes the individualistic approach to
cognition and develops the idea that that many higher cognitive functions,
and in particular metarepresentational capacities, are essentially
world-involving. He discusses the cases of memory, theory-of-mind, and
cultural evolution, and argues that, in each case, external symbols and
their metarepresentations play an essential role.
In "Consider the source: The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and
metarepresentations," LEDA COSMIDES AND JOHN TOOBY outline a novel and
wide-ranging approach to the evolution of metarepresentational abilities.
They start from the observation that human evolution is characterized by a
dramatic increase in the use of contingent information for the regulation
of improvised behavior tailored to local conditions. They argue that
adaptations evolved to solve the problems posed by using local and
contingent information include a specialized "scope syntax," decoupling
systems, and a variety of metarepresentational devices. These adaptations
are essential to planning, communication, mindreading, pretence, deception,
inference about past or hidden causal relations, mental simulation, and
much else. Thus Cosmides and Tooby view mindreading as only one of the
functions that has driven the evolution of metarepresentational abilities
and of human intelligence in general. One may note that the
representational powers they see as having evolved in the human mind are
interestingly similar to those François Recanati analyzes from a semantic
point of view in his chapter.
In "Metarepresentations in an evolutionary perspective," DAN SPERBER
envisage the possibility that humans might be endowed, not with one, but
with several evolved metarepresentational abilities. He argues that, beside
the standard metapsychological mindreading ability, humans might have a
comprehension module aimed at the online interpretation of utterances, and
a logico-argumentative module, aimed at persuading others and avoiding
deception.
In "Chimpanzee cognition and the question of mental re-representation",
ANDREW WHITEN examines the state of the evidence regarding the ability of
chimpanzees to engage in imitation, mindreading, and pretence. He argues
that chimpanzees have a capacity for a most basic form of
metarepresentation, which he calls "re-representation" and which are mental
representations whose content derives from other mental representations
either in oneself or in others. He discusses how these abilities in apes
relate to the different "grades" of metarepresentation envisaged in the
theory-of-mind literature, in particular by Leslie and Perner. This chapter
provides a welcome transition to the second part.
PART II: Metarepresentations in mind
In "The mentalizing folk," ALVIN GOLDMAN raises central questions regarding
people's abilities to metarepresent mental representations. What concepts
of mental states do people possess? How do they attribute specific
instances of mental states to themselves and to others? How do these
abilities develop? He reviews the main competing answers to these
questions, criticizes various forms of the theory-theory approach and
defends a version of the simulation theory approach where particular
attention is paid to introspection.
In "How to acquire a 'representational theory of mind'," ALAN LESLIE
discusses several versions of the theory-theory of cognitive development in
its application to the acquisition a representational theory-of-mind.
Theory-theories associate the possession of a concept, in particular the
concept of belief, to some descriptive knowledge of the referents, in this
case, of beliefs. Leslie argues against this view and for a "conceptual
psycho-physical" approach where a concept such as that of belief might be
causally correlated with, or "locked to," beliefs in the world, and be that
concept just because of this locking mechanism. The concept of belief,
then, is not acquired as part of a proper 'theory' of mind. Rather the
acquisition of a theory is made possible by the possession and deployment
of the previously available concept. What makes this concept of belief
available - as well as the basic metarepresentational abilities where it
gets deployed -may well be an innate disposition rather than a learning
process.
In "Metarepresentation and Conceptual Change: Evidence from Williams
Syndrome," SUSAN CAREY AND SUSAN JOHNSON present a case study of abnormal
cognitive development, specifically, the acquisition of a intuitive but
non-core theory of biology, by a population of retarded people with
Williams Syndrome. They argue that the bootstrapping devices that underlie
conceptual change require metarepresentational cognitive architecture.
Metarepresentational capacities that are part of the theory-of-mind module
support for instance noticing of contradictions and distinguishing
appearance from reality, thus permitting conceptual change. However, in
the case of retarded individuals, the lack of sufficient computational
capacity serves as a bottleneck, both in the construction of metaconceptual
knowledge that goes beyond the core, and in the construction of the first
theories that likewise transcend the core. This study also throws light on
the status of the 4-year-old's theory-of-mind as core knowledge or
constructed knowledge.
DAVID ROSENTHAL's HOT (i.e. higher-order thought) theory of consciousness
is a particularly clear and crisp case of metarepresentational thinking. In
"Consciousness and Metacognition,", he defends this theory and discusses
relevant evidence from current research on metacognition and in particular
on feeling-of-knowing experiences. He argues that this evidence sheds light
on what it is to be conscious of a mental state and on what it is,
therefore, for a mental state to be conscious. He discusses important
issues having to do with the development of metacognitive abilities and
with their fallibility.
PART III: Metarepresentations, language, and meaning
In "Meaning, exemplarization and metarepresentation", KEITH LEHRER argues
that the human mind is essentially a "metamind" (see Lehrer 1990),
involving first level representational states that are metarepresented and
evaluated at a metalevel thus becoming states of the metamind. This permits
mental plasticity and the resolution of conflicts that at the lower level
that are unavoidable for a complex representational system. Such a
metarepresentational view seems, however, threatened by a regress (as
suggested by Wilfrid Sellars) or by circularity (as suggested by Jerry
Fodor) in accounting for language learning. Drawing on Sellars theory of
meaning, and on Nelson Goodman notion of exemplarization, Lehrer argues
that the problem of understanding meaning and of achieving representational
transparency is resolved through a harmless referential loop of ascent to
quotation and desent to disquotation.
In "The iconicity of metarepresentations," FRANÇOIS RECANATI develops an
extensive and original formal treatment of the semantics of
metarepresentations. He discusses the relevant philosophical literature on
quotations and indirect reports of speech or thought, and argues, against
standard views, for a Principle of Iconicity according to which true
metarepresentations essentially resemble the representations they are
about. They are fundamentally "transparent," in that they represent what
the metarepresented representation represents and not just, "opaquely" that
representation itself. He contrast his approach to the simulation view of
metarepresentations, and speculates about the relationship between
conditionals and metarepresentations.
In a series of influential papers, Tyler Burge has argued for the view that
the intentional states of a subject are in part determined by the social
practices of the members of his community. The disposition to defer to
experts plays an important role in this externalist view. In "Social
externalism and deference," STEVEN DAVIS discusses and refines Burge's
account. He argues that a conditional disposition to defer is essential to
concept possession. He analyzes this disposition to defer as involving
epistemic norms and a metarepresentational ability. This chapter thus
relates the metarepresentational framework to some of the most interesting
recent developments in the philosophy of language and mind.
In "Metarepresentations in staged communicative acts," RAYMOND GIBBS
demonstrates, with linguistic and experimental evidence, how
speaker's/listener's recognition of specific metarepresentations affects
their joint production and understanding of nonserious speech, and in
particular or irony. The evidence tends to show that irony, because of its
complex metarepresentational character, requires more processing effort to
understand than tropes like metaphor. Gibbs concludes that the most general
challenge that studying metarepresentations in language poses is
to recognize how the coordination of mutual beliefs in ordinary speech
reflects essential connections between the ways people think and the ways
they produce and understand language.
In "Metarepresentation in linguistic communication," DEIRDRE WILSON
examines the different types of metarepresentational ability involved in
linguistic comprehension. She discusses Grice's metarepresentational view
of speaker's meaning and of comprehension processes. Focusing on the use of
utterances to represent attributed utterances and thoughts, she surveys a
range of linguistic metarepresentational devices, and argues that their
analysis can both benefit from and provide useful evidence for the study of
more general metarepresentational abilities. From a historical point of
view, current approaches to metarepresentations derive from semiotic and
philosophical interest in metalinguistic devices. Deirdre Wilson's chapter,
showing how this traditional interest is now being reframed in a cognitive
perspective, provides a fitting conclusion for the whole volume.
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Dan Sperber
Directeur de Recherche au CNRS (Paris)
email: dan@sperber.com
web page: http://www.dan.sperber.com
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