I have pictures of my mother in my head, for example, and might visualize a time series (your economics example), and for most purposes what the physical explanation of these might be is not relevant.
Who says it's not relevant? God? You? Who? It is relevant for me, when trying to understand you. You should grant me that, at least, and not treat the whole thing in such a cavalier manner.
But if "representation" is supposed to be a term of art in a theory of linguistic competence, then I am not sure I am required to believe in them if they can't be cashed out in physical terms.
The word representation, on the other hand may be used in art, as you say, but this does not mean that it can't be used in another field, namely, in (classical or symbolical) cognition. And in this world, cognitive representations are indeed the very gist of the research efforts. You may belong to the connectionist cognitive world, of course. If that is so, we may perhaps never meet theoretically.
I tend to agree with Jerry Fodor when he said, sometime ago, that the way to describe the work of cognitive mental representations is not (and cannot be) the physical one. There is nothing material in them; they are just a mental function which can only be described through a computing sort of expression. You may not find e.e. cummings poem anywhere in the physical innards of your computer where, I am sure, you have seen it, as I have in mine.
There are, incidentally, some writers that believe similarly; that the theoretical rubber has got to meet the physical road somewhere if semantic theory is to be taken seriously.
Yes, I know there are, but I think they have the wrong ... ehr ... representation of the matter.
Also, lets leave out the physical for a moment. I am not sure there is even any mental (say, gathered from introspection) evidence that the kind of interpretation you are talking about happens.
It may be so, I don't know. But that's the way chomskyans describe it, and until better description, allow me to stand for it as the best description so far. It's such an explicit description that with some ingenuity one may imagine it causally allowing to simulate that sort of message interpretation in a fairly accurate way. It is what Sperber and Wilson have attempted in their work on relevance theory, which is, BTW, the name of the forum we are debating in.
At least, I don't work through the interpretive steps in assigning a meaning to a sentence in the same way as I work out a sum in my head, or work out the counter to a chess move, or even work out assigning meaning to a line the way Empson might have done for 7 types of Ambiguity.
You don't, do you? I am all willing to accept it on parole. However, the trouble is that I have no other causal description at hand (you did not offer an alternative one this far) to represent (sorry for the artistic terminology, I can't escape my creative mind condition, I am afraid) how you would understand the quiz construction, but not the following one (in which there is small chance that you may even imagine the phrase structure, to begin with):
ki bu olmad#305;#287;#305;n#305; bildiren olmad#305;#287;#305;n#305; o de#287;ildir ne de o oldu#287;unu olmad#305;#287;#305;d#305;r de#287;ildir yani o
In any case, I think we have gone miles off the topic of this thread which was started by A. Gutt asking a precise question which makes sense ONLY in our RT frame which you don't seem to appreciate.
José Luis Guijarro
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Cádiz
11002 Cádiz, España (Spain)
tlf: (34) 956-011.613
fax: (34) 956-015.505
Received on Sun Feb 13 16:53:09 2011
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