The problem of misrepresentation meets connectionist representations : a thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy
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Date
1995
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Massey University
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Abstract
Theories of semantics try to explain the relationship between a mental representation and the thing it represents; to explain, for instance, how my coffee representation represents coffee. (Here and in the rest of this thesis, I use the convention of writing the label for a representation in bold type.) In many traditional theories of semantics, the relationship between my coffee representation and coffee is usually explained by recourse to causal relations between coffee and this representation. But attempts at explanations along these lines have many problems, among them the problem that it is difficult to find a plausible way of accounting for the fact that representations are able to misrepresent-or have false content. Sometimes I can think "that's coffee" when what's actually in the cup being handed to me is tea. Getting this fact to sit happily with accounts of the relation between my coffee representation and coffee hasn't been an easy task. Traditional approaches to this problem haven't had a lot of success so far in explaining how a representation can misrepresent. In this thesis I aim to avoid the problems with these traditional approaches, and find a causally-based, biologically realistic way to explain semantic relations between mental representations and objects in the world, which is also capable of explaining misrepresentation. The best place to start such an endeavour is to examine what the problem of representation and misrepresentation is, and the general tactics used in traditional attempts to solve this problem. This will illustrate why misrepresentation appears to be so intractable. Through such an examination we can get a close look at the traditional approaches, and their assumptions about what representations are, what sorts of things they represent, and how they can represent what they represent. We can also get a good view of the unquestioned assumptions these traditional theories are based on. This will give us a good place to start. I'm going to argue that if we want to achieve our aim of a biologically realistic theory of semantics which shows how representations can misrepresent, we'll need an approach to the problem which does not take these assumptions as foundations. In this thesis I aim to construct an account which isn't based on these assumptions.[FROM INTRODUCTION]
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Page 162 is missing from the original copy
Keywords
Perception (Philosophy), Connectionism