Thoughts Without Laws; Cognitive Science with Content

Abstract

formal likeness-likeness in logical form. Roughly, the idea was that something like mathematical mapping relations correlated the domain of thought with the world. But unfortunately (for example, Wittgenstein 1953; Quine 1960; Putnam 1977), mathematical mapping relations are embrassingly legion. An indefinite number of them can be defined that will correlate, in one way or another, any two domains of entities having much size or complexity. Which of these-which sort of abstract similarity-is the kind, then, that makes inner represent? Suppose we begin by considering a very familiar and nonmysterious example of a biological device that works by picturing something else: a bee dance. The bee dance represents the location of nectar that has been spotted by the dancing bee; it is about' the location of nectar. At least it is natural to say this. Bee dances seem to be like inner conceived on the classical model though not on the contemporary model that requires inner to be calculated over. Let us try to spell out exactly what is involved in this case of representing.' 4 Assume that proper functions of a bee dance are causing watching bees to fly towards nectar, causing watching bees to find nectar, causing nectar to be gathered into the hive, etc. Then any bee dance that serves its proper functions in accordance wi/th a Normal explanation (that part is important) is related in this way to other bee dances that do the same: transformations of the dance (say, rotate the axis of the dance 20 degrees clockwise) correspond one-to-one to transformations of the location of nectar relative to hive and sun 141 am using the term representation in the usual way here, not in the technical sense used in Millikan (1984) where full-fledged representations are contrasted with mere intentional icons.