Ecological Representations

Abstract

Mainstream cognitive science and neuroscience both rely heavily on the notion of representation in order to explain the full range of our behavioral repertoire. The relevant feature of representation is its ability to designate (stand in for) spatially or temporally distant properties, When we organize our behavior with respect to mental or neural representations, we are (in principle) organizing our behavior with respect to the property it designates. While representational theories are a potentially a powerful foundation for a good cognitive theory, problems such as grounding and system-detectable error remain unsolved. For these and other reasons, ecological explanations reject the need for representations and do not treat the nervous system as doing any mediating work. However, this has left us without a straight-forward vocabulary to engage with so-called representation-hungry problems or the role of the nervous system in cognition. In an effort to develop such a vocabulary, here we show that James J Gibsons ecological information functions to designate the ecologically-scaled dynamical world to an organism. We then show that this designation analysis of information leads to an ecological conceptualization of the neural activity caused by information, which in turn we argue can together support intentional behavior with respect to spatially and temporally distal properties. Problems such as grounding and error detection are solved via law-based specification. This analysis extends the ecological framework into the realm of representation-hungry problems, making it as powerful a potential basis for theories of behavior as traditional cognitive approaches. The resulting analysis does, according to some definitions, allow information and the neural activity to be conceptualized as representations; however, the key work is done by information and the analysis remains true to Gibsons ecological ontology.