Explore the vast range of titles available.

Humans use pictures to model the world. The structure of a picture maps to mind space to form a concept. When an internal structure matches the corresponding external structure, an observation functions. Whether effective or not, the observation is self-consistent. In epistemology, people often differ from each other in terms of whether a concept is probabilistic or certain. Based on the effect of the presented IG and pull anti algorithm, we attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to this problem. Using the characters of hidden structures, we explain the difference between the macro and micro levels and the same difference between semantics and probability. In addition, the importance of attention is highlighted through the combination of symmetry and asymmetry included and the mechanism of chaos and collapse revealed in the presented model. Because the subject is involved in the expression of the object, representationalism is not complete. However, people undoubtedly reach a consensus based on the objectivity of the representation. Finally, we suggest that emotions could be used to regulate cognition.

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance—in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations—is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account—an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the ‘aboutness’ or intentionality of cognitive systems; our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors.

The question of mediation has become one of the central intellectual problems in the late 20th and 21st centuries, in part because of the extraordinary acceleration of technology, the rampant proliferation of digital media technologies that sometimes goes under the name of \"mediatization.\" Despite widespread theorizing about media prompted by the intense mediatization of the past several decades, mediation is a concept that has been curiously undertheorized. Taking off from William James's understanding of \"radical empiricism,\" Grusin develops the concept of \"radical mediation\" to argue that mediation functions technically, bodily, and materially to generate and modulate individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. Mediation operates physically and materially as an object, event, or process in the world, impacting humans and nonhumans alike. Radical mediation participates in recent critiques of the dualism of the Western philosophical tradition, which make up what he has elsewhere called the nonhuman turn in 21st-century studies. As he suggests in the final sections, radical mediation might also be understood as nonhuman mediation.

This article explores the possibility that ideas are dynamic, socio-material and relational entities that come into existence with the help of materials and technologies. It starts from arguing that the popular understanding of ideas as immaterial entities (thoughts, concepts, insights) that we process mentally, communicate (symbolically) to others, and eventually realise is rooted in essentialist and representationalist philosophy and as such is not universal. It is then argued that an alternative understanding of what an idea is may be proposed within the relationist perspective that focuses our attention primarily on change and historicity. The article employs the concept of translation – borrowed from the actor-network theory – to propose that an idea is enacted slightly differently in every social situation and with the use of different materials and technologies. Importantly, the presented relational and socio-material interpretation emphasizes that it is not the “essence” of an idea but the translations it is subjected to that enable or constrain action possibilities and determine its evolution. Finally, it is proposed that following translations of ideas empirically may be a promising avenue for further research.

This paper argues that representationalism of a Fodorian variety can accommodate the fact that beliefs come in degrees. First, it responds to two key arguments to the contrary. Second, it builds upon these responses and outlines a novel representationalist theory of degrees of beliefs. I call this theory dispositional representationalism, as it involves direct appeal to our dispositions to form representations and propositional attitudes concerning them.

The traditional view that perceived and archival uncertainty measures are substitutable proxies for “true” environmental (entrepreneurial) uncertainty presumes an “all-seeing eye.” Adopting a representationalist epistemology, we distinguish environmental (objective) unpredictability from entrepreneurs’ subjective uncertainty, which has so far been theoretically confounded. It is, in fact, possible for an entrepreneur to be highly certain despite excessive unpredictability and vice versa. Theoretically distinguishing these constructs has fundamental implications for entrepreneurial action theory. For example, because intentional action is consciously originated, unpredictability influences action only indirectly, while uncertainty has direct effects. Outcomes, on the other hand, are directly affected by the complexity and dynamism (unpredictability) of things, whereas uncertainty only has an indirect and tenuous role in what occurs. We develop hypotheses along these theoretical lines and test them on a longitudinal sample of new mobile apps and survey responses from their developers. We find, generally, that unpredictability, uncertainty, and their effects on entrepreneurial action are empirically distinct. This provides added impetus for a shift away from positivism and toward a subjectivist approach to entrepreneurship.Plain English SummaryDistinguishing Unpredictability from Uncertainty in Entrepreneurial Action Theory. Entrepreneurship scholarship commonly references a single “entrepreneurial uncertainty” construct in discussing the effects of the unknown on entrepreneurial action. We explain that there are not one but two key constructs at play that should not be confounded: external unpredictability and subjective uncertainty. We explain, and support with evidence from the app development industry, that the unpredictability of a market environment or of entrepreneurial outcomes only has indirect influence on actions. It is the entrepreneur’s own uncertainty that drives what actions they will pursue. However, the outcomes that result from action are causally tied to the real unpredictability of the market rather than the entrepreneur’s uncertainty of it. As we move into the theory refinement stage of the entrepreneurship discipline, greater care must be taken in referencing one or the other (or both) in entrepreneurship theory.

This paper is a new defense of the view that visual hallucinations lack content. The claim is that visual hallucinations are illusory not because their content is nonveridical, but rather because they seem to represent when they fail to represent anything in the first place. What accounts for the phenomenal character of visual experiences is not the content itself (content-representationalism), but rather the vehicle of content (vehicle-representationalism), that is, not the properties represented by visual experience, but rather the relational properties of experience (or of the brain) of representing singular contents, namely particular instantiations of properties. I argue that the Russellian particular-involving proposition is the only appropriate model for the representational content of visual experience and hence that visual hallucinations are just like failed demonstrations.

Many theorists maintain that perceptual experience exhibits the what is often called the phenomenology of particularity: that in perceptual experience it phenomenally seems that there are particular things. Some urge that this phenomenology demands special accounts of perception on which particulars somehow constitute perceptual experience, including versions of relationalism, on which perception is a relation between perceivers and particular perceived objects, or complex forms of representationalism, on which perception exhibits demonstrative or special particular-involving types of content. I argue here that no such account required. I develop and defend a novel account of such phenomenology, grounded in the higher-order theory of consciousness. In short, this view holds that the phenomenology of particularity arises because suitable higher-order states make it appear to one that one is in perceptual relations to particulars, even if perception is not in any way constituted by particulars. I argue that this account has many advantages and avoids problems that other theories of such phenomenology face.

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition (PCT), brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom–up, externally-generated sensory signals and top–down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparalleled in contemporary cognitive science and see in it a framework that could potentially provide us with a unified account of cognition. It is also commonly assumed that PCT is a representational theory of sorts, in the sense that it postulates that our cognitive contact with the world is mediated by internal representations. However, the exact sense in which PCT is representational remains unclear; neither is it clear that it deserves such status—that is, whether it really invokes structures that are truly and nontrivially representational in nature. In the present article, I argue that the representational pretensions of PCT are completely justified. This is because the theory postulates cognitive structures—namely action-guiding, detachable, structural models that afford representational error detection—that play genuinely representational functions within the cognitive system.

Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view (EV) advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a nonrepresentational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has received from both representationalists and non-representationalists. I analyze this debate, and distinguish four sorts of objections: (1) the objection of the wrongfully cut middleman, (2) the argument against explanatory exclusionism, (3) the case for scientific benefits of representations, and (4) the charge of inconsistent ascription of representational status in EV. I argue that (1) the middleman was never cut in EV, and is controversial to boot, (2) otherwise equal, non-representational explanations have primacy over representational explanations, due to the lack of naturalistic grounds for representations and the unnecessarily ascribed cognitive load to the system. Further, I show that (3) puts the cart before the horse, and the arguments on offer are viciously circular. However, the final objection, (4) lays bare a deeper issue for EV. At the cost of giving up the middle position, however, the explanatory tools already available to EV can be shown to cover the work initially thought to require representation. I conclude that EV is best altered to be a non-representational theory of perception.