"Are Receptors Representations?" 

Abstract

Throughout the cognitive sciences and philosophy of psychology, a notion of representation has become increasingly popular, whereby a state or structure is viewed as playing a representational role simply because of the way it reliably responds to environmental stimuli. In my talk, I’ll refer to this as the “receptor” notion. A prima facie problem for this notion is that there is little motivation for thinking that being a reliable responder is sufficient for serving as a representation. Recently, philosophers such as Fred Dretske have offered accounts that are often thought to answer this worry by providing additional features to the receptor notion that make it adequately robust. In my talk, I critically examine this notion and its philosophical augmentation. I argue that these attempts to defend the representational status of receptor states – by showing how they can handle misrepresentation and how they acquire a function to represent – fail to rescue the notion and thus fail to provide a justification for treating such states as representations. At the end of my talk, I’ll offer further reasons for dropping the receptor notion of representation altogether.