Misrepresenting Dretske
Introduction
- Dretske is interested overall in "naturalizing" the mind. However, instead of resorting to an appeal to neuroscience, he is trying to make precise (even sort of mathematical) definitions of intentional phenomena such as representation.He tends to direct his abstract discussions with very colorful and concrete examples.
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Previously, Dretske in Knowledge and the Flow of Information wants to use information-theoretic concepts to show how mental concepts like "belief" flow from information-bearing (which he strongly correlates with truth-bearing) objects. However - this leads him to a crucial weakness in his argument - if meaning is natural and derived from truth-bearing information, how can meaning be false?
- Dretske is not interested in how a particular representational system can misrepresent, since these systems are all derived from our original representational capacity.
Natural Meaning
- Dretske first considers natural meaning. Natural meaning is when one thing means another thing. Dretske focuses on the "token" level, looking only at particular events. So, smoke naturally indicates fire. But can natural meaning ever represent falsely? Obviously, no.
- Harry:My issue with this is that this issue of natural meaning is too simplistic. For example, if two events are always indicative of each other, then why are they separate events? For example, why not consider smoke and fire part of the same "smokefire" system? Also, it's unclear how given these strong realist notions of truth how we can escape the vice-grip of veridicality - a Panglossian world in which every representation is always true, or supposed to be true. This doesn't seem to do any justice to the often messy world of lies and mistakes most of us inhabit.
Functional Meaning
- However, natural meaning for a thing seems always to mean something regardless of the context and independent of any outside observer, and this is not always true for many events in the world. For example, the ringing of a doorbell usually means that someone is at the door. However, this may not be true if the doorbell is malfunctioning, say if a circuit broke. Also, a doorbell is a man-made artifact, and thus it is hard to say if some "natural" and "lawful" regularity holds between the doorbell and the presence of someone ringing it.
- So we can replace for some events a definition of functional meaning where meaning is derived from some function, so that there are some thing that it is the function of that event to indicate another thing.
- This seems to deal with the door-bell example - since under the normal conditions of the doorbell use the doorbell ringing indicates someone at the door. If it does not, then it misrepresents.
- But why are certain things assigned meaning?
Needs
- Could it be system's natural functions? Using the simplest possible example, a simple bacteria goes towards the magnetic north in the Northern Hemisphere to avoid oxygenated water, and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere. This behavior of correlating a presence of magnetic north with low oxygen is a natural meaning whose detection fulfills the evolutionary natural need for survival, but it can be disrupted by the use of a magnet.
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However, do you say that the bacteria misrepresented where the oxygen-free water was? In fact, the system as itself only detects the magnetic north, so it couldn't possibly by the system's fault for failing - it did correctly determine the direction of the magnetic north!
- Harry:Aren't we the outside observer of the system assigning the system both needs and functions? Perhaps we are right in saying that its function is to point towards the oxygenless water, so the organism has to survive, instead of just pointing to magnetic north? Is that a matter of scientific fact or interpretation - or a judgment? So isn't this entire concept of misrepresentation functionally normative, since it depends on the idea of truth - and so we need to analyze "truth" first before analyzing misrepresentation.
Functional Determination and Indeterminacy
- Dretske tries to escape this by noting that some function can be determined by a response, but that this single response can be triggered by multiple things.
- If a response caused by a disjunction of things, makes it much more complicated to determine the natural or even functional meaning, since it is a cluster of things that could lead to a response. Therefore one thing does not always have to mean another thing, but only might mean another thing. This give us the flexibility needed to make a representation error. But is it enough?
- This also leaves open the status of acquiring non-natural meaning through learning. Since the learner will only have only so much partial information, and since on thing can mean different things, there will always be some level of indeterminacy of what something means. This is why intentional organisms like humans tend to make misrepresentations while rocks do not have the capacity.
- In summary, an organism possesses "genuine powers of misrepresentation" when there is a "breakdown in the normal chain of natural signs" when one sign that naturally means something in one context does not naturally mean it in another context. Assuming the organism is not aware of the full context, the thing still functionally means one thing when it does not actually naturally mean it, and so it .
- The problem of misrepresentation is then the failure to align natural meaning and functional meaning.