Reading Writing and Representation by Phil Agre has given me a slightly wider vocabulary with which to describe my anti-representationalist tool for thought; more importantly, it's instilled in me a conviction in the theoretical basis of this project (never expected that seeing Rorty's Mirror of Nature cited in a bibliography would put me to ease). I've felt, until reading Agre, that I was standing on vaporous grounds in trying to translate ideas from enactive cognition and pragmatist epistemology to computational systems, and so every step I took was uncertain. Agre has given me some footholds, or guard rails, or a condensation machine with which to transform this vapour into something I can move along.
§1. Most significantly, we share a conception of understanding as not something one comes to possess by collecting and manipulating a certain set of symbolic representations in certain ways. Understanding something is to be able to go on with it. It is to be able to put it to use, in an utterance, in an explanation, in an essay, in an analogy, in a demonstration, in a recognition, and so on. It is to draw on it at the right moments in relevant social practices. Understanding is to acquire a (conceptual and/or practical) capacity.
§2. Symbolic representations as 'encoding' knowledge of the world to a sufficient degree for it to be possible to 'read' this knowledge off them at a later time is an old but totally false notion that was strengthened by the design of computational systems. In fact, representations that most usefully contribute to our cognitive affairs are representations for action: instruction sheets, recipes, texts that appear as something.
§3. One recognises that the standard idea of representations is suspect once we notice that there is no notion of them absent their interpretation by an individual or a culture. The representation itself is transformed by its involvement in an act of cognition, by its availability within a specific setting. In every case, how these images are perceived is shaped by the goals and attitudes and capacities of the agent, by the particulars of the environment in which she is acting, and more deeply and silently, by the form of life in which it occurs.
In the course of our cooperative activity, we rely in endless ways on the imperfection, indeed the superficiality, of our separation. Before we have our own private thoughts, before we can fall prey to insidious and tragic failures of communication, before we even feel the need to engage in positive acts of imparting information to one another at all, we dwell together in a radically inarticulable common world whose roots reach bottomlessly into our commonalities of environment and biology and cultural heritage. Insofar as this common experiential world is the site and basis of so much of our learning, its properties must be central to any scientific theory of human cognition.
§4. In opposition to the picture of reasoning as the manipulation of symbolic representations, we ought to seek more a active vocabulary:
The phrase 'reasoning' about X suggests a purely internal cognitive process, as opposed to more active phrases like 'using' or 'acting upon' or 'working with' or 'participating in' or 'manipulating' X.
§5. To keep in view both what I think and Agre's notes: there are forms of cognition, not entirely visible in a textual cultural context, that we ought to leave ourselves open to. For this, we have to let go of the essential place in cognition we have given to representations. These are not inert collections of symbols that 'encode' a an external world, but images that are not wholly describable without reference also to the person and culture that is engaging with them.