Is the switch ‘on’?

Journal

of Pragmatics

17 (1992) 545-547

545

North-Holland

Is the switch ‘on’? Stephen

A. Tyler

Bickhard and Campbell’s attack on what they call ‘encodingism’ (this issue) contains much useful critique and is, at least in its emphasis on interactivity, consonant with the contemporary critique of ‘representation’ in the discourses of a variety of disciplines where such notions as pragmatics, rhetoric, dialogue, discourse, and conversation index a turn toward communication as the key concept in language studies, and the rejection of representation as the hegemonic principle around which all important issues constell. Bickhard and Campbell’s critique, however, is not really informed by these other critiques (see p. 428) and that probably accounts for the fact that they do not reject representation, but seek instead to rescue it from encodingism. It is an interesting attempt to save something from the wreckage of the cognitive enterprise by a kind of word magic typified by ‘epistemic agents’ and ‘control structures’ and by the kind of clotted prose in which representation becomes “ .,. a source of selections among alternative process possibilities) that permits (increases the likelihood) of a goal-directed (sub)system to reach its goal” (p. 406). As the authors say, ‘This is a non-encoding explanation . ..’ but what does it have to do with representation in either of the senses - as substitution of appearances and recurrent presence - which have long constituted the means of psychology’s narratives of perception, memory, and thought? Part of the difficulty here is that the authors seek to avoid the kind of essentialism that representation has typically been used for in psychology, as the source of cognitive content in the form of images, engrams, and the like. They want instead, an account in terms of activities and processes - a shift from nouns to verbs. The problem is that inasmuch as they succeed in ‘verbalization’, they sacrifice all of the implications of ‘content’ that facilitate or enable processes to be knowledge or memories. In order to explain how processes produce knowledge and memory, or themselves become known, the authors have to fall back on such tired old encodingist metaphors as ‘levels’ of process organization and ‘emergence’, the latter being, of course, the mechanist’s Correspondence IO: S.A. Tyler, Department P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251, USA.

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546

S. A. Tyler / Is the switch ‘on’?

admission that hierarchies of processes cannot be given a mechanical account of how they transcend themselves. The difficulty for all activation accounts of cognitive processes, whether of S-R, parallel distributive processing, or Hebbian cell assemblages, is how does the activation of an internal system by an external agent provide knowledge about the external agent that is more than a simple indication of the external agent’s presence? How does “ . ..a potential outcome ‘pick out’ a set of environmental conditions that would yield it . . . when . . . the internal outcome contains no information about the nature [author’s emphasis] of that set except that they yield that internal outcome” (p. 409)? It is all very well to invoke the Quinean idea of ‘implicit definition’ as an explanation for this precocious omniscience, but how does the notion of ‘definition’ enter in here where there is no ‘epistemic agent’ to perform the act of defining? Without this hidden agent, the only recourse is to some sort of idea that there is a preordained harmony between the internal outcome and the environmental conditions that propagate it. Clearly, the idea of the knowing agent quivers at the brink, not only by means of this invocation of definition, but also in the idea that the internal outcome (already entified here) has the information that aset will yield the outcome it (wants??). Isn’t this another way of saying that the outcome ‘knows’ the external agent, and isn’t it exactly parallel to the way the ‘epistemic agent’ of the encoding version knows what its encoding element encodes? Here - in other words, perhaps - the authors have surely slipped back into the language of illicit knowing that they have characterized as the special incoherence of encodingism. The author’s use of the notion ‘goal directed’ is also problematic. To say that a system ‘contains a test’ for an internal condition pushes too hard at the boundaries of metaphoric credulity, and is just a way of providing systems with exactly the kind of internal agency that the mechanistic definition of system has already sought to exclude. And to say that a system is goal directed because its operations function relative to other systems is a judgment made by the external observer, an attribution, in other words, that has nothing to do with the system’s innards, and the authors are thus not justified in saying that “Goal directed . . . does not depend on any epistemic concepts . ..” (p. 406). Telos is a stern master, but it is not independent of its being known. All activity notions of cognition have a problem with recurrence, and consequently with memory and knowledge. What is it that recurs? We cannot say something like the ‘same pattern’ of activity or the ‘same’ sequence of events, because the invocation of these ‘sames’ that are necessary to the idea of recurrence are entifications that are not themselves processes or activities. Nor are they accessible - as recurrences ~ to the activities themselves. There is, in other words, no memory in activity alone, and that is why activity theories always postulate higher level processes as external agents who have the cognitive ability to entify activities and to keep track of them as entities.

S.A.

Tyler / Is the switch ‘on’?

547

Bickhard and Campbell wish to escape one kind of Cartesian dualism but, in keeping to the idea of the necessity for foundations, they continue to inscribe another, even more troubling dualism. Their notion of ‘interactivity’, expressed as the relation between a system and its environment, encodes the archaic opposition of inside vs. outside (the primitive opposition that enables all input/output theory), in which the activity and form of the inside originates in the activity and form of the outside. From this condition of the priority of the outside, it follows that the inside must be some kind of representation of the outside. A metaphor more appropriate to their antidualism would be a notion something like ‘environing’, in which there is no originating and foundational activity either on the outside or the inside, or in which, indeed, the inside/outside distinction has little, if any pertinence. In the end, Bickhard and Campbell give us a very traditional account that repeats much of Aristotle’s ironic narrative - but without its subtlety - in which the arkhe kin&is is the necessary, but unknowable source of mime’sis. I have no quarrel with Bickhard and Campbell’s rejection of encodingism, categorial grammar, possible world semantics, and the like, or with their pragmatic and contextual intentions, but I do not find their attempt to derive everything in language and cognition from the foundational operation of a simple light switch either convincing or new. A genuine attempt to come to terms with hermeneutics and postmodernism might have resulted in a more interesting, less tradition-bound critique.

Reference Bickhard, Mark H. and Robert L. Campbell, language studies: With a focus on categorial semantics. Journal of Pragmatics 17: 401433

1992. Some foundational questions concerning grammars and model-theoretic possible worlds (this issue).