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From time to time, I receive requests for commentary on articles
appearing in Brain and Behavioural Sciences. Here is in article I
received today. I think that the comparisons with the Peircean
categories are obvious and, I note, that the article also refers to
'mental representations' behaving 'like functions'.
My point is that the 'outside world' is filled with examples of the
Peircean analytic framework and that this framework can be used to
analyze and explain that world.
Edwina
"Target Article: Above and Beyond the Concrete: The Diverse
Representational Substrates of the Predictive Brain
Authors: Michael Gilead, Yaacov Trope, and Nira Liberman
Deadline for Commentary Proposals: Tuesday, August 13th, 2019
Abstract: In recent years, scientists have increasingly taken to
investigate the predictive nature of cognition. We argue that
prediction relies on abstraction, and thus theories of predictive
cognition need an explicit theory of abstract representation. We
propose such a theory of the abstract representational capacities
that allow humans to transcend the "here-and-now". Consistent with
the predictive cognition literature, we suggest that the
representational substrates of the mind are built as a hierarchy,
ranging from the concrete to the abstract; however, we argue that
there are qualitative differences between elements along this
hierarchy, generating meaningful, often unacknowledged, diversity.
Echoing views from philosophy, we suggest that the representational
hierarchy can be parsed into: modality-specific representations,
instantiated on perceptual similarity; multimodal representations,
primarily instantiated on the discovery of spatiotemporal contiguity;
and
categorical representations, primarily instantiated on social
interaction. These elements serve as the building blocks of complex
structures discussed in cognitive psychology (e.g., episodes,
scripts) and are the inputs for mental representations that behave
like functions, typically discussed in linguistics (i.e.,
predicators). We support our argument for representational diversity
by explaining how the elements in our ontology are all required in
order to account for humans' predictive cognition (e.g., in
subserving logic-based prediction; in optimizing the trade-off
between accurate and detailed predictions) and by examining how the
neuroscientific evidence coheres with our account. In doing so, we
provide a testable model of the neural bases of conceptual cognition,
and highlight several important implications to research on
self-projection, reinforcement learning, and predictive-processing
models of psychopathology. "
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