a very intensive search of the literature to find uses of the word ‘representation’ in my work and elsewhere, and consistently misinterprets them, in my opinion [see Rey's contribution and Chomsky's reply in Hornstein & Antony ( 2003 )]. If you look at the literature on cognitive science and neurology and so on and so forth, people are constantly talking about internalrepresentations. But they don't mean that there's a connection between what's inside and some mind-independent entity. The term “internal representation” just means that something's inside. And when you add this philosophical tradition to it, yes, you get funny conclusions – in fact, pointless ones. But if we learned anything from graduate school when we were reading the late Wittgenstein, it's that that's a traditional philosophical error. If you want to understand how a cognitive neuroscientist or a linguist is using the word representation , you've got to look at how they're using it, not add a philosophical tradition to it. [To return to an earlier point,] takephonetic representation – which is the standard, the traditional linguistic term from which all the others come. Nobody thinks that an element in a syllable in IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet] picks out a mind-independent entity in the world. If it's called a phonetic representation, that's just to say that there's something going on in thehead.[C]
4 More on human concepts
JM: We had spoken earlier about the distinctiveness of human concepts, and I'd like to get a bit clearer about what that amounts to. I take it that, at least in part, it has to do with the fact that human beings, when they use their concepts – unlike many animals – do not in fact use them in circumstances in which there is some sort of direct application of the concept to immediate circumstances or situations .
NC: Well, as far as anyone knows – maybe we don't know enough about other animals – what has been described in theanimal literature is that every action (local, or whatever) is connected by what Descartes would have called a machine to either an internal state or an external event that is triggering it. You can have just an internal state – so the animal emits a particular cry [or other form of behavior] ‘saying’ something like “It's me” or “I'm here,” or a threat: something like “Keep away from me,” or maybe a mating cry. [You find this] all the way down to insects. Or else there is a reaction to some sort of external event; you get a chicken that's looking up and sees something that we interpret as “There's a bird of prey” – even though no one knows what the chicken is doing. It appears that everything is like that, to the extent – asmentioned before – that Randy Gallistel ( 1990 ) in his review introduction to a volume on animal communication suggests that for every animal down to insects, whatever internal representation there is, it is one-to-one associated with an organism-independent external event, or internal event. That's plainly not true of human language. So if [what he claims] is in any way near to being true of animals, there is a very sharp divide there.
JM: That's a sharp divide with regard to what might be called the “use” or application of relevant types of concepts, but I take it that it's got to be more than that . . .
NC: Well, it's their natures. Whatever the nature of HOUSE, or LONDON, ARISTOTLE, or WATER is – whatever their internal representation is – it's just not connected to mind-independent external events, or to internal states. It's basically a version of Descartes's point, which seems accurate enough.
JM: OK, so it's not connected to the use of the concepts, nor is it connected . . .
NC: Or the thought. Is it something about their nature, or something about their use? Their use depends on their nature. We use HOUSE differently from how we use BOOK; that's because there's something different about HOUSE and BOOK. So I
4 More on human concepts
JM: We had spoken earlier about the distinctiveness of human concepts, and I'd like to get a bit clearer about what that amounts to. I take it that, at least in part, it has to do with the fact that human beings, when they use their concepts – unlike many animals – do not in fact use them in circumstances in which there is some sort of direct application of the concept to immediate circumstances or situations .
NC: Well, as far as anyone knows – maybe we don't know enough about other animals – what has been described in theanimal literature is that every action (local, or whatever) is connected by what Descartes would have called a machine to either an internal state or an external event that is triggering it. You can have just an internal state – so the animal emits a particular cry [or other form of behavior] ‘saying’ something like “It's me” or “I'm here,” or a threat: something like “Keep away from me,” or maybe a mating cry. [You find this] all the way down to insects. Or else there is a reaction to some sort of external event; you get a chicken that's looking up and sees something that we interpret as “There's a bird of prey” – even though no one knows what the chicken is doing. It appears that everything is like that, to the extent – asmentioned before – that Randy Gallistel ( 1990 ) in his review introduction to a volume on animal communication suggests that for every animal down to insects, whatever internal representation there is, it is one-to-one associated with an organism-independent external event, or internal event. That's plainly not true of human language. So if [what he claims] is in any way near to being true of animals, there is a very sharp divide there.
JM: That's a sharp divide with regard to what might be called the “use” or application of relevant types of concepts, but I take it that it's got to be more than that . . .
NC: Well, it's their natures. Whatever the nature of HOUSE, or LONDON, ARISTOTLE, or WATER is – whatever their internal representation is – it's just not connected to mind-independent external events, or to internal states. It's basically a version of Descartes's point, which seems accurate enough.
JM: OK, so it's not connected to the use of the concepts, nor is it connected . . .
NC: Or the thought. Is it something about their nature, or something about their use? Their use depends on their nature. We use HOUSE differently from how we use BOOK; that's because there's something different about HOUSE and BOOK. So I
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