I happened to be reading Cummins (2000)
paper “’How does it work?’ vs. ‘What are the laws?’ Two conceptions of
psychological explanation”, when my Twitter feed announced that Chomsky was
right and we do have grammar in our heads after all. The Twitter buzz concerned
a new Nature Neuroscience paper by Ding and colleagues called “Cortical
tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech.” You can find it online here. Curious
whether I needed to completely overhaul my understanding of language, I tracked
down the paper and read it this morning. The method employed is sensible, the
results are fairly clear, the analyses seem legit (though I’m not a
neuroscientist). So, why am I not worried that everything I thought I knew
about language is wrong?
As Chemero (2011) observed, there are two ways to think about debates in science. We can either debate about the actual facts of the matter in the world or we can debate about the best way to explain the world. Some debates aren't amenable to the first type of debate, because there is no evidence that can definitively rule out one of the options. The only debate we can really have about representations is in terms of their role in explanations of behaviour. This is different than how I thought about representations a few years back when I wanted to argue that invoking representations was inherently a bad idea. Now I think we need to consider the utility or representations as part of explanations for psychological phenomena. In this post, I will argue that the concept of representations is not helpful in developing a particular class of explanation - ontic mechanistic explanations (described below). This is the first of two posts on this idea. In the next post I will attempt to explicitly compare cognitive and ecological approaches to behaviour in terms of how well they set us up to identify real parts and operations.
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