Reply to Hamlyn: In detail

This is a detailed reply to the critique Jim Hamlyn wrote critiquing our Ecological Representation preprint (and related blog post). If you aren’t him, then you might want to visit his blog to read his full review before proceeding…

First, Jim, thank you very much for providing such a thorough review of our paper. I hope this lengthy reply can be a part of an ongoing dialogue about these ideas. 

I’ve written this the same way I did the one for Sergio Graziosi (here) – replying to each point you make without reading ahead. 

Quotations are text taken directly from Hamlyn’s critique and are presented in the order in which they appear in his blog post.

“Hopefully they can be persuaded that this is only true if the required representations are of the fully public and intentional sort and not the neural and non-intentional sort that they seem to have embraced.”

As this sentence comes at the very beginning of your critique, let me take a second to say that I think what we propose here is consistent with a conception of public and intentional representations. The notion of informational representations is both public (in that they are external physical structures) and inherently intentional (in that they specify biologically relevant and, frequently, dispositional properties and, as such, coordinating with respect to this information is fundamentally FOR or ABOUT something, which satisfies most people’s construal of intentionality). 

Ecological Representations

Funny story. One day, I got a text from Sabrina that said "Holy crap. I think ecological information is a representation." "Uh oh", I thought - "Twitter is gonna be maaaaad". Then we thought, "we should probably write this idea down, see if we can break it". So we wrote, and the funnier thing was....it all just got stronger. The result is a paper we call "Ecological Representations", which we have just uploaded as a preprint to BioRxiv.

In it, we

1. argue that Gibsonian, ecological information meets the criteria to be a representation, then
2. predict that this information leads to neural activity that preserves its structure and that also meets the criteria to be a representation, and
3. we argue that these two ecological representations (informational and neural representations) can address the three core reasons cognitive science wants representations (getting intentionality/aboutness from a physical system, solving poverty of stimulus and enabling higher order cognition) while 
4. avoiding the two big problems with mental representations trying to address those motivations (symbol grounding and system-detectable error). 
5. We then spend a bunch of time getting serious about higher order cognition grounded in information (see, I told you we were working on it!)

We submitted this to a good cognitive science journal and got the reviews back last week. We were rejected after hitting a wall of confusion from two reviewers who got distracted by side issues and one who just didn't quite get it. No-one gave us much in the way of specific actionable things that need fixing, nor did anyone actually say our analysis of information as a representation was wrong. We remain unimpressed with the quality of the reviews (although the editor has been very clear and generous with his time in replying to us querying the rejection). 

That said, we are taking one hint from the process before submitting elsewhere, and that is we are clearly having trouble articulating the argument, in part I think because comes out of left field and we're tripping a lot of different knee-jerk reactions. We think the story makes sense but then we're us, so what we need is some fresh eyes. This is where you lovely people come in.

I have made some minor structural revisions to the version that got reviewed to address some of the issues that came up and I have uploaded it as a pre-print to BioRxiv.org. Now, we want your help.