Content, Embodiment and Objectivity: The Theory of Cognitive Trails

Frege was a powerful advocate of the explanatory priority of a theory of repre-sentation in thought over a theory of representation in experience.1 It is hard to overestimate the importance of this theoretical strategy. It has had ubiquitous consequences: for our conception of persons—and the relation of persons to other animals—for computational and other technologies, and for our modelling of psychological, social and semantic phenomena. Most systematic theories of rep-resentation since Frege, however divergent from each other they have been in other respects, have followed Frege in adopting the priority of thought over expe-rience. The principle exceptions to this have belonged to the empiricist or posi-tivist traditions; most impressively, perhaps, Camap's Aufbau. But theories in those traditions have been widely viewed to be failures in their own terms, and to make untenable assumptions of the "given " in experience, and of the duality of representational scheme and experiential content.2 In this paper I explore one way to do representational theory which adopts the converse of Frege's priority— i.e. which explains thought in terms of experience—but which nevertheless is not an empiricist theory. I shall call representational theory which takes experience to be prior to thought "nonconceptual and constructionist". It is nonconceptual because it does not take the atoms of representation to be concepts (the constituents of thoughts3) and it is constructionist because it attempts to explain thought in terms of non-conceptual atoms grounded in experience. (Experience is taken to be prior to thought, not merely independent of thought. I don't consider "eclectic " theo-ries—recently popular in the philosophy of psychology—that employ mutually independent theories of thought and experience.) The version of nonconceptual constructionist theory explored here is called "the theory of cognitive trails". It is, in addition4, neither empiricist nor materialist because it adheres to a symmet-ric metaphysics: it neither assumes (our conception of) the mind in order to 1 For brevity I shall normally omit "theory of representation " and speak simply of the priority of thought over experience.