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Organized representations forming a computationally useful processing structure.

Peter Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. When a collection of representations form an organized family, similar representational vehicles carry similar contents. For example, where neural firing rate represents numerosity (an analogue magnitude representat...

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Published in:Synthese Vol. 202; no. 6; pp. 1 - 21
Main Author: Shea, Nicholas
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Dec2023
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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          Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, WC1A 7HU, London, UK
          https://ror.org/052gg0110 Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, OX2 6GG, Oxford, UK
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        Computational processing
        Representational organization
        Representational structure
        Representational theory of mind
        Semantic content
      ab: Peter Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. When a collection of representations form an organized family, similar representational vehicles carry similar contents. For example, where neural firing rate represents numerosity (an analogue magnitude representation), similar firing rates represent similar numbers of items. Organization has been elided with structural representation, but the two are in fact distinct. An under-appreciated merit of representational organization is the way it facilitates computational processing. Representations from different organized families can interact, for example to perform addition. Their being organized allows them to implement a useful computation. Many of the cases where organization has seemed significant, but which fall short of structural representation, are cases where representational organization underpins a computationally useful processing structure.
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    language: English
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