2. Valent Representation

Yesterday I promised to give an
account of valent representation. This is perhaps the core original idea of the
book (though it has precedents in Ruth Millikan’s ‘pushmi-pullyu’
representations (1995) and Andy Clark’s ‘action oriented representations’ (1997)).
Essentially, valent representation is representation in a valent (i.e. positive
or negative) manner. What makes it valent is that the representational activity
automatically triggers a bodily response aimed at increasing or decreasing the
presence of the object. The theory is still representationalist in the sense
that there is an inner state or activity that stands in for the object. But at
the same time it incorporates embodied views on cognition, since the response
is playing an indispensable role in the activity
of representation.
Valent representations are handy for
satisfying various desiderata we have for emotions. They are factive states
(tracking the condition of the world), but simultaneously evaluative in
character, as well as intrinsically motivational, just like emotions. Yet while
valent representation can conveniently combine different aspects of emotions, I
motivate the existence of this type of representation independently of the
attempt to make sense of emotions. I argue that we should believe in valent
representation because it resolves the problem of how mental states acquire
content.
The basic problem of mental content
is how some activity inside the head could be about a specific kind of object
in the world. Structural resemblances may well be involved, but resemblance is
too cheap to fix objects precisely. Thus a lot of philosophers have thought
that some kind of pragmatic interaction with the object could fix things precisely.
Teleosemantic views are one approach (e.g. Dretske, Millikan). Success
semantics is another.
Success semantics is roughly the claim that what a mental state is about, is whatever object makes actions based on that state successful. In this sense,. . .
News source: Philosophy of Mind – The Brains Blog