Representation from Bottom and Top

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-542
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Correlation Relation ◽  
Special Relevance ◽  
George Williams

I would like to nominate one more principle for initial inclusion in the science of teleonomy. This principle is that the nature of the stimuli that initiate and regulate a response may be no indication of the function of the response.George Williams could not have anticipated the special relevance his principle has for contemporary analyses of representational content. In particular, his principle provides both a concise statement of where a currently popular strategy for naturalizing representational content has gone wrong and a positive suggestion for how we should right this wrong. I characterize the kind of naturalistic analysis of representation I have in mind asbottom-upbecause it seeks to build representation up from a non-intentional, and hence naturalistically unimpeachable, correlation relation. Many authors have suggested such an approach to naturalizing intentionality, but for clarity and completeness perhaps Fred Dretske'sExplaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causesought to be construed as the exemplary source.

scholarly journals Prior expectations induce pre-stimulus sensory templates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kok ◽  
Pim Mostert ◽  
Floris P. de Lange
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Neurons ◽  
Temporal Resolution ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Sensory Cortex ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Neural Signals ◽  
Neural Signal ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
Sensory Inputs

AbstractPerception can be described as a process of inference, integrating bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down expectations. However, it is unclear how this process is neurally implemented. It has been proposed that expectations lead to pre-stimulus baseline increases in sensory neurons tuned to the expected stimulus, which in turn affects the processing of subsequent stimuli. Recent fMRI studies have revealed stimulus-specific patterns of activation in sensory cortex as a result of expectation, but this method lacks the temporal resolution necessary to distinguish pre- from post-stimulus processes. Here, we combined human MEG with multivariate decoding techniques to probe the representational content of neural signals in a time-resolved manner. We observed a representation of expected stimuli in the neural signal well before they were presented, demonstrating that expectations indeed induce a pre-activation of stimulus templates. These results suggest a mechanism for how predictive perception can be neurally implemented.

Against Jazz Combo Theories of Meaning and Reference

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Dynamic Priority ◽  
Shared Set ◽  
Explanatory Priority ◽  
The Common ◽  
Causal Theories ◽  
Theories Of Meaning

The “jazz combo theory” captures the common spirit of various theories that reject reference and the “bottom up” approach to the problem of objective representational content. We can imagine the members of a jazz combo initially playing together without any shared musical norms. But they continually adjust to one another until norms emerge and are mutually endorsed. Players start holding one another to these norms, and it’s this that gives the sounds they produce—what would otherwise be mere noise—determinate musical content. Similarly, on the jazz combo theory, what would otherwise be productions of meaningless strings by language users, come to constitute determinate linguistic acts with determinate propositional contents, by virtue of the users adopting, and holding one another to, a shared set of linguistic and discursive norms. This chapter argues that jazz combo theorists overstate the case against reference, although they’re right in stressing the importance of norms and their dependence on social interaction. Jazz combo theorists tend to reject bottom-up approaches, including causal theories, because they take those approaches to be incompatible with the explanatory priority of the sentence and to fail to bridge the supposed gap between cause and norm. A number of conceptual tools are introduced to counter their arguments and to defend the consistency of the dynamic priority of the sentence, the syntactic correlativity of sentences and their constituents, and the semantic priority of constituents.

Psychology and Culture: Top Down Versus Bottom Up?

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (19) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cole
Keyword(s):  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up
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