What is the syntactic representation of mental content? Is that even possible?

Question

In the philosophy of mind, the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) usually is said to be associated with semantic propertys of intentionality. Does representation have to be semantic? What would be the meaning of "syntactic representation", and what would an example of that be like?

Answer 1

In the gospel of mind, Representational Theory of Mind( RTM) is a view that mental states, such as similar beliefs, solicitations, and comprehensions, are characterized by their intentionality, or their directedness towards objects or states of affairs in the world. According to RTM, internal states are basically emblematic, in the sense that they involve the internal representation of objects or states of affairs.

Representation can be either semantic or syntactic. Semantic representation involves the meaning or content of the representation, while syntactic representation involves the structure or form of the representation.

An illustration of syntactic representation might be a series of symbols or laws that represent a particular conception or idea but don't convey any meaning on their own. For instance, a computer program might use a series of 1's and 0's to represent a particular image or data set, but the meaning of the image or data would not be conveyed by the 1's and 0's themselves. rather, the meaning would be deduced from the way in which the 1's and 0's are organized and interpreted according to certain rules or conventions.

So, in the environment of RTM, representation doesn't inescapably have to be semantic in order for it to be considered internal representation. Syntactic representation can also be a form of internal representation, as long as it's used to represent some aspect of the world or to render certain generalities or ideas

Answer 2

Welcome, eer!

RTM, if PhilPapers surveys can be believed is the dominant position of contemporary philosophers. While not all philosophers of mind accept representationalism (John Searle rather prominently rejecting it in detail as an error in his book Seeing the World As It Is), it is a topic widely discussed canonically. But the notion that the mind, intuitively, is a container that somehow deals in pictures, words, sounds, etc which are like copies is powerful that John Locke and others argued was an adequate characterization of thought.

If you're not familiar, there's a dichotomy between the syntactic and the semantic that is best understood intuitively as the difference between symbols and the concepts. The symbols, graphemes such as lexemes or icons, are seen as somehow divorced from the meanings they bear. (Though, to "bear a meaning" itself is a metaphor among constructivist philosophers.) That is to say, one can have a sentence "Today is Wednesday" and can secure a translation such as "Hoy es miercoles" or "Heute is Mittwoch" which obviously doesn't use the same tokens, but does carry with it the same meaning. Philosophers of all sorts draw a distinction between sentences/utterances and the propositions they represent. Logicians have a similar dichotomy when they work with FORMalisms, such as P and Q where the symbols P and Q are syntactic versus what P and Q represent. Saul Kripke in his Naming and Necessity is famous for taking on the age old problem about sense and reference explicated upon by no one less than Frege himself in Sinn und Bedeutung. The syntax-semantic divide is studied by linguists as well.

The question of what these modifiers mean in the context of RTM goes to the question of just what is going on when data is manipulated by brains and computers. For instance, most philosophers reject that computers have consciousness based on the fact that while they are capable of storing and processing sentences, they lack any capacity to understand propositions. Thus, while you and a PC are both capable of representations, they would argue that a PC has syntactic representations, but those representations are non-semantic. A logician likewise can be credited with having representations, and those might take the form of syntactic representations, such as the argument P->Q AND P THEREFORE Q (a string of characters I've typed into this forum) BUT ALSO an understanding of the argument, that is that it is modus ponens, it's a tool for transforming natural language argumentation without regards to propositional content, etc.

So...

Since intentionality is usually described as "aboutness", and human minds can entertain representations about objects, whether concrete or abstract, it is possible to characterize them as syntactic (somehow related to or speaking of the form of representation) or semantic (related to understanding, meaning, and so on). This is a very interesting question, with philosophers trying to characterize it even further. A famous example of such an additional characterization is Fodor's language of thought hypothesis (SEP) which is:

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) proposes that thinking occurs in a mental language. Often called Mentalese, the mental language resembles spoken language in several key respects: it contains words that can combine into sentences; the words and sentences are meaningful; and each sentence’s meaning depends in a systematic way upon the meanings of its component words and the way those words are combined. For example, there is a Mentalese word whale that denotes whales, and there is a Mentalese word mammal that denotes mammals. These words can combine into a Mentalese sentence whales are mammals, which means that whales are mammals. To believe that whales are mammals is to bear an appropriate psychological relation to this sentence. During a prototypical deductive inference, I might transform the Mentalese sentence whales are mammals and the Mentalese sentence Moby Dick is a whale into the Mentalese sentence Moby Dick is a mammal. As I execute the inference, I enter into a succession of mental states that instantiate those sentences.

Is thought primarily linguistic? In my own discipline, the physical symbol system hypothesis essentially maintains that syntactic representations are sufficient for intelligence (a proposition challenged by connectionists).