BEING ABOUT Part III: Representing and thinkingIn Part II, Presence and simulation, acting and perceiving were seen as interdependent aspects of evolved competency, both occurring by structural changes in many parts of an organism. The various forms of simulational cognition -- imagining, planning, remembering -- also occur by structural changes, but are less closely coupled to immediately present environments. Part III groups representing and thinking because thinking often requires representational support, whether explicit or implicit; like representing, thinking is understood as necessarily grounded in a prior aboutness of evolved, located bodies able to perceive, act and simulate. There are four chapters in Part III. In Chapter 6, Representing, I describe representational practices as culturally developed forms for social management of presence and simulation. Representing artifacts and events may be used to direct perception and action in an actual mutual circumstances, but they more often use perception to direct simulation. Chapter 7, Representational effects, discusses cognitive effects such as abstraction and metaphor whose developed forms, essential to many forms of thought, rely on representational support. Recently evolved and exclusive to human brains, the inferior parietal lobe is unusually lateralized and specialized for representational function. Lateralization of representational function seems to be related to the lateralization of focal hand, eye and mouth motion, but Chapter 8, Representing and the IPL, suggests that it may also be important to maintaining and relating incommensurable task axes, as when representational function requires simultaneous perception and simulation. Chapter 9, Kantian stories, illustrates principles outlined above by describing remnants of spatial engagement found in four high-cultural forms of representation-guided cognition -- signed and spoken language, electroacoustic music, pictorial perspective, and mathematics.
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