博主按：费了半天劲，终于把这个同行的一点资料找到，很多地方还是进不去，估计又是屏蔽或封掉了吧。这个哥们的东东正是俺目前感兴趣的，希望能够再找到一点他的文章。不罗嗦了，接着找。

Adrian Cussins

 

 

                                                                        Adrian@haecceia.com

Department of Philosophy, 326 Lincoln Hall, 702 South Wright Street, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

Main research focus: Theory of content; philosophy of mind; philosophy of language; philosophy of psychology and cognitive science; metaphysics; epistemology; science and technology studies; cognitive science.

 

 

 

 

Research Description:

  My research is on the nature of representation and representations: as bearers of meaning, information and knowledge; as mediations of the world for active subjects; as distributed in space; and as the elements out of which cognitive environments are made. I try to understand how, in a variety of contexts of representational use, information is transformed into knowledge, and how sometimes this transformation fails.  I have developed a general theory of one kind of failure in information Û knowledge transformations (“frame-dependence”).  I use the account of frame-dependence to probe failures of reference—for example in names and demonstrative expresssions—, failures of problem-solving, failures in technological design, and failures in the attempts, so far, of Artificial Intelligence to build an intelligent machine.  Analysis of the failure conditions of a normative system provides insight into the nature of the system.  It also helps us to understand meaning-involving systems as fragile epistemic achievements.

  Much of my work explores questions about representation—its semantics, psychology and metaphysics—through the area of philosophy known as the theory of content.  Until recently, analytic theory of content has focused on propositions and thoughts as bearers of truth, and on the conceptual constituents of thoughts and propositions.  Relatively little attention has been paid to the representational content of experience and activity.  Drawing on the work of Strawson, Dummett, Evans, McDowell and Peacocke, I have concentrated on providing an account of the "nonconceptual content" of experience and activity, and on understanding the relations between nonconceptual content and the conceptual content of objective thought.  This provides a different perspective on traditional questions about reference, indexicality, normativity, objectivity, explanation of action, and realism.

Work in the Philosophy of Language has tended to assume that representational content should be understood in terms of reference or purported reference to truth-makers: objects, properties or states of affairs.  By contrast, work on nonconceptual content has allowed us to see that there are representations that do not present, or purport to present, the world objectively—as a truth-maker—to their subjects; there are other ways in which the world may be made present in experience.  Moreover, it may be possible to explain the concepts of reference and objectivity in terms of the theory of the nonconceptual content of experience and activity.  Rather than explaining meaning in terms of objective reference, reference and objectivity may be explained in terms of nonconceptual but still meaningful ways of being in the world.  It seems to me that this intellectual route helps provide bridges between the formal tradition in analytic philosophy—for which truth is the central concept—and traditions influenced by phenomenology and the work of Heidegger and Wittgenstein—for which concepts of practice and activity are central.

Information exists wherever there is reliable counterfactual dependency or correlation: smoke carries information about fire because it is reliable that were there to be no fire then there would be no smoke.  We are surrounded by immense quantities of information, but the vast majority of the information in which we are immersed has no utility for us, because we have no idea how to put it to use, or to make its content accessible to our knowledge-using practices. There is a sense in which information is a raw material.  It is valuable but not usable in its original form.  To make it usable, we must 'mine' it, and then transform it into knowledge.

Information forms trails through an environment which structures the environment in ways that can allow agents to act effectively and intelligently.  To do so, the information must make available to the agents the objects (the referents) of the activity, for which and on which the agents act.  Thus the information trails that emanate from a pushed electric doorbell result in an experience of a ringing bell, and not of the pressure of a finger on a switch, or an electric circuit, or of processes in the inner ear.  The information in the circuits, both neural and artefactual, acts as a mediator of the object of the activity: the ringing bell.  Sometimes the information trails fail to function as mediators, but instead act as veils.  In such cases what should be present as a mediator is present as object or referent; consider certain illusions, mirages, web search engines that yield thousands of misleading ‘hits’, a political process that comes to be about hanging or dimpled chads (the mechanisms of counting votes) rather than representing ‘the will of the people’.

How then are we to understand the processes by which information is transformed into knowledge?  How are we to understand the failure that occurs when the objects of knowledge are veiled rather than revealed?  Could such an understanding show us something about the natures of knowledge and reference?   Might a theoretical  analysis of information – knowledge transformations help us to understand intelligence: the kinds of cognitive environment and other conditions that sustain, or fail to sustain, effective, intelligent engagement with the objects of knowledge?

Through my work on the distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual content of experience, and its application to work in the philosophy of language on the reference of demonstrative expressions and to work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science on modelling cognitive processes, I have developed some tools that will help in mapping these processes of information-knowledge transformation.  Three of these tools are distinctions that are necessary for describing and analysing information transformations: the distinction between frame-dependent representation and frame-relative representation, the distinction between nonconceptual content which is specified by reference to a “Realm of Mediation”, and conceptual content which is specified by reference to a “Realm of Reference”, and the distinction between cognition which is “ontologically exploratory” and cognition which is “ontologically bounded”.   My book, Constructions of Thought, gives an account of these distinctions, and their application to help understand something about knowledge, reference and intelligent activity.

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