Representación y causalidad en las discusiones actuales sobre cognición: el caso "Watt Governor"

Abstract

Recently, the cognitive sciences have been involved in a debate between Representationalists and anti-Representationalists as to the representational status of the Watt governor. Tim van Gelder has argued that the Watt governor is a paradigmatic example of an intelligent system, which is not in need of internal representations to carry out its cognitive activity. In response, William Bechtel has argued that, given the ?stand-in? definition of representation, such artifact should be interpreted as representing. My aim in this paper is to give a negative answer to the question. To support this I will argue that it is essential for the representations to be normative, which means that they are only attributable to those who/which have the capacity to correct their behavior. Being so, the governor should not be located within the set of representational systems, because it is not possible to find in its behaviors signs of this normative capacity.