The theme of my blog requires explanation. Throughout
a process of many years, I have begun to understand that there is an endemic
confusion between the concepts of representation and reference in present-day
psychology. It seems to be regularly overlooked in the philosophy of mind as
well. Semantic-referential and cognitively modular aspects of the mind are
happily mixed. Reference and representation are frequently used as synonyms.
Complications and confusions are multiplied, because the meaning of these terms
have changed during a development in epistemology, semantics, and philosophy of
mind that covers over two millennia.
I entered this domain of this conceptual problem
quite innocently from the vantage point of psychotherapy research. Psychotherapy is a laboratory that demonstrates,
incessantly, the relationships between intra-psychic processes and how they get
expressed in the joint interchange between clients and therapists. Every
utterance of the client refers to something.
Usually, it is about something else than about the immediate interaction
in the consulting room. Clients’ life events, memories, fantasies, dreams,
fears, and hopes enter into the therapeutic dialogue. Both partners try to make
sense of these expressions and find new ways of understanding the client’s
predicament. Psychotherapists cannot escape the issue of client intrapsychic
processes and their expression in the therapeutic dialogue.
When clients speak about something, what do
they do? Do they convey their mind’s content, which is built up as a complex
repertoire of mental representations? This looks obvious. Communication is a vehicle
that gives an external form to mental contents. We are happy with this idea and
do not recognise the problems that stem from philosophical assertions made over
2300 years ago. Aristotle can be regarded as one influential source of the
confusion between reference and representation. In the first paragraph of De Interpretatione he wrote:
Now spoken words [ta en te phone] are symbols [symbola]
of affections in the soul [pathemata], and written
marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not
the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the
first place signs [semeia] of—affections
of the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are
likenesses [omoiomata] of—actual
things [pragmata]—are also the same. (Translated by J.L. Ackrill)
Ackrill’s
translation is regarded as the most accurate in conveying the meaning of the
Greek terms that Aristotle used in the formulation. We still hear echoes of
them in “phonemes”, “pathology”, and “pragmatics”. The important point here is
a division between expression as a semiotic phenomenon and the affections of
the soul as representative phenomena. The leap is actually staggering. What
mental process can account for transforming mental likenesses of things into
symbolic expressions? Aristotle did not give an answer to it. In the meantime,
the theory of mental likenesses underwent some changes, especially in the writings
of Descartes and Kant. But behind these transformations we still can recognise
Aristotle’s original formulation. The gap between the representational mind and
the referential expressions remains firm. To explore the problems it has caused
for psychological theories of infant development, language acquisition, and
psychopathology will be my main aim in the forthcoming posts.
