Representation, Embodiment, and Subpersonal States

Abstract

In the literature on psychosemantics, fully externalist views hold that nomological brain-environment relations exhaustively determine the representational properties of internal states; computational role has no bearing. Fully internalist views reverse both claims. I argue that there is no overwhelming reason to adopt either view, and that the most promising alternative is functional-role semantics (FRS). Next, I show that the main arguments against FRS fail at the subpersonal level of description—a fact obscured by the “psychofunctionalist” tradition’s persistent conflation of personal with subpersonal. I survey six interrelated differences between them. Unlike personal-level states, subpersonal states are not inferentially integrated, never conscious, never expressed in speech, lack mental attitude, are not composed of concepts, and do not resist computational treatment. I then go on to distinguish between representing a rule, embodying it, and conforming to it, providing rough-and-ready characterizations of each phenomenon. Crucially, embodiment is an intermediate notion, distinguishable from the others by conceivable empirical tests. Finally, I discuss the distinction between occurrent and dispositional personal-level states—propositional attitudes such as datable judgments and standing beliefs. I argue that an analogous distinction operates at the subpersonal level, between mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles, respectively.