Haskins Publications

Number	525
Year	1986
Drawer	9
Entry Date	11/18/1999
Authors	Turvey, M. T.
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Publication	Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol 9 No. 1, 153-154.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0525.pdf
Abstract	[Introduction] It is refreshing to see a scholar who is largely sympathetic to the so-called information processing or representational/computational approach to cognitive systems recognizing its fundamental inadequacies. To be blunt, that approach fails to come to terms with either information or intentionality. Sayre’s response to these inadequacies, however, keeps close to the received view. He assumes that a biologically and psychologically relevant sense of information can be provided by the mathematical theory of communication: he assumes that intentionality amounts to representation. These assumptions are bolstered by the closely cognate beliefs that intentionality is to be ascribed to some roughly midway-state in the classical afferent-efferent link and that there is a metamorphosis from meaningless states to meaningful states. To his credit, Sayre aspires to make the representations genuine. He wants them to stand for real things. He wants the transition from meaningless sensory states to meaningful perceptual states to be (mathematically) principled.
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