Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 17
Writing and representation
Philip E. Agre
University of California, Los Angeles, CA
Introduction
The notion of representation obviously labors under a long philosophical his-
tory (Judovitz 1988; Rorty 1979; Silvers 1989), not to mention the history of art
(Hagen 1986; Wallis 1984), literature (Auerbach 1953; Brodsky 1987; Krieger
1987), and historiography (Hartog 1988; White 1973). These days, though, it
also labors under an appreciable technical history, handed down through a
practice of building computer systems that construct, maintain, and manip-
ulate “representations” (Brachman & Levesque 1985; Haugeland 1981). And
the philosophical and computational issues interact. I often find that philoso-
phy helps to interpret the difficulties that arise in my technical practice. And
I want to believe that technical practice can help philosophy. In writing the
stories that follow, I have explored some places where technical questions align
with philosophical answers. I don't yet know how to convert these answers back
into technical practice.
I disagree with two widespread ideas about representation, namely “se-
mantics” and “world models”. The main tradition of semantics holds - pre-
supposes - that a representation has a “meaning” or a “content” independent
of the identity, location, attitudes, or activities of any particular agent (but cf.
Barwise & Perry 1983). This meaning or content is often understood as a sys-
tematic, objective relationship between the representation itself and states of
affairs obtaining in the world. A world model is a component of a physically
realized computational system, an object whose internal structure stands in a
systematic, objective, analogical relationship to states of affairs presumed to
obtain in the world. Some computational process maintains the model as the
world changes; reasoning about the world involves inspecting and manipulat-
