Writing and representation - Narrative Intelligence - page 285

I want to concentrate on representations written on paper. The image of
standing in a kitchen or on a street with a written text in your hand is a good
reminder that relating texts to circumstances requires work and that this work
requires understanding in some measure what you're doing. You have to un-
derstand what you're doing since the text certainly doesn't (cf. Searle 1981).
Obviously representations often influence your actions, but you don't under-
stand what you're doing in virtue of owning them. This point is supposed to
apply equally to all forms of representation, not just writing. The idea that
understanding does not reside in representations is difficult and consequen-
tial. The paper's later stories will explore this idea in the context of “internal
language”.
Five fairly independent notes follow.
The homunculus and the orbiculus is an assault on the notion of a world
model, placing it in a philosophical tradition of trying to explain the human
ability to act competently in the world by pretending that the relationship
between person and world is reproduced inside the person's head. This sort
of explanation is seductive because it plays to the principal strength of cur-
rent computational technology: building abstractions inside of computers that
are almost entirely cut off from the outside world. But it doesn't work well
in practice.
Writing as bad and good metaphor for representation contrasts two ways in
which written texts might be regarded as prototypes of representation. The
first, “bad” way focuses however tacitly on certain physical properties of written
texts. This bad understanding of writing is central to the main tradition of
computing. The second, “good”, way concentrates on more abstract aspects of
written texts: both the text and your surroundings are outside of you, and so it
takes work to see the world as being what the text is talking about.
A story about photocopier supplies also concerns written instructions. A secre-
tary is justifiably annoyed because somebody has put laser-printer dry toner in
the photocopier. What happened and why? At issue is the selective use people
must make of the representational materials that surround them. I defend the
culprit, arguing that the phrase “dry toner” on a bottle is not “ambiguous” in a
way that anybody could be expected to notice, even if evidence serving to iden-
tify and resolve the ambiguity is readily available. One would like photocopier
users to be “careful”, but it's hard to formulate the demand in an actionable