Reasoning , representation and social practice ( extended abstract )

The idea that human cognition essentially involves symbolic reasoning and the manipulation of representations which somehow stand for entities in the real world is central to “cognitivist” approaches to AI and cognitive science, but has been repeatedly challenged within these disciplines; while the very idea of representation has been problematised by philosophers such as Dreyfus, Davidson, McDowell and Rorty. This extended abstract discusses Robert Brandom’s thesis that the representational function of language is a derivative outcome of social practices rather than a primary factor in mentation and communication, and raises some questions about the computational implications of his approach.