Revenge of The Given

ing from some or other opaque one; viz by ignoring the mode of representation in certain specifications of a representational content. There are, to be sure, two ways one might read an assertion that John believes the king of France is bored: according to the opaque construal, the speaker takes responsibility for the definite description, according to the transparent construal he doesn’t. (See eg. Brandom, 19xx; Dennett, 19xx). But that’s a distinction between two styles of belief ascription, not between two styles of believing or two ways of mentally representing. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, for the difference between representing and representing as; representing a thing is always representing it as this-orthat; though one always has the option, in saying that something is represented, of not bothering to say as what.’ That sort of objection has force on the assumption that representing is indeed an abstraction from representing as. But that assumption is not available in the present polemical context; that representing requires representing as is supposed to be the conclusion of the argument, not its premise. Suffice it for present purposes then,. if we can imagine, even roughly, how X might represent Y without representing it under some description or other I think, in fact, that there’s a plausible candidate: X represents Y insofar as X carries information about Y, where `carries information about...’ is itself read as transparent. (Information is (more or less) correlation according to standard accounts and I don’t suppose anybody thinks that correlation is description-relative). Maybe construing content as a kind of information in the case of the given, would allow for representing without representing as, and hence allow for unconceptualized representing. Well then, is there a serious possibility of thinking of the content of the given in some informational sort of way? This is another of those questions that scare me, so I don’t 20 As, by the way, `bare’ demonstratives are sometimes supposed to do. 21 See, eg, Dretske, 19xx; Fodor 19xx etc. 22 If there is a correlation then, presumably, there will be a covering law which explains it, and there will be counterfactuals that the law supports It is thus important to recognize that `correlates with’ and `carries information about...’ can be transparent even if `nomically explains’ contexts and subjunctive contexts are not According to the usual construal, events typically carry information about the events that caused them, but not about what it was about the events that caused them in virtue of which they did so