Representation and reality
Abstract
Part I raises the problems that will shape our investigation of representation. Locke's account is inadequate because of its failure
to allow any role to an agent who creates or understands the representational relation. Representation occurs mysteriously by means of mediating entities. This inadequacy becomes even more evident in contrast with Aquinas' account of the activity of mind: representation for Aquinas is an act (not an object) of mind. A reading of Aquinas
also illuminates the reasons for the extreme passivity of Locke's account, since its origins are clearly to be seen in the Thomist account, but Locke's version has lost the most important feature of the Thomist account. Descartes' conception of 'ideas' is ambivalent between act
and object; and, in examining some of the problems of his account, we shall see the importance of an intentional interpretation of representation: that it is an act of thought about some object. Part II develops the issues raised earlier within the
particular context of signification and semiotic theory. The semiotic theories of Saussure, Peirce .and Piaget are examined, with occasional reference to Frege. The theme of Chapters 4 to 6 is that a signifier
is only as good as the intelligence which uses it. It is not because humans have a sign system that they can achieve 'disengagement' from any particular 'here-and-now' context: other animals also use representative items, but not in the same way as humans do. Something more is required than just the availability of some physical item which can stand in for something else. There are various kinds of signifiers - broadly speaking, those which are used wittingly and those which are
unwittingly used - and what gives a signifier its particular structure is the manner of its use. Part II, then, deals with questions about the representative item and how it comes to represent other items. But this investigation reveals the importance of the representative act, and it is to this topic that we turn in the final Part.
Part III focuses on the activity of representation. What kind of act is it, and how is it possible? In Chapter 7 a distinction is made between active and passive senses of representation, and arising
out of this distinction we study the particular case of images, considered as a form of representation. Chapter 8 presents a contrast between non-representational (animal) thought and representational
thought, and this leads to a final discussion of the relationship between representation, thought and reality.