The idea that everything is not as it seems is a consistent theme in modern media. One may even argue that it is even more prevalent in postmodern media. It’s an idea that grips our fear that everyone who smiles at us has something to hide, that it’s “too good to be true.” Looking at examples such as The Matrix and Inception, we can see that these ideas go from the purely situational to believing that the entire world that we live in may just be a figment of our (or someone else’s) imagination. However, this fear is not a purely modern/postmodern concern; the idea that we aren’t fully aware of the real world was present in the ancient philosophy of Plato, specifically with the Allegory of the Cave. In modern philosophy, this school of thought, …show more content…
Chemero outlines two schools of anti-representationalism: ontological and epistemological (62). For the ontological school of anti-representationalism, Chemero provides a nature hypothesis that argues that the human mind does not work with representations (629). We can straight out reject this hypothesis because it is factually untrue. Physically, the mind has to work with representations of the physical world, as the electrical signals that transmit the information are, in and of themselves, a representation. The second type is epistemological and is titled the Knowledge Hypothesis that states that “the best models and/or explanations of natural cognitive systems will not invoke explicit representations” (296). Chemero is dubious of the ability of this hypothesis to support anti-representationalism (646) and rightfully so. The reason that this hypothesis is able to function is because it is just vague enough to accommodate the way that representationalism actually functions. The entire hypothesis hinges upon the word explicit, which could realistically go either way. This is a problematic hypothesis, because it is entirely victim to how the reader perceives the sentences, which, ironically, falls victim to different representations based upon the individual. Furthermore, …show more content…
First, Kind argues that there are two kinds of representationalism: weak (nonreductive) and strong (reductive) (406). She characterizes the weak variety of representationalism as taking all of the information that is provided, but then tacking on a footnote to the information that says that it is dependent on the phenomenal character of the observer (Kind 406). On the other hand, strong representation removes the original object from consideration entirely, focusing solely on the representation of the object (Kind 406). A problem with conceptualizing something solely on its perceived qualities is that there is a potential for a single sense to give two different representations, causing reductive representation to topple. Gray gives an example of a pit viper that can see in the infrared spectrum (367). This viper is able to see temperature, meaning that this is both a heat sense and a visual sense. These are two different representations from the same sensory data. Now, an objection may be raised that that these representations are layered on top of each other meaning that the infrared indicates temperature and everything can coexist happily, but Gray preempted that argument responding that because the “second layer of content is represented by the representation of a first layer of content,”