ON THE EFFICACY OF REPRESENTATION
Atsushi Shimojima · 1996
In this dissertation, “representations” are external objects that we use to present information about some other objects on the basis of some fixed semantic rules. All the following objects count as representations: a set of Japanese declarative sentences describing Mount Fuji, a time table of the Boston subway system, a geometry diagram used to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem, a state map of the United States, a relief map of a Rocky terrain, a ball-and-stick model of a molecular, and a scale model of the Rockfellar center. The dissertation studies how different modes of presenting information exhibit different degrees and kinds of efficacy as an aid for human reasoning. The main hypothesis, which we dub the “Constraint Hypothesis,” is that the varience in inferential potentials of different modes of representation is largely attributable to particular ways in which structural constraints on representations match and mismatch with constraints on their targets. If proven true, the hypothesis provides a definite perspective for the study of information representation in general, which is rapidly taking the shape of an independent branch of science. As the basis for our analysis, we adopt the mathematical framework of the “qualitative information theory” being developed by Dretske, Barwise, Perry, and Seligman. We analyze several key properties that account for the efficacy of particular modes of representation, including the capacity of providing “free rides” in inference, the