Representation of Knowledge: Non-Linguistic Forms do we Need Images and Analogues?

It is no accident that inside most psychological theories of representation we can, if we look closely enough, discern a small person with his eyes on a screen and his hands on the controls. The metaphor is so seductive that almost all theories of perception succumb to it (as Kaufman, 1974 has noted in his recent review of theories in perception). True, we try to deliver the homonculus a better and more stable picture than falls on the eye of the larger person he is controlling -in fact we usually go to the trouble of presenting him with a three-dimensional model (often holographic), hoping to lighten his load, but the little man seems so friendly and familiar that we can't imagine how we could do without him. The dilemma this places us in goes back several millenia. It runs something like this. We need to have some internal representation of the world in order to think about it (indeed, in order to apprehend it at all). But if this internal representation is too similar to the world itself it cannot help us to apprehend it since it merely moves the same problem inside. On the other hand if it is too dissimilar then how can it represent the world at all? Epistemologists have squirmed under the horns of this dilemma trying by various means to make the problem disappear. Psychologists on the other hand have by and large dismissed the problem as old-fashioned (which it is) and have proceeded to be rigorous in their experimental analysis of the "functional role of images", Where images are not merely "pictures" but are artfully becoming much more fleeting and sketchy. Sometimes they are referred to as perceptual schemas, sometimes as "the activation of perceptual processes", and more recently as a~alo~ues. The little man for his part has been put in a black box where he continues to live under such guises as "the visual system" or as something which responds to the analogues by moving limbs or uttering sentences as required. This account is admittedly unfair to the many investigators who understand the basic problem quite well and are struggling to develop representation systems adequate to the task. But I believe that the caricature adequately characterizes the vast majority of psychological approaches to the phenomenon of so-called "non-verbal representation".