I don’t need a “theory” to explain how a “hypothetical” learning algorithm can build a generative model that can represent this kind of information in its latent variables, and draw appropriate inferences.
Sure, but we would still need a separate explanation if we want to understand how representation/reference works in a model (or in the brain) itself. If we are interested in that, of course. It could be interesting from the standpoint of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and of course machine learning interpretability.
If, when you run these algorithms, you wind up with all kinds of edge cases where it’s unclear what is “about” what, (and you do), then that’s a sign that you should not be treating “aboutness” as a bedrock principle in the first place.
I don’t think we did run into any edge cases of representation so far where something partially represents or is partially represented, like chess is partially sport-like. Representation/reference/aboutness doesn’t seem a very vague concept. Apparently the difficulty of finding an adequate definition isn’t due to vagueness.
That being said, it’s clearly not necessary for your theory to cover this topic if you don’t find it very interesting and/or you have other objectives.
Sure, but we would still need a separate explanation if we want to understand how representation/reference works in a model (or in the brain) itself. If we are interested in that, of course. It could be interesting from the standpoint of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and of course machine learning interpretability.
I don’t think we did run into any edge cases of representation so far where something partially represents or is partially represented, like chess is partially sport-like. Representation/reference/aboutness doesn’t seem a very vague concept. Apparently the difficulty of finding an adequate definition isn’t due to vagueness.
That being said, it’s clearly not necessary for your theory to cover this topic if you don’t find it very interesting and/or you have other objectives.