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Fishing with the wrong nets: How the implicit slips through the Representational Theory of Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1999

Luis Jiménez
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Universidad de Santiago, 15706 Santiago, Spainjimenez@usc.es web.usc.es/~psljim/englishpage.html
Axel Cleeremans
Affiliation:
Cognitive Science Research Unit, Université Libre de Bruxelles CP 122, 1050 Brussels, Belgiumaxcleer@ulb.ac.be srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/axc.html

Abstract

Dienes & Perner's target article is not a satisfactory theory of implicit knowledge because in endorsing the representational theory of knowledge, the authors also inadvertently accept that only explicit knowledge can be causally efficacious, and hence that implicit knowledge is an inert category. This conflation between causal efficacy, knowledge, and explicitness is made clear through the authors' strategy, which consists of attributing any observable effect to the existence of representations that are as minimally explicit as needed to account for behavior. In contrast, we believe that causally efficacious and fully implicit knowledge exists, and is best embodied in frameworks that depart radically from classical assumptions.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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