Directive representation and the Job Description Challenge

Philosophical work on representation has largely focused on descriptive content, which concerns what the world is like. Neuroscientists and psychologists regularly make other sorts of content ascriptions, however, including to forward models, motor commands, and error signals. Here I focus on directive states – states that shape what a system does – in relation to the question: what makes a directive state a representation? I begin by recharacterizing Ramsey’s (2007) Job Description Challenge (JDC) so that it applies to directive states. After arguing that existing answers to the JDC do not answer the “directive JDC,” I develop my own account by asking: what is the explanatory payoff of appeal to directive representations? I argue that directive representations help explain how a system achieves a particular outcome in the face of varying internal or external conditions. To be a representation, then, a directive state must make a specific causal contribution to bringing about an outcome in a way that is decouplable from any particular behavior of the system. This account captures both what is distinctive about directive representation and what it has in common with descriptive representation. It also implies that we should be much more sparing in attributing content to directive states.