O "frame problem": a sensibilidade ao contexto como um desafio para teorias representacionais da mente

Abstract

Context sensitivity is one of the distinctive marks of human intelligence. Understanding the exible way in which humans think and act in a potentially innite number of circumstances, even though theyre only nite and limited beings, is a central challenge for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, particularly in the case of those using representational theories. In this work, the frame problem, that is, the challenge of explaining how human cognition efciently acknowledges what is relevant from what is not in each context, has been adopted as a guide. By using it, weve been able to describe a fundamental tension between context sensitivity and the mental representations used in cognition theories. The rst chapter discusses the nature of the frame problem, as well as the reasons for its persistence. In the second and third chapters, the problem is used as a measure tool in order to inquiry a few representational approaches and check how well suited they are to deal with context dependencies. The problems found are then correlated with the frame problem. Throughout the discussion, we try to show that 1) none of the evaluated approaches is capable of dealing with context sensitivity in a proper manner, but 2) thats not a reason to think that the frame problem constitutes an argument against representational approaches in general, and 3) that it constitutes a fundamental conceptual tool in contemporary research.