Why representation(s) will not go away: crisis of concept or crisis of theory?

A treatment of the notion of ‘representation’ requires philosophical, conceptual, and empirical arguments (Goodman 1981 [1968]; Rorty 1980; Jorna 1990). Philosophical and conceptual arguments are always involved because the choice of concepts often presupposes a philosophical position. In addition, discussions about ‘representation’ and, especially, the so-called ‘crisis of representation’ are subject to fads and fashions. However, in our view, there can never be a crisis of ‘representation’, just as there can be no crisis of weather or crisis of the atom. It is true that a crisis in the interpretation of representation or in the operationalization of this notion may be at issue, but such an interpretation must be clearly formulated and elaborated. We believe that there is a philosophical debate on the notion of ‘representation’, but we also believe that ‘representations’ have a steady empiricalconstructivist side that will continue to exist as long as knowledge and human cognition exist. Let us begin with a few general remarks on ‘representation’. We postulate the equivalence of the concepts of representation, symbol, and sign and support the classical tenet that representation means ‘aliquid stat pro aliquo’. On these premises, we will discuss the major positions in the debate on the crisis of representation. We will then go into the details of various aspects of ‘representation’, such as its characterization in terms of predication, various features of the notion of representation, and the relation between representation, knowledge, and human cognition. After the discussion of these analytical and conceptual aspects of our topic, the constructivist-empirical domain of representations will be dealt with in the light of our present research, the CASTOR Project, which deals with innovation and knowledge change in members of organizations. As our present CASTOR research shows, knowledge in organizations is really knowledge of human cognition and representations.