Anticipation and Representation

What is the relation between anticipations and representation? Anticipations of an external system, or of the system environment, might be generated from a model, a representation, of that system or that environment. In contrast, I will argue that there is a different sense of anticipation — internal anticipation of the flow of interaction between a system and its environment — that constitutes the basis upon which foundational representation is emergent. In simple form, anticipations of interaction appropriateness are involved in selecting what interactions to engage in, those anticipations can be false and falsified, and that constitutes the emergence of representational truth value. Other more complex forms of representation, and other psychological phenomena, are constructed out of, and within the framework of, this basic emergence. Anticipations can certainly be based on representations, on models of the system whose activities are being anticipated. There is, however, a deeper relationship between anticipation and representation: representation is emergent in particular kinds of anticipation. An interacting system must in some manner select which interactions to engage in, or what flow of interacting to pursue. Such selections anticipate that those interactions will be appropriate in that environment at least in the sense that they proceed within anticipated bounds. They will also be selected, in general, with respect to the potential accomplishment of a goal, and that too may succeed or fail, but it is the basic appropriateness anticipation that I focus on here. The actual flow of interaction may or may not proceed within anticipated bounds. In general, it will do so in certain environments and not in others. Selecting an interaction, then, presupposes that the environment is one of those kinds that supports that kind of interaction, that the environment has whatever the properties are that support that kind of interaction. Selecting an interaction constitutes an implicit predication of the environment: this environment is one of those, has those properties, that supports the selected interaction. That implicit predication, in turn, that set of implicit presuppositions about the environment, can be true or false: the interaction can proceed within anticipated bounds or not. This is the point of emergence of the normativity of representational truth value out of the pragmatic normativity of success and failure (Bickhard, 1993, 2003a, in press, in preparation). The Evolution of More Complex