# Haugeland on Representational Genera  ## Metadata - Author: [[Martin Roth]] - Full Title: Haugeland on Representational Genera - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: In a review of John Haugeland’s Having Thought, Dan Dennett called Haugeland’s essay “Representational Genera” a “stunning piece” and a “display of philosophical move-making of the highest order” (Journal of Philosophy, December 1998). - URL: https://philosophyofbrains.com/2010/07/20/haugeland-on-representational-genera.aspx ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Haugeland spends a great deal of time trying to show why the canonical account of the distinction cannot be right. Haugeland goes about this in a number of ways, but the perhaps most powerful route—rhetorically and probatively—is his debunking of several “outlandish theses” concerning the alleged ease with which we can “translate” iconic representations into equivalent (content-wise) logical representations (and vice-versa). For example, one might be tempted to think that by taking a picture of a written copy of a description, one can produce an iconic translation of the description. Not so, says Haugeland, and to think otherwise is to confuse representing with recording. The photo of the description records the description, and if the photo is clear, one may be able to recover the content of the description from the image. But the content of the photo is not the content of the description. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hne2bmd345d4bds3eppwmdtg))