Organized Representations Forming a Computationally Useful Processing Structure

Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. Representations from an organized family are tokened on different occasions and systematically interrelated (eg. analogue magnitude representations). Organization has been elided with structural representation, but the two are in fact distinct. An under-appreciated merit of representational organization is the way it facilitates computational processing. When representations from different organized families interact, they form a processing structure. These processing structures can be computationally useful. Many of the cases where organization has seemed significant, but which fall short of structural representation, are cases where representational organization underpins a computationally useful processing structure.