The Cambridge handbook of cultural-historical psychology

characteristically de-couplable (as defined by absence and distalness) to qualify as representations. For them, such features of cognitive states (if true) are accountable in a dynamic, enactive and importantly non-contentful framework. A final remark should be made concerning the discussion of predictive coding accounts of vision. The inclusion is commendable. Given the increasing prevalence of predictive models, debates over their relationship with representation are likely to escalate in coming years—but currently there is a gap in the literature, and The Innocent Eye takes a brave step toward filling it. Nevertheless, some of the conclusions bear further development. Orlandi rightly rejects the view that predictive coding is representational in the same sense as traditional inferentialist theories. Predictive coding explanations are not constructive in the bottom-up sense, do not (typically) treat early visual states as representations, and do not treat priors as encoded premises akin to the inferentialist’s stored rules. Orlandi moves from these observations to the position that predictive coding is committed to representations only insofar as certain high-level hypotheses count as visual percepts. Representations play no role in visual processing itself. However, one might think that the processing versus percept dichotomy is leading us astray. It seems that if predictive coding theories are representational, they are representational in so far as they posit generative models at various levels in the hierarchical processing scheme—models which in turn function as stand-ins for the causal-probabilistic structure of the world. These models are action guiding and de-couplable in the sense that they are top-down and predictive. In turn, perceptual processing is in part explained by the dynamics of these representational models, their interaction with incoming stimuli, and their role in the generation of hypotheses. One can of course, as Orlandi does, understand a hypothesis as a mere active cluster of units to be checked against some lower-level units. But this is not all that is happening within the predictive coding story, and it ignores the important role of internal models as structural “predictors” of stimuli. Representation here does not play the same role as it does in traditional inferentialist accounts, and it does not exhaust explanation of a phenomenon in the same way, but nonetheless it appears to play some role in the explanation of visual processing. The Innocent Eye provides plenty of evidence as to how the embedded theorist could begin to respond to these objections. But one is left questioning whether those who are not already sympathetic to a moderate embedded view will be convinced. This however, is not indicative of the weakness of the argument as such, but of the byzantine complexity and confusion surrounding the debate over representation, and the ambiguity of the victory conditions. Perhaps the greatest strength of the The Innocent Eye is that it functions as a sobering case study with which to focus recent debates over the role of representation in scientifically informed explanations. Regardless of one’s philosophical allegiance, the book usefully draws out some of the stakes by centering in on the concrete issue of visual processing. In doing so, it provides a readable yet comprehensive contribution to one of the most important and hotly contested areas in current philosophy of cognitive science.