meaning of representation action

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• representation

the act of representing.

the state of being represented.

the expression or designation by some term, character, symbol, or the like.

action or speech on behalf of a person, group, business house, state, or the like by an agent, deputy, or representative.

the state or fact of being so represented: to demand representation on a board of directors.

Government . the state, fact, or right of being represented by delegates having a voice in legislation or government.

the body or number of representatives, as of a constituency.

Diplomacy .

the act of speaking or negotiating on behalf of a state.

an utterance on behalf of a state.

presentation to the mind, as of an idea or image.

a mental image or idea so presented; concept.

the act of portrayal, picturing, or other rendering in visible form.

a picture, figure, statue, etc.

the production or a performance of a play or the like, as on the stage.

Often representations. a description or statement, as of things true or alleged.

a statement of facts, reasons, etc., made in appealing or protesting; a protest or remonstrance.

Law . an implication or statement of fact to which legal liability may attach if material: a representation of authority.

Origin of representation

Other words from representation.

• non·rep·re·sen·ta·tion, noun
• o·ver·rep·re·sen·ta·tion, noun
• pre·rep·re·sen·ta·tion, noun
• self-rep·re·sen·ta·tion, noun
• un·der·rep·re·sen·ta·tion, noun

Words Nearby representation

• reprehensible
• reprehension
• representational
• representationalism
• representative
• representatives

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use representation in a sentence

It was a metaphorical statement of giving and withdrawing consent for a show rooted in a literal representation of Coel being assaulted.

The mathematically manipulated results are passed on and augmented through the stages, finally producing an integrated representation of a face.

I hope this list—a representation of the most consequential changes taking places in our world—is similarly useful for you.

“Given the moment we are in, I can only hope our institutions really understand what this failure of representation means to our city,” he said.

The voters don’t want to have an elected city attorney on the, and representation said, that’s fine.

With all that said, representation of each of these respective communities has increased in the new Congress.

As this excellent piece in Mother Jones describes, however, Holsey had outrageously poor representation during his trial.

During that time days, Livvix went through court hearings without legal representation .

What do you think prompted the change in comic book representation of LGBTQ characters?

Barbie is an unrealistic, unhealthy, insulting representation of female appearance.

With less intelligent children traces of this tendency to take pictorial representation for reality may appear as late as four.

As observation widens and grows finer, the first bald representation becomes fuller and more life-like.

The child now aims at constructing a particular linear representation , that of a man, a horse, or what not.

He had heard it hinted that allowing the colonies representation in Parliament would be a simple plan for making taxes legal.

But sufficient can be discerned for the grasping of the idea, which seems to be a representation of the Nativity.

British Dictionary definitions for representation

/ ( ˌrɛprɪzɛnˈteɪʃən ) /

the act or an instance of representing or the state of being represented

anything that represents, such as a verbal or pictorial portrait

anything that is represented, such as an image brought clearly to mind

the principle by which delegates act for a constituency

a body of representatives

contract law a statement of fact made by one party to induce another to enter into a contract

an instance of acting for another, on his authority, in a particular capacity, such as executor or administrator

a dramatic production or performance

(often plural) a statement of facts, true or alleged, esp one set forth by way of remonstrance or expostulation

linguistics an analysis of a word, sentence, etc, into its constituents : phonetic representation

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of representation in English

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representation noun ( ACTING FOR )

• Defendants have a right to legal representation and must be informed of that right when they are arrested .
• The farmers demanded greater representation in parliament .
• The main opposing parties have nearly equal representation in the legislature .
• The scheme is intended to increase representation of minority groups .
• The members are chosen by a system of proportional representation.
• admissibility
• extinguishment
• extrajudicial
• extrajudicially
• out-of-court
• pay damages
• plea bargain
• walk free idiom

representation noun ( DESCRIPTION )

• anti-realism
• anti-realist
• complementary
• confederate
• naturalistically
• non-figurative
• non-representational
• poetic license
• symbolization

representation noun ( INCLUDING ALL )

• all manner of something idiom
• alphabet soup
• it takes all sorts (to make a world) idiom
• non-segregated
• odds and ends
• of every stripe/of all stripes idiom
• this and that idiom
• variety is the spice of life idiom
• wide choice

representation | Business English

Examples of representation, collocations with representation.

• representation

These are words often used in combination with representation .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of representation

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Word of the Day

to add harmonies to a tune

Shoots, blooms and blossom: talking about plants

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• representation (ACTING FOR)
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• make representations to sb
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Media and Society

Production, content and participation, student resources, meaning, representation and power, chapter introduction.

The creation and control of meaning-making is critical to the exercise of power.

How is meaning made and controlled?

How does representation work as a social process?

How is meaning used to exercise power?

In this chapter we:

• Define meaning and power.
• Consider how meaning and power are related to one another.
• Examine several fundamental accounts of the relationship between meaning and power: hegemony, ideology, discourse and representation.
• Overview how media representations organise everyday life. 

Cases & Activities

Constructing meanings: #iftheygunnedmedown.

The shooting of Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 drew attention to how news organisations draw on social media profiles to depict victims or perpetrators of crime.

Some news organisations ran a photo of Brown in his graduation cap and gown, while many others used a photo of Brown wearing a basketball singlet and making a hand gesture that naïve viewers might interpret as a gang sign.

The use of an image that implied Brown was a member of a gang, prompted many black Americans to post contrasting images from their social media accounts to Twitter using the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown. Many featured young black men in formal dress for church, military or graduation in one image, while in the other image they wore street wear that could be used to suggest they are gang members.

Like the images used for Brown, people drew attention to the way that selective use of images from their social media profiles could be used to construct very different representations of their identities. By constructing their identity one way or another the media could invoke differing perceptions of the extent to which the use of force by police was legitimate. 

Consider these images. How do the two images of the same individual represent them in different ways? What ‘symbols’ in the images convey different meanings that you associate with that individual? How do the images position the individuals differently in power relationships?

Examine images of yourself on your own social media profile. Find two contrasting images. Consider the way in which the images represent your identity differently. If the media were reporting, could they use the images to tell different stories about your character? Would characteristics like your gender, ethnicity or sexuality be at play in the interpretation of those images? If not, would the images suggest different aspects of your character that might affect your reputation.

Links below to news stories about the #iftheygunnedmedown hashtag.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mrloganrhoades/how-the-powerful-iftheygunnedmedown-movement-changed-the-con

http://mashable.com/2014/08/12/iftheygunnedmedown-hashtag/

http://time.com/3100975/iftheygunnedmedown-ferguson-missouri-michael-brown/

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/08/iftheygunnedmedown-calls-out-media-portrayal-of-black-youth-following-michael-brown-shooting.html

Representation as a social process: The Occupy protests and casually-pepper-spray-everything cop meme

Representation is a social system involving the continuous production and circulation of meaning. People interact with each other to represent events. Media representations work inter-textually. That is, meanings are transferred from one text to another. Texts make new arrangements of meanings that often depend on the capacity of readers to ‘decode’ them by understanding them in relation to other texts.

Internet memes demonstrate the inter-textual and social process of representation in action. 

The first image above is an image from a protest at the University of California (Davis) in 2011. The protest was part of the global Occupy movement. When students refused to disband a campus police officer sprayed them with pepper spray. The cop’s act was a ‘violent’ one. As an authority figure he used physical force against people. The police are licensed to do that by the state and the university. The act though is also a symbolic one. When police use force against citizens they demonstrate to them what will happen if they do not obey the law.

The cop’s act set off a change of events where the student protestors, university management, news organisations, and the public interacted with each other in an effort to represent the event in different ways.

The protest was videoed and uploaded to YouTube. In the video the crowd can be heard chanting ‘the whole world is watching’ as the cop sprays the protestors with pepper spray. The protestors captured the act on camera. The protestors understood that they could use video to ‘bear witness’ to the event. In doing so, they were able to ‘re-present’ it. They take the act from its original context and turn it into a media text. That text then circulated rapidly through social networks. The ‘re-presentation’ of the act symbolises the excessive use of force by the powerful. The Occupy protests aimed to represent the ‘99%’ of ordinary people against the world’s privileged ‘1%’. The representation of the cop pepper-spraying the protestors symbolises – ‘stands in’ for – the entrenched privilege and blatant use of power the Occupy movement as protesting against in its slogan ‘we are the 99%’.

The protestors’ videos of the incident became a news story. The university needed to respond to the way the video of the protest represented the institution and its relationship with students. The Chancellor of the university organised a media conference. This was an attempt to ‘counter’ the meanings and narratives circulating in conjunction with the pepper spray video. The university attempted to control how the event was represented. They did that by inviting selected media organisations to the media conference, and excluding students from the venue. The students responded to being excluded by forming a silent protest outside. When the Chancellor eventually emerged they formed a silent guard all the way from the venue to her car. This silent protest was also filmed and the video circulated widely online. The protestors used silence to represent their exclusion. In doing so they drew attention to how the powerful maintain power by controlling who speaks where and when, by attempting to control who gets to represent events. When the Chancellor excluded students from the press conference, she attempted to work with the police and media organisations to control how the event was represented.

Following this event, images of the cop pepper-spraying students were widely reappropriated and recirculated. The pepper-spraying cop ‘represented’ the use of excessive force, the attempt of the powerful to control who gets to speak, the disrespect for democratic values. The cop more broadly represented the use of force against ordinary people, the undermining of democratic rights, and the policing of public space. 

The powerful – like the chancellor and the police – use strategies to attempt to control media representations. They use their relations with media, their resources to organise media events, and control who gets access to those events. In contrast, ordinary people use tacts to resist those meanings.

One way this unfolded with the pepper spray cop was by using the cop as a symbol of excessive power and ‘remixing’ his image into other popular culture texts. The image of the cop worked intertextually to create new representations. In the image above the cop pepper-sprays Bambi. To make sense of this image we need to understand both texts it references: the pepper spray cop and the film Bambi. In the image above, the cop is crudely superimposed over a scene from Bambi. In doing so, the innocence of the scene from Bambi evident in the joyful expressions on the characters’ faces and the colourful animation is juxtaposed with the dark, menacing and violent presence of the cop. The cop is larger than the characters from the animation, towering over them and his head is cropped out of the frame, as if to make him a faceless and distant figure. This image is one of many examples where the cop was super-imposed onto another scene – a movie like Bambi, an important historical moment like the Declaration of Independence, or a cultural icon like a Renaissance painting. The creators of these images were able to repeat this juxtaposition by ‘photo-shopping’ the cop over images in this way. Meaning is created via the repeated gesture of imposing the cop in scenes that evoked the innocence of childhood memory or shared cultural history and values. We can see throughout this example how representation works as a social process, constructing how we understand and act in the world, and a process in which some people have more power than others.

Map out the array of actors involved in attempting to represent the student protest at UC Davis. What were their preferred representations of the event and why? What resources and techniques did they use to create their preferred representations? Who did they interact with to create their preferred representations?

Find other examples of the pepper-spray cop meme.

What texts are referenced in the memes?

How is meaning created in the interplay between the texts?

What do the texts represent?

Links below to the Casually-Pepper-Spray-Everything Cop meme.

Know Your Meme offers a history and explanation of the meme.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop

Google image search for the meme.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih=910&q=casually+pepper+spray+everything+cop&oq=casually+pepper+spray&gs_l=img.3.0.0l2j0i5l3.606.6093.0.6909.39.19.1.8.1.2.446.2413.0j1j3j3j1.8.0....0...1ac.1.52.img..34.5.1361.J65A0TdfUes&gws_rd=ssl

Student video of the protest where the cop pepper-sprays students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBntXr1QFnU

News report about the pepper spray incident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCJEomwVMrw

Video of students’ silent protest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmfIuKelOt4

Fox News description of pepper spray as a ‘food product’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrx6DDgTH_w

Changing meanings

Consider the major societies and ideologies since the beginning of the twentieth century:

• Social Democracy
• Nationalism
• Conservatism

Consider discourses that some of these societies used to organise social and political systems:

• Imperialism: empires can organise development, trade and governance more effectively than indigenous populations.
• Decolonisation: Empires are bad. Indigenous populations should be given independence.
• Human rights: There are universal human values that all societies should respect.

Each of these ideologies was or is taken to be ‘common-sense’. Examine one or more and ask:

• What ideas did they take to be ‘common-sense’ and ‘natural’?
• What institutions, practices, rituals, words and images did they use to convey their ideas?
• Who conveyed the ideas?
• Whose interests did these common-sense ideas serve?
• Who opposed these ideas and why?
• Are these ideas still common-sense? If not, what happened?

Explaining representation with The Wire

In a famous scene in the television drama The Wire three members of a drug gang sit guarding territory called ‘the Pit’ in an inner-city housing estate. The scene uses a metaphor to create meaning between everyday experience, mental concepts and a shared language. The scene illustrates the social nature of representation, how it is embedded within our everyday lives and relationships, and how it embodies and mediates power relationships.

D’Angelo, the leader of the trio sees the two junior members – Wallace and Bodie – playing checkers on a chess board. ‘Hold up you to don’t know how to play chess do you?’ he asks, and sits down to teach them the rules. He begins by picking up the king.

D’Angelo: See this? This the kingpin, a’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.

Bodie : Like your uncle.

D’Angelo : Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

Wallace : Remind me of Stringer.

D’Angelo : And this over here is the castle. It’s like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.

Wallace : Dog, stash don’t move, man.

D’Angelo : C’mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.

Bodie : True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?

D’Angelo : These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it’s like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.

Wallace : So how do you get to be the king?

D’Angelo : It ain’t like that. See, the king stay the king, a’ight? Everything stay who he is. Except for the pawns. Now, if the pawn make it all the way down to the other dude’s side, he get to be queen. And like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves.

Bodie : A’ight, so if I make it to the other end, I win.

D’Angelo : If you catch the other dude’s king and trap it, then you win.

Bodie : A’ight, but if I make it to the end, I’m top dog.

D’Angelo: Nah, yo, it ain’t like that. Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early.

Bodie : Unless they some smart-ass pawns.

D’Angelo explains the rules of chess drawing on the shared conceptual map and language of the inner-city drug trade. In his analysis of the scene, Peter Honig writes:

D’Angelo uses the familiar world of the drug hierarchy to explain an alien and complex game to Bodie and Wallace. At the same time, (the writers) use this scene to explain the (presumably) alien drug game to their audience using the (presumably) familiar rules of chess.

The rules of chess are understood via the world the characters live in, and the rules of the drug trade are understood via the world the audience lives in. Representation maintains power relationships by creating ways of understanding them. Representations make themselves true, ‘all knowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, ‘becomes true’’ (Hall 1997: 49). We are not outside representations. They constitute us as much as we produce and relate to them. Our representations shape both how we understand the world and how we act in it. They construct a position for us as the ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’, and we work to locate ourselves in relation to them. Representation is the production of social knowledge and therefore the development and maintenance of power relationships. Our way of understanding ourselves, our lives and our material worlds is marked out in relation to others, some of whom have more power to structure the schemas within which we understand the world.

By explaining the rules of chess to his colleagues D’Angelo is marking out the power relationships of the inner-city drug trade. For Honig,

D’Angelo isn’t so much teaching them how to play chess as he is trying to help them see that the world they are in is far more complex than they realise. But they refuse to see it, or at least Bodie does. His questions about promotion show a fundamental misunderstanding of board games, and all games. He keeps using the word ‘I’, as in a single piece standing in as his avatar. He is only capable of seeing the drug game as it applies to him in his limited experience in the Pit. He fails to consider the fact that a chess player has to manage an entire army of pieces with a variety of skills and abilities. The concept of both chess and the drug game are bigger than he realises.

The scene demonstrates how representation is a system that can communicate simple material aspects of the world like the rules of a game involving moving objects around a board. At the same time, it can also communicate complex, immaterial, social aspects of the world like the power relationships between people in a criminal enterprise. But, even though D’Angelo intends to explain those more complex power relationships, that doesn’t mean that Wallace and Bodie will understand. Representing social relationships always depends on our place within those relationships. D’Angelo’s explanation of how chess works is grounded in the everyday life experience of the inner-city drug trade, but even so the more junior members of the gang fail to fully appreciate the power relationships D’Angelo describes because of their position in the power relationships D’Angelo is representing. Much later in the narrative, Bodie appears to develop a fuller appreciation of D’Angelo’s representation when he says to a cop, ‘this game is rigged, we’re like them little bitches on the chess board’. The ability to make sense of representations is interrelated with our life experiences. The kind of life we lead, the people we interact with, the material environment we live in embeds us within certain systems of representation. Representation is a system for understanding things we can’t see or touch, but which we know shape our lives. Representation is critical to creating and regulating relationships between people. And, the material world in which we live shapes our systems of representation.

Bodie’s final line might also demonstrate the on-going nature of representation. Meanings are only ever partially and temporarily fixed. On one level the ‘rules’ of the game are represented as fixed and immutable to the ‘players’. The ‘king stays the king’ in both the game of chess and the drug trade. But, when Bodie says, ‘unless they some smart-ass pawns’, he suggests that players understand social arrangements and their meanings are never completely fixed. Regardless of whether we think D’Angelo ‘gets’ the bigger game that his junior colleagues don’t, or whether we think Bodie deftly ‘gets’ the contingent nature of meaning and power, what we do see here is how an explanation of the game of chess is used to re-present the inner-city drug trade and its power relationships. An explanation of the rules of chess serves to hold ‘in place relationships between people and the world’, and both the characters and the audience locate themselves in relation to those representations and perhaps recognise that they are never ‘finally fixed’ (Hall 1997: 23). Representation always involves the active participation of senders and receivers, communication must be understood as a process of exchange between people.

Representations are important for creating, enacting, maintaining and understanding relations of power. They help us to consider how power is something continually ‘done’ via communication. Practices of representation and power are diffused into our everyday lives and relations with people. Representation is a process embedded within the world, as much as it is a reflection of events and relationships in the world. Representation creates reality in the sense that by constructing our view of the world it shapes how we act in the world. These relationships are enacted by people at all positions in social hierarchies and formations. The three drug gang members as much as they ‘understand’ the system of representation D’Angelo explains to them, also enact it in their daily lives and practices. We can only understand the world and our place in it via discourse (Hall 1997: 45). For Foucault, this representational system was a ‘discursive formation’ that constructed and regulated ways of talking about topics. The relationship between media and the social world is a dynamic one, each interrelating with the other. Just as media re-presents the social world to us, in doing so, it shapes that world. Practices of representation are always-already embedded in the social world. They don’t sit outside of or above events and relationships. They are instead a part of them, and therefore condition them.

Map out how the game of chess represents the power relationships between characters in the urban drug trade.

Reflect on the extent to which the characters understand their role in those power relationships.

Consider how the game of chess makes the drug trade sensible to the audience. What meanings about the drug trade are conferred by the game of chess? Does the scene naturalise and legitimize the drug trade and the underclass?

The ‘King Stay the King’ scene from The Wire (Season 1, Episode 3).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0mxz2-AQ64

Peter Honig’s blogs about The Wire.

http://www.thewireblog.net/season-1/episode3_thebuys/chess-as-a-metaphor-for-everything/

Further Readings

The work of Stuart Hall and Nick Couldry are both instructive in developing an account of media representation. Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding essay, originally published in 1973, provides a seminal account of the process by which meanings are inscribed into texts and deciphered by audiences. Hall’s book Representation published with several colleagues in 1997 (and in an updated edition in 2013) provides a clear and accessible explanation of the cultural and media processes of representation. In the past decade Nick Couldry’s work on mediatisation, media power and rituals has further advanced our understanding of media representations within a media-dense society. Couldry draws our attention to how practices of media representation are embedded in everyday cultural practices, social spaces and power relationships. In chapter 1 we also referred to Foucault’s notion of discourse. For more advanced readers his book Discipline and Punish is a good place to start. In that book he defines the relationship between power, knowledge and representation.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in television discourse (Vol. 7). Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham or Hall, S. (1991). Culture, media, language: working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79. Routledge: London.

Hall, S., Evans, J. & Nixon, S. (Ed.). (2013). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices . Sage: London.

Couldry, N. (2002). The place of media power: Pilgrims and witnesses of the media age. Routledge: London.

Couldry, N. (2003). Media rituals: A critical approach . Routledge: London

Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). Conceptualizing mediatization: Contexts, traditions, arguments. Communication Theory , 23 (3), 191-202.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish. Penguin: London.

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representation

Quick reference.

[Latin repraesentare ‘to make present or manifest’]

1. Depicting or ‘making present’ something which is absent (e.g. people, places, events, or abstractions) in a different form: as in paintings, photographs, films, or language, rather than as a replica . See also description; compare absent presence.

2. The function of a sign or symbol of ‘standing for’ that to which it refers (its referent).

3. The various processes of production involved in generating representational texts in any medium, including the mass media (e.g. the filming, editing, and broadcasting of a television documentary). Such framings of the concept privilege authorial intention. See also auteur theory; authorial determinism; sender-oriented communication.

4. A text (in any medium) which is the product of such processes, usually regarded as amenable to textual analysis (‘a representation’).

5. What is explicitly or literally described, depicted, or denoted in a sign, text, or discourse in any medium as distinct from its symbolic meaning, metaphoric meaning, or connotations: its manifest referential content, as in ‘a representation of…’ See also mimesis; naturalism; referentiality.

6. How (in what ways) something is depicted. However ‘realistic’ texts may seem to be, they involve some form of transformation. Representations are unavoidably selective (none can ever ‘show the whole picture’), and within a limited frame, some things are foregrounded and others backgrounded: see also framing; generic representation; selective representation; stylization. In factual genres in the mass media, critics understandably focus on issues such as truth, accuracy, bias, and distortion ( see also reflectionism), or on whose realities are being represented and whose are being denied. See also dominant ideology; manipulative model; stereotyping; symbolic erasure.

7. The relation of a sign or text in any medium to its referent. In reflectionist framings, the transparent re- presentation, reflection, recording, transcription, or reproduction of a pre-existing reality ( see also imaginary signifier; mimesis; realism). In constructionist framings, the transformation of particular social realities, subjectivities, or identities in processes which are ostensibly merely re- presentations ( see also constitutive models; interpellation; reality construction). Some postmodern theorists avoid the term representation completely because the epistemological assumptions of realism seem to be embedded within it.

8. A cycle of processes of textual and meaning production and reception situated in a particular sociohistorical context ( see also circuit of communication; circuit of culture). This includes the active processes in which audiences engage in the interpretation of texts ( see also active audience theory; beholder's share; picture perception). Semiotics highlights representational codes which need to be decoded ( see also encoding/decoding model; photographic codes; pictorial codes; realism), and related to a relevant context ( see also Jakobson's model).

9. (narratology) Showing as distinct from telling (narration).

10. (mental representation) The process and product of encoding perceptual experience in the mind: see dual coding theory; gestalt laws; mental representation; perceptual codes; selective perception; selective retention.

11. A relationship in which one person (a representative) acting on behalf of another (as in law), or a political principle in which one person acts, in some sense, on behalf of a group of people, normally having been chosen by them to do so (as in representative democracies).

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Body Language: Representation in Action

Mark Rowlands, Body Language: Representation in Action , MIT Press, 2006, 218pp., $36.00 (hbk), ISBN 0262182556.

Reviewed by Shaun Gallagher, University of Central Florida

Mark Rowlands, in his book Body Language (2006), provides an analysis of representation as it enters into action.   For anyone interested in action theory or the philosophy of action, or the concept of representation, this is an important book that will help you get a bearing on the recent embodied, enactive, extended approaches to these topics.

The central question in this book is whether the concept of representation is required for an account of action.   This question is the subject of an ongoing debate that plays the more recent approaches based on embodied, enactive and extended analyses of cognition against traditional accounts of representation.   Rowlands champions the former approaches, and along with several others, like Michael Wheeler (2005), Richard Menary (2007), and Andy Clark and Rick Grush (1999), attempts to defend a minimalist account of representation in embodied action.

First, let's set aside two forms of representation that would shift the focus away from action.   What is not at stake in Rowlands' book is what we might call internal representation, that is, a sort of representation that may (or may not) occur as the basis for propositional attitudes "inside" a cognitive system traditionally defined as mind or brain.   We can also leave aside the question of external representations such as physical signs, diagrams, and such (see Menary 2007 for the importance of such representations).   Rather, the focus is on representation in action and what role representational elements might play in the structure and control of action.

Consider then the classical concept of representation as outlined and rejected by Rowlands (5-10), a concept that is modeled on language, on how words work.   On such a conception, representation:

1.   is internal (it's an image, symbol, neural configuration)

2.   has duration (it's an identifiable thing)

3.   is intentional (it refers to something other than itself -- it has content)

4.   requires interpretation (its meaning derives from the semantic economy of the subject -- like a word or an image its meaning gets fixed in context)

5.   is passive (it's produced, enacted, called forth by some particular situation – à la Dretske; or we do something with it – à la Millikan).

To this list, we should add that representation is decoupleable, that is, it functions even when the feature or object of which it is a representation is absent from the environment.   Rowlands does not include decoupleability in his definition of the classic conception, but as his discussion of decoupleability (157ff.) suggests, it seems to apply to all concepts of representation.   The idea of decoupleability is that one can go "off-line" and represent (imagine or remember) an action or object or context even if that action, object, or context is not currently present.   Accordingly, representation would involve a form of decoupling away from action, away from the target of action, or away from the current context.   One question about representation in action is whether action itself depends on this kind of representation, traditionally defined -- and another question is whether there can be a decoupled element within action itself.

There are some theorists who give negative answers to these questions and take an anti-representationalist view.   Hubert Dreyfus (2002), for example, argues that for practiced or skillful intentional action one does not require representation, traditionally defined as internal.

A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each.   Maximal grip [Merleau-Ponty] names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt.   Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations.   They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.   (Dreyfus 2002, 367)

Dreyfus associates the idea of representation with a failed Cartesian philosophy -- the concept of representation (as used in AI) remains context-independent and bound up with epistemic states of knowing-that (propositional knowledge), when everything about intelligent action and knowing-how depends on being-in-the-world, not standing back and representing the world.

A similar anti-representationalist stance is explicated by Alain Berthoz and Jean-Luc Petit in their recent Phénoménologie et physiologie de l'action (2006).   They argue that the brain is an organ for action rather than an organ for representation.   Berthoz and Petit want to move away from a philosophy that puts language in first place and that models action on language-like representation, where action is equivalent to movement plus representation.   Representations are not the dynamic processes required to explain action.   Yet, even if action involves dynamic anticipation, as it certainly does according to Berthoz and Petit, there is a certain way, as we'll see, that anticipation itself might be considered representational.

What takes the place of representations in non-representationalist accounts of action is a form of perceptually based online intelligence which generates action "through complex causal interactions in an extended-body-environment system" (Wheeler 2005, 193).   But can this sort of system do everything it needs to do without any form of representation?   According to Rowlands, Wheeler, and others, the answer is "no."   One requires some minimal kind of representation in action.

Wheeler (2005), for example, is certainly a friend of Dreyfus' anti-representationalist view, but following Clark (1997), he suggests that there has to be something like "action-oriented representations" (AORs).   AORs are temporary egocentric motor maps of the environment that are fully determined by the situation-specific action.   On this model, it is not that the AORs re -present the pre-existing world in an internal image, or that they map it out in a neuronal pattern:   rather, "how the world is is itself encoded in terms of possibilities for action" (Wheeler 2005, 197).   What is represented in AORs is not knowledge that the environment is x, but knowledge of how to negotiate the environment.   AORs are action specific, egocentric relative to the agent, and context dependent.

But what sort of thing is an AOR?   Is it a neural firing pattern, a motor schema, or something like a bodily movement?   In contrast to Wheeler (2005, 209), Rowlands argues that certain kinds of bodily movements are themselves representational -- not, however, in the traditional sense of representation.   AORs (I'll retain Wheeler's terminology here for convenience) are not internal, enduring, intentional, in need of interpretation, or passive.   For Rowlands (113-114), the following characteristics define the representational nature of action oriented representation.

·      AOR carries information about something other than itself (x)

·      AOR is teleological -- it tracks or has a specific function towards x

·      AOR can misrepresent x

·      AOR occurs within a more general representational framework

·      AOR is decoupleable from x (x may be absent from the immediate environment)

To make the case that certain kinds of bodily movements can count as representational Rowlands distinguishes between intentional actions, sub-intentional acts, and pre-intentional acts.   Sub-intentional acts (O'Shaughnessy 1980) are non-intentional movements, e.g., of tongue or fingers, of which we are not aware, for which there is no reason, and which serve no purpose connected with action.   Pre-intentional acts or "deeds" include such things as the positioning of fingers in catching a ball that is flying toward you at a high rate of speed, or the movement of your fingers while playing Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu in C# Minor on the piano.

Deeds, or pre-intentional acts, include an array of "on-line, feedback-modulated adjustments that take place below the level of intention, but collectively promote the satisfaction of [an] antecedent intention" (103).   Rolands provides a detailed example: Yarbus' (1967) experiments on saccadic eye movements.   In these experiments subjects view a painting of six women and the arrival of a male visitor; subjects are asked to do certain tasks, such as: view the picture at will; judge the age of the people in the painting; remember the clothing worn; indicate which person the man came to visit.   Yarbus found that subjects used different visual scan paths/saccades for each task.   E.g., subjects who were asked about the age of the people focused on their faces.   The scan paths varied systematically with the nature of the task.   The saccades are in some way governed by the intention/task, but they are not intentional in the sense that we do not decide to use this visual tactic, and we are not conscious we are doing the saccades: they are pre-intentional acts.

Rowlands argues that such "deeds" or pre-intentional acts are representational.   Pre-intentional acts:

·      carry information about x (the trajectory, shape, size of the ball, the keyboard, a specific aspect of people in the painting)

·      track x or function in a way that allows me to accomplish something in virtue of tracking x

·      can misrepresent (get it wrong)

·      can be combined into a more general representational structure (I catch the ball and throw it back; I continue to play the music; I can systematically scan a painting)

·      are decoupleable from x (x may be absent from the immediate environment -- e.g., I can later remember and demonstrate how I caught the ball replicating the same act).

Let me focus on this question of decoupleability.   According to any definition of representation, a representation is decoupleable from x (x may be absent from the immediate environment).   But it is difficult to see how pre-intentional acts can decouple from x (the ball, the piano keys, the painting) or the context, without becoming something other than what they are and failing to serve the action originally at stake.   Imagining, remembering, or even re-enacting an action outside of its original context and absent x, may (or may not) require representation -- but this says nothing about representation in action and the role that pre-intentional acts play in constituting that action.

One might be tempted, although Rowlands is not, to appeal to a model developed by Andy Clark and Rick Grush (1999).   They offer a model of representation that puts decoupleability directly into action at a sub-personal level.   They propose that anticipation in motor control, specifically in the working of a forward emulator, involves a decoupled representation.   Since the emulator anticipates (represents) an x that is not there (a future x), or a predicted motor state, it is decoupled from x or the current movement.   Thus, " emulators seem to be a nice, biologically detailed example of the sort of disengagement that Brian Cantwell Smith (1996) has recently argued to be crucial for understanding representation" (Clark and Grush 1999, 7).   On this view, it seems that in the very structure of action (and motor control) one finds an aspect of decoupled representation.

It is difficult, however, to see how an aspect of motor control that is a constitutive part of the action can be considered decoupled from x, the context, or the action itself.   Doesn't the anticipation of a future state or location of x (e.g., anticipating where the ball will be in the next second), or of the predicted motor state (anticipating where to strike the keyboard in the next measure), require reference to the present state or location of x and my hand, or more generally my body's motor state?   Furthermore, the idea of decoupleability seems to interfere with the concept of teleological tracking in this regard.   Nor is it clear in what sense this sort of anticipatory simulation/emulation is "off-line" rather than part of the online process of action.   If one does decouple the emulation, it ceases to be part of a forward motor control mechanism, although it may turn into part of a truly off-line representational process, that is, we may use a decoupled emulation process in memory or imagination.

Decoupleability aside, Rowland's pre-intentional acts could be considered an example of Wheeler's AORs. [1]   As such they are not reducible to neural firing patterns, although they do not exclude such patterns.   They clearly involve the body-schematic motor control system.   So they belong to a system that includes brain and body, but also environment.   "The vehicles of representation do not stop at the skin; they extend all the way out into the world" (Rowlands 2006, 224).   Here Rowlands joins Clark and Wheeler, and the extended mind (vehicle externalism) hypothesis, where AORs are complex causal interactions in an extended-body-environment system -- where the causality is spread around.

Wheeler calls this the "threat from [non-trivial] causal spread" (2005, 200).   Precisely the commitment to some version of this idea is what motivated anti-representationalism in the first place.   Let's say, for example (a la Haugeland 1995), that I am riding my horse from Aix to Ghent.   Getting from one place to another involves having some kind of strategy.

Strategy 1:   I have a stored inner representation of the directions

Strategy 2:   I follow the road and road signs, which are external representations

Strategy 3:   Having decided to go to Ghent, I jump on my horse and start off, and having done it many times before, we (my horse and I) go on automatic pilot and allow the landscape and roads to guide us (no representations required since the landscape, which is not representing anything, does the work)

The third strategy involves non-trivial causal spread since we allow the world to do some of the work.   Does this not rule out a role for representations?   Rowlands would seemingly point to certain pre-intentional body-schematic aspects of my riding and guiding the horse along the road, and call them representational.   Likewise Wheeler argues that in order to go anti-representationalist in an extended cognition paradigm one would have to construe representations as involving (1) strong instructionalism (i.e., the idea that representations provide a full and detailed description of how to achieve the outcome) -- and this is certainly not implied in Rowlands' concept of pre-intentional acts; and (2) the neural assumption (i.e., that neuronal processes play a central and close to exclusive role) -- and this too is not the case on Rowlands' account, since the shape of my body and gravity certainly play a role in pre-intentional acts.   The neural assumption is already weakened in favor of non-neural elements on the extended cognition hypothesis; and we can easily give up (1) -- no need for anything like a fully-specifying representation.   Giving up (1) and (2), however, still leaves room for minimal kinds of representation that are distributed across brain, body, and environment.

But, we can surely ask, what's the point in retaining the term 'representation' in this case?   What work does the concept of representation really do since nothing is being re -presented to the subject, since it is not consistent with the classical notion of representation, and since in working out the justification for characterizing this as representation one is already explaining action in non-representational terms of perception-based complex causal interactions in an extended-body-environment system?   A facetious economic argument against either the representationalist, or even the minimal representationalist, would suggest that the work that the concept of representation does is less than the work it takes to justify the use of the term 'representation'.

Dreyfus (2007), arguing against the minimalist representationalism of Wheeler, appeals to Merleau-Ponty's work, and a non-representational Heidegger, for an account of the way the body and the world are coupled.   As an agent acquires skills, those skills are "stored," not as representations in the agent's mind, but as the solicitations of situations in the world.   If the situation does not clearly solicit a single response or if the response does not produce a satisfactory result, the learner is led to further refine his discriminations, which, in turn, solicit ever more refined responses.

On this model, in our action, we can still get things wrong, but not because our representation of the world misrepresents the world.   Rather, the world itself appears ambiguous in the light of our particular abilities and projects.   From a particular distance and perspective, or in a certain light, the mountain appears to be climbable.   Once I begin to climb, however, I can discover that the mountain is not climbable.   On the representationalist view this is explained by saying that my original representation of the mountain had been wrong.   On the non-representationalist view, the mountain presented a certain affordance relative to my embodied skills, at a certain distance, in a certain light, from a certain perspective.   Once we change the distance, light and/or perspective, the affordance disappears.   These are physically determined factors that involve being embodied and in-the-world; they need not be representational (although I can certainly represent them cognitively).   The affordance disappears not because I changed the representation of my distance from the mountain -- I actually have to change my distance, and when I do so, the body-mountain relation, which defines the affordance, changes.

Within such embodied-embedded-extended approaches, what role does a minimal representation play?   For Wheeler, the AOR is a perception-based, short-lived, egocentric (spatial) mapping of the environment calibrated strictly in terms of possible actions.   Clark and Grush suggest that representational elements are to be found in the anticipation that is built into a forward emulator for online motor control.   Rowlands argues that the pre-intentional movement that constitutes the current structure of intentional action is representational.   When we consider these three aspects of action together we should notice that they constitute the dynamic temporal structure of action itself.   On a phenomenological, non-representational model of this temporal structure the short-term mapping of the environment is a function of a pragmatic (i.e., in terms of possible actions) retentional maintenance (holding in perceptual presence) of the relevant aspects of the environment, where those aspects themselves may be doing some of the work; the anticipation that is essential to motor control is a protentional aspect that is an implicit characteristic of my immediate project-determined coupling with the environment.   And the pre-intentional movement is an occurrent contribution to the very structure of the action.   As Berthoz and Petit (2006) make clear, none of these dynamically dissipating aspects amounts to a representation, if we take representation to involve:

·      an internal image, symbol, or neural configuration

·      an enduring thing

·      decoupleability

·      interpretation, where some other process takes it as content.

Could these aspects add up to a minimal representation?   Rowlands' concept of pre-intentional deeds is consistent with Wheeler's definition of a minimal representation as (1) richly adaptive, (2) "arbitrary" or ad hoc -- in the sense that it is not predefined, but processes current information about the world, and (3) employing a homuncular mechanism, i.e., a mechanism that is hierarchically compartmentalized but contributes to a collective achievement (see Wheeler 2004, 252ff.).   The idea of the homuncular mechanism is an attempt to preserve the criterion of interpretability.   Representational interpretation is usually conceived of as involving modularity -- processing in one module independent of processing in another, but each communicating results to (and mutually interpreting) another module.   The homuncular mechanism thus takes some information "off-line" and manipulates it to anticipate possible actions -- much like Clark and Grush's emulator.

But modularity can be given up for the dynamic systems concept of a self-organizing continuous reciprocal causation (Varela, Clark).   On-line sensory-motor processes that are serving intentional action and are temporally structured in dynamic relation to the environment are in fact richly adaptive and arbitrary in the relevant sense, but are not homuncular, which means they involve no interpretational element -- one part of the mechanism doesn't interpret the information presented by another part -- the relation is more causal than communicative.

Once again we can ask what's left of the idea of representation in action.   The kind of processes that make up action:

1.   are not internal -- they extend to include embodied-environmental aspects and are only "weakly" neuronal

2.   cannot be characterized in terms of simple duration -- rather they are temporal, dynamic, and distributed processes

3.   are not passive -- they are pragmatically enactive -- proactively contributing to the adaptability of the system

4.   are not decoupleable -- indeed, if such processes are to remain teleological, they have to continue tracking x or they have to involve a continuing and online anticipation or protention of a predicted motor state

5.   are not strongly instructional

6.   do not involve interpretation.

In effect, the processes described as minimally representational no longer conform to the criteria that would make them representational.   Action does involve processes that are intentional (action refers to something other than itself) at the personal level, and in a way that contributes to the organization of the sub-personal processes that support the intentional action.   But if representation is one form of intentionality, not all intentionality is representational.   There is an intentionality of the body-in-action that is not internal, decoupleable, or instructional, that does not involve interpretation in the relevant sense, and that is dynamically linked with the environment in a way that reflects a specific temporal structure at the subpersonal level.

Action, thus, involves temporal processes that can be better explained in terms of dynamic systems of self-organizing continuous reciprocal causation at the subpersonal level.   Action does involve a retentional, short-lived, egocentric orientation to the environment calibrated in terms of possible actions (but this does not require an action oriented representation); action does involve an anticipatory (protentional) aspect that is built into a non-modular forward emulator for online motor control (but this does not require representational modularity); and these two aspects are dynamically tied to occurrent pre-intentional movements that serve the intentional action (but are not representational since they are not decoupleable).

It might still be argued that representational accounts provide a helpful short-cut for explaining action.   In this regard, however, at best, it is just one way -- a scientifically abstract way -- of explaining the action process.   I submit that the concept of a representation is not an explanans that does any work itself; rather, it's a concept which itself requires explanation.   The risk is that representational accounts come with ontological claims -- there really are representations in the system and they are something more than what a motor control system does as part of the action itself.

The problem is that a majority of cognitive scientists, and many philosophers, including Rowlands, continue to use the R-word as if it is an explanation.   In this regard, however, even if you think that the concept of representation does do some explanatory work, what I called the facetious economic argument against representationalism in fact suggests a scientific pragmatism.   It may take more energy to define and distinguish any legitimate sense of representation from amongst the plethora of uses of that term, and to justify its special use (which is the central task that Rowlands takes on in Body Language ), than it would take to explain the phenomenon in non-representationalist terms.   And if one can explain the phenomenon in non-representationalist terms, then the concept of representation is not necessary, and is at best redundant.

Berthoz, A. and Petit, J-L. 2006. Phénoménologie et physiologie de l'action . Paris: Odile Jacob.

Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and Workd Together Again . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Clark, A. and Grush, R. 1999. Towards a cognitive robotics. Adaptive Behavior 7 (1): 5-16.

Dreyfus, H. 2007. Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian. Philosophical Psychology 20 (2): 247-268.

Dreyfus, H. 2002. Intelligence without representation: Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 367-83.

Gallagher, S. 2005. A new movement in perception: Review of Alva Noë's Action in Perception . Times Literary Supplement (London), 9 September 2005.

Haugeland, J. 1998. Mind embodied and embedded. Having thought: Essays in the metaphysics of mind (pp. 207-237). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Meneary, R. 2007. Cognitive Integration . London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1966. The Structure of Behavior (A. L. Fisher, Trans., 2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press.

O'Shaughnessy, B. 1980. The Will , 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowlands, M. 2006. Body Language . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wheeler, M. 2005. Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Yarbus, A. 1967. Eye Movements and Vision . New York: Plenum Press.

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Political Representation

The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition. In fact, there is an extensive literature that offers many different definitions of this elusive concept. [Classic treatments of the concept of political representations within this literature include Pennock and Chapman 1968; Pitkin, 1967 and Schwartz, 1988.] Hanna Pitkin (1967) provides, perhaps, one of the most straightforward definitions: to represent is simply to “make present again.” On this definition, political representation is the activity of making citizens’ voices, opinions, and perspectives “present” in public policy making processes. Political representation occurs when political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political arena. In short, political representation is a kind of political assistance. This seemingly straightforward definition, however, is not adequate as it stands. For it leaves the concept of political representation underspecified. Indeed, as we will see, the concept of political representation has multiple and competing dimensions: our common understanding of political representation is one that contains different, and conflicting, conceptions of how political representatives should represent and so holds representatives to standards that are mutually incompatible. In leaving these dimensions underspecified, this definition fails to capture this paradoxical character of the concept.

This encyclopedia entry has three main goals. The first is to provide a general overview of the meaning of political representation, identifying the key components of this concept. The second is to highlight several important advances that have been made by the contemporary literature on political representation. These advances point to new forms of political representation, ones that are not limited to the relationship between formal representatives and their constituents. The third goal is to reveal several persistent problems with theories of political representation and thereby to propose some future areas of research.

1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee

1.2 pitkin’s four views of representation, 2. changing political realities and changing concepts of political representation, 3. contemporary advances, 4. future areas of study, a. general discussions of representation, b. arguments against representation, c. non-electoral forms of representation, d. representation and electoral design, e. representation and accountability, f. descriptive representation, other internet resources, related entries, 1. key components of political representation.

Political representation, on almost any account, will exhibit the following five components:

• some party that is representing (the representative, an organization, movement, state agency, etc.);
• some party that is being represented (the constituents, the clients, etc.);
• something that is being represented (opinions, perspectives, interests, discourses, etc.); and
• a setting within which the activity of representation is taking place (the political context).
• something that is being left out (the opinions, interests, and perspectives not voiced).

Theories of political representation often begin by specifying the terms for the first four components. For instance, democratic theorists often limit the types of representatives being discussed to formal representatives — that is, to representatives who hold elected offices. One reason that the concept of representation remains elusive is that theories of representation often apply only to particular kinds of political actors within a particular context. How individuals represent an electoral district is treated as distinct from how social movements, judicial bodies, or informal organizations represent. Consequently, it is unclear how different forms of representation relate to each other. Andrew Rehfeld (2006) has offered a general theory of representation which simply identifies representation by reference to a relevant audience accepting a person as its representative. One consequence of Rehfeld’s general approach to representation is that it allows for undemocratic cases of representation.

However, Rehfeld’s general theory of representation does not specify what representative do or should do in order to be recognized as a representative. And what exactly representatives do has been a hotly contested issue. In particular, a controversy has raged over whether representatives should act as delegates or trustees .

Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether representatives should act as delegates or as trustees . Representatives who are delegates simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1787–8) describes representative government as “the delegation of the government...to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” Madison recognized that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Consequently, Madison suggests having a diverse and large population as a way to decrease the problems with bad representation. In other words, the preferences of the represented can partially safeguard against the problems of faction.

In contrast, trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue. Edmund Burke (1790) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole… You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament (115).

The delegate and the trustee conception of political representation place competing and contradictory demands on the behavior of representatives. [For a discussion of the similarities and differences between Madison’s and Burke’s conception of representation, see Pitkin 1967, 191–192.] Delegate conceptions of representation require representatives to follow their constituents’ preferences, while trustee conceptions require representatives to follow their own judgment about the proper course of action. Any adequate theory of representation must grapple with these contradictory demands.

Famously, Hanna Pitkin argues that theorists should not try to reconcile the paradoxical nature of the concept of representation. Rather, they should aim to preserve this paradox by recommending that citizens safeguard the autonomy of both the representative and of those being represented. The autonomy of the representative is preserved by allowing them to make decisions based on his or her understanding of the represented’s interests (the trustee conception of representation). The autonomy of those being represented is preserved by having the preferences of the represented influence evaluations of representatives (the delegate conception of representation). Representatives must act in ways that safeguard the capacity of the represented to authorize and to hold their representatives accountable and uphold the capacity of the representative to act independently of the wishes of the represented.

Objective interests are the key for determining whether the autonomy of representative and the autonomy of the represented have been breached. However, Pitkin never adequately specifies how we are to identify constituents’ objective interests. At points, she implies that constituents should have some say in what are their objective interests, but ultimately she merely shifts her focus away from this paradox to the recommendation that representatives should be evaluated on the basis of the reasons they give for disobeying the preferences of their constituents. For Pitkin, assessments about representatives will depend on the issue at hand and the political environment in which a representative acts. To understand the multiple and conflicting standards within the concept of representation is to reveal the futility of holding all representatives to some fixed set of guidelines. In this way, Pitkin concludes that standards for evaluating representatives defy generalizations. Moreover, individuals, especially democratic citizens, are likely to disagree deeply about what representatives should be doing.

Pitkin offers one of the most comprehensive discussions of the concept of political representation, attending to its contradictory character in her The Concept of Representation . This classic discussion of the concept of representation is one of the most influential and oft-cited works in the literature on political representation. (For a discussion of her influence, see Dovi 2016). Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach to language, Pitkin maintains that in order to understand the concept of political representation, one must consider the different ways in which the term is used. Each of these different uses of the term provides a different view of the concept. Pitkin compares the concept of representation to “ a rather complicated, convoluted, three–dimensional structure in the middle of a dark enclosure.” Political theorists provide “flash-bulb photographs of the structure taken from different angles” [1967, 10]. More specifically, political theorists have provided four main views of the concept of representation. Unfortunately, Pitkin never explains how these different views of political representation fit together. At times, she implies that the concept of representation is unified. At other times, she emphasizes the conflicts between these different views, e.g. how descriptive representation is opposed to accountability. Drawing on her flash-bulb metaphor, Pitkin argues that one must know the context in which the concept of representation is placed in order to determine its meaning. For Pitkin, the contemporary usage of the term “representation” can signficantly change its meaning.

For Pitkin, disagreements about representation can be partially reconciled by clarifying which view of representation is being invoked. Pitkin identifies at least four different views of representation: formalistic representation, descriptive representation, symbolic representation, and substantive representation. (For a brief description of each of these views, see chart below.) Each view provides a different approach for examining representation. The different views of representation can also provide different standards for assessing representatives. So disagreements about what representatives ought to be doing are aggravated by the fact that people adopt the wrong view of representation or misapply the standards of representation. Pitkin has in many ways set the terms of contemporary discussions about representation by providing this schematic overview of the concept of political representation.

1. Formalistic Representation : Brief Description . The institutional arrangements that precede and initiate representation. Formal representation has two dimensions: authorization and accountability. Main Research Question . What is the institutional position of a representative? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . None. ( Authorization ): Brief Description . The means by which a representative obtains his or her standing, status, position or office. Main Research Questions . What is the process by which a representative gains power (e.g., elections) and what are the ways in which a representative can enforce his or her decisions? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely assess whether a representative legitimately holds his or her position. pdf include--> ( Accountability ): Brief Description . The ability of constituents to punish their representative for failing to act in accordance with their wishes (e.g. voting an elected official out of office) or the responsiveness of the representative to the constituents. Main Research Question . What are the sanctioning mechanisms available to constituents? Is the representative responsive towards his or her constituents’ preferences? Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . No standards for assessing how well a representative behaves. One can merely determine whether a representative can be sanctioned or has been responsive.

Brief Description . The ways that a representative “stands for” the represented — that is, the meaning that a representative has for those being represented.

Main Research Question . What kind of response is invoked by the representative in those being represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Representatives are assessed by the degree of acceptance that the representative has among the represented.

Brief Description . The extent to which a representative resembles those being represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative look like, have common interests with, or share certain experiences with the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess the representative by the accuracy of the resemblance between the representative and the represented.

Brief Description . The activity of representatives—that is, the actions taken on behalf of, in the interest of, as an agent of, and as a substitute for the represented.

Main Research Question . Does the representative advance the policy preferences that serve the interests of the represented?

Implicit Standards for Evaluating Representatives . Assess a representative by the extent to which policy outcomes advanced by a representative serve “the best interests” of their constituents.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which Pitkin has shaped contemporary understandings of political representation, especially among political scientists. For example, her claim that descriptive representation opposes accountability is often the starting point for contemporary discussions about whether marginalized groups need representatives from their groups.

Similarly, Pitkin’s conclusions about the paradoxical nature of political representation support the tendency among contemporary theorists and political scientists to focus on formal procedures of authorization and accountability (formalistic representation). In particular, there has been a lot of theoretical attention paid to the proper design of representative institutions (e.g. Amy 1996; Barber, 2001; Christiano 1996; Guinier 1994). This focus is certainly understandable, since one way to resolve the disputes about what representatives should be doing is to “let the people decide.” In other words, establishing fair procedures for reconciling conflicts provides democratic citizens one way to settle conflicts about the proper behavior of representatives. In this way, theoretical discussions of political representation tend to depict political representation as primarily a principal-agent relationship. The emphasis on elections also explains why discussions about the concept of political representation frequently collapse into discussions of democracy. Political representation is understood as a way of 1) establishing the legitimacy of democratic institutions and 2) creating institutional incentives for governments to be responsive to citizens.

David Plotke (1997) has noted that this emphasis on mechanisms of authorization and accountability was especially useful in the context of the Cold War. For this understanding of political representation (specifically, its demarcation from participatory democracy) was useful for distinguishing Western democracies from Communist countries. Those political systems that held competitive elections were considered to be democratic (Schumpeter 1976). Plotke questions whether such a distinction continues to be useful. Plotke recommends that we broaden the scope of our understanding of political representation to encompass interest representation and thereby return to debating what is the proper activity of representatives. Plotke’s insight into why traditional understandings of political representation resonated prior to the end of the Cold War suggests that modern understandings of political representation are to some extent contingent on political realities. For this reason, those who attempt to define political representation should recognize how changing political realities can affect contemporary understandings of political representation. Again, following Pitkin, ideas about political representation appear contingent on existing political practices of representation. Our understandings of representation are inextricably shaped by the manner in which people are currently being represented. For an informative discussion of the history of representation, see Monica Brito Vieira and David Runican’s Representation .

As mentioned earlier, theoretical discussions of political representation have focused mainly on the formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation states, that is, on what Pitkin called formalistic representation. However, such a focus is no longer satisfactory due to international and domestic political transformations. [For an extensive discussion of international and domestic transformations, see Mark Warren and Dario Castioglione (2004).] Increasingly international, transnational and non-governmental actors play an important role in advancing public policies on behalf of democratic citizens—that is, acting as representatives for those citizens. Such actors “speak for,” “act for” and can even “stand for” individuals within a nation-state. It is no longer desirable to limit one’s understanding of political representation to elected officials within the nation-state. After all, increasingly state “contract out” important responsibilities to non-state actors, e.g. environmental regulation. As a result, elected officials do not necessarily possess “the capacity to act,” the capacity that Pitkin uses to identify who is a representative. So, as the powers of nation-state have been disseminated to international and transnational actors, elected representatives are not necessarily the agents who determine how policies are implemented. Given these changes, the traditional focus of political representation, that is, on elections within nation-states, is insufficient for understanding how public policies are being made and implemented. The complexity of modern representative processes and the multiple locations of political power suggest that contemporary notions of accountability are inadequate. Grant and Keohane (2005) have recently updated notions of accountability, suggesting that the scope of political representation needs to be expanded in order to reflect contemporary realities in the international arena. Michael Saward (2009) has proposed an innovative type of criteria that should be used for evaluating non-elective representative claims. John Dryzek and Simon Niemayer (2008) has proposed an alternative conception of representation, what he calls discursive representation, to reflect the fact that transnational actors represent discourses, not real people. By discourses, they mean “a set of categories and concepts embodying specific assumptions, judgments, contentions, dispositions, and capabilities.” The concept of discursive representation can potentially redeem the promise of deliberative democracy when the deliberative participation of all affected by a collective decision is infeasible.

Domestic transformations also reveal the need to update contemporary understandings of political representation. Associational life — social movements, interest groups, and civic associations—is increasingly recognized as important for the survival of representative democracies. The extent to which interest groups write public policies or play a central role in implementing and regulating policies is the extent to which the division between formal and informal representation has been blurred. The fluid relationship between the career paths of formal and informal representatives also suggests that contemporary realities do not justify focusing mainly on formal representatives. Mark Warren’s concept of citizen representatives (2008) opens up a theoretical framework for exploring how citizens represent themselves and serve in representative capacities.

Given these changes, it is necessary to revisit our conceptual understanding of political representation, specifically of democratic representation. For as Jane Mansbridge has recently noted, normative understandings of representation have not kept up with recent empirical research and contemporary democratic practices. In her important article “Rethinking Representation” Mansbridge identifies four forms of representation in modern democracies: promissory, anticipatory, gyroscopic and surrogacy. Promissory representation is a form of representation in which representatives are to be evaluated by the promises they make to constituents during campaigns. Promissory representation strongly resembles Pitkin’s discussion of formalistic representation. For both are primarily concerned with the ways that constituents give their consent to the authority of a representative. Drawing on recent empirical work, Mansbridge argues for the existence of three additional forms of representation. In anticipatory representation, representatives focus on what they think their constituents will reward in the next election and not on what they promised during the campaign of the previous election. Thus, anticipatory representation challenges those who understand accountability as primarily a retrospective activity. In gyroscopic representation, representatives “look within” to derive from their own experience conceptions of interest and principles to serve as a basis for their action. Finally, surrogate representation occurs when a legislator represents constituents outside of their districts. For Mansbridge, each of these different forms of representation generates a different normative criterion by which representatives should be assessed. All four forms of representation, then, are ways that democratic citizens can be legitimately represented within a democratic regime. Yet none of the latter three forms representation operates through the formal mechanisms of authorization and accountability. Recently, Mansbridge (2009) has gone further by suggesting that political science has focused too much on the sanctions model of accountability and that another model, what she calls the selection model, can be more effective at soliciting the desired behavior from representatives. According to Mansbridge, a sanction model of accountability presumes that the representative has different interests from the represented and that the represented should not only monitor but reward the good representative and punish the bad. In contrast, the selection model of accountability presumes that representatives have self-motivated and exogenous reasons for carrying out the represented’s wishes. In this way, Mansbridge broadens our understanding of accountability to allow for good representation to occur outside of formal sanctioning mechanisms.

Mansbridge’s rethinking of the meaning of representation holds an important insight for contemporary discussions of democratic representation. By specifying the different forms of representation within a democratic polity, Mansbridge teaches us that we should refer to the multiple forms of democratic representation. Democratic representation should not be conceived as a monolithic concept. Moreover, what is abundantly clear is that democratic representation should no longer be treated as consisting simply in a relationship between elected officials and constituents within her voting district. Political representation should no longer be understood as a simple principal-agent relationship. Andrew Rehfeld has gone farther, maintaining that political representation should no longer be territorially based. In other words, Rehfeld (2005) argues that constituencies, e.g. electoral districts, should not be constructed based on where citizens live.

Lisa Disch (2011) also complicates our understanding of democratic representation as a principal-agent relationship by uncovering a dilemma that arises between expectations of democratic responsiveness to constituents and recent empirical findings regarding the context dependency of individual constituents’ preferences. In response to this dilemma, Disch proposes a mobilization conception of political representation and develops a systemic understanding of reflexivity as the measure of its legitimacy.

By far, one of the most important shifts in the literature on representation has been the “constructivist turn.” Constructivist approaches to representation emphasize the representative’s role in creating and framing the identities and claims of the represented. Here Michael Saward’s The Representative Claim is exemplary. For Saward, representation entails a series of relationships: “A maker of representations (M) puts forward a subject (S) which stands for an object (O) which is related to a referent (R) and is offered to an audience (A)” (2006, 302). Instead of presuming a pre-existing set of interests of the represented that representatives “bring into” the political arena, Saward stresses how representative claim-making is a “deeply culturally inflected practice.” Saward explicitly denies that theorists can know what are the interests of the represented. For this reason, the represented should have the ultimate say in judging the claims of the representative. The task of the representative is to create claims that will resonate with appropriate audiences.

Saward therefore does not evaluate representatives by the extent to which they advance the preferences or interests of the represented. Instead he focuses on the institutional and collective conditions in which claim-making takes place. The constructivist turn examines the conditions for claim-making, not the activities of particular representatives.

Saward’s “constructivist turn” has generated a new research direction for both political theorists and empirical scientists. For example, Lisa Disch (2015) considers whether the constructivist turn is a “normative dead” end, that is, whether the epistemological commitments of constructivism that deny the ability to identify interests will undermine the normative commitments to democratic politics. Disch offers an alternative approach, what she calls “the citizen standpoint”. This standpoint does not mean taking at face value whomever or whatever citizens regard as representing them. Rather, it is “an epistemological and political achievement that does not exist spontaneously but develops out of the activism of political movements together with the critical theories and transformative empirical research to which they give rise” (2015, 493). (For other critical engagements with Saward’s work, see Schaap et al, 2012 and Nässtrom, 2011).

There have been a number of important advances in theorizing the concept of political representation. In particular, these advances call into question the traditional way of thinking of political representation as a principal-agent relationship. Most notably, Melissa Williams’ recent work has recommended reenvisioning the activity of representation in light of the experiences of historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she recommends understanding representation as “mediation.” In particular, Williams (1998, 8) identifies three different dimensions of political life that representatives must “mediate:” the dynamics of legislative decision-making, the nature of legislator-constituent relations, and the basis for aggregating citizens into representable constituencies. She explains each aspect by using a corresponding theme (voice, trust, and memory) and by drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups in the United States. For example, drawing on the experiences of American women trying to gain equal citizenship, Williams argues that historically disadvantaged groups need a “voice” in legislative decision-making. The “heavily deliberative” quality of legislative institutions requires the presence of individuals who have direct access to historically excluded perspectives.

In addition, Williams explains how representatives need to mediate the representative-constituent relationship in order to build “trust.” For Williams, trust is the cornerstone for democratic accountability. Relying on the experiences of African-Americans, Williams shows the consistent patterns of betrayal of African-Americans by privileged white citizens that give them good reason for distrusting white representatives and the institutions themselves. For Williams, relationships of distrust can be “at least partially mended if the disadvantaged group is represented by its own members”(1998, 14). Finally, representation involves mediating how groups are defined. The boundaries of groups according to Williams are partially established by past experiences — what Williams calls “memory.” Having certain shared patterns of marginalization justifies certain institutional mechanisms to guarantee presence.

Williams offers her understanding of representation as mediation as a supplement to what she regards as the traditional conception of liberal representation. Williams identifies two strands in liberal representation. The first strand she describes as the “ideal of fair representation as an outcome of free and open elections in which every citizen has an equally weighted vote” (1998, 57). The second strand is interest-group pluralism, which Williams describes as the “theory of the organization of shared social interests with the purpose of securing the equitable representation … of those groups in public policies” ( ibid .). Together, the two strands provide a coherent approach for achieving fair representation, but the traditional conception of liberal representation as made up of simply these two strands is inadequate. In particular, Williams criticizes the traditional conception of liberal representation for failing to take into account the injustices experienced by marginalized groups in the United States. Thus, Williams expands accounts of political representation beyond the question of institutional design and thus, in effect, challenges those who understand representation as simply a matter of formal procedures of authorization and accountability.

Another way of reenvisioning representation was offered by Nadia Urbinati (2000, 2002). Urbinati argues for understanding representation as advocacy. For Urbinati, the point of representation should not be the aggregation of interests, but the preservation of disagreements necessary for preserving liberty. Urbinati identifies two main features of advocacy: 1) the representative’s passionate link to the electors’ cause and 2) the representative’s relative autonomy of judgment. Urbinati emphasizes the importance of the former for motivating representatives to deliberate with each other and their constituents. For Urbinati the benefit of conceptualizing representation as advocacy is that it improves our understanding of deliberative democracy. In particular, it avoids a common mistake made by many contemporary deliberative democrats: focusing on the formal procedures of deliberation at the expense of examining the sources of inequality within civil society, e.g. the family. One benefit of Urbinati’s understanding of representation is its emphasis on the importance of opinion and consent formation. In particular, her agonistic conception of representation highlights the importance of disagreements and rhetoric to the procedures, practices, and ethos of democracy. Her account expands the scope of theoretical discussions of representation away from formal procedures of authorization to the deliberative and expressive dimensions of representative institutions. In this way, her agonistic understanding of representation provides a theoretical tool to those who wish to explain how non-state actors “represent.”

Other conceptual advancements have helped clarify the meaning of particular aspects of representation. For instance, Andrew Rehfeld (2009) has argued that we need to disaggregate the delegate/trustee distinction. Rehfeld highlights how representatives can be delegates and trustees in at least three different ways. For this reason, we should replace the traditional delegate/trustee distinction with three distinctions (aims, source of judgment, and responsiveness). By collapsing these three different ways of being delegates and trustees, political theorists and political scientists overlook the ways in which representatives are often partial delegates and partial trustees.

Other political theorists have asked us to rethink central aspects of our understanding of democratic representation. In Inclusion and Democracy Iris Marion Young asks us to rethink the importance of descriptive representation. Young stresses that attempts to include more voices in the political arena can suppress other voices. She illustrates this point using the example of a Latino representative who might inadvertently represent straight Latinos at the expense of gay and lesbian Latinos (1986, 350). For Young, the suppression of differences is a problem for all representation (1986, 351). Representatives of large districts or of small communities must negotiate the difficulty of one person representing many. Because such a difficulty is constitutive of representation, it is unreasonable to assume that representation should be characterized by a “relationship of identity.” The legitimacy of a representative is not primarily a function of his or her similarities to the represented. For Young, the representative should not be treated as a substitute for the represented. Consequently, Young recommends reconceptualizing representation as a differentiated relationship (2000, 125–127; 1986, 357). There are two main benefits of Young’s understanding of representation. First, her understanding of representation encourages us to recognize the diversity of those being represented. Second, her analysis of representation emphasizes the importance of recognizing how representative institutions include as well as they exclude. Democratic citizens need to remain vigilant about the ways in which providing representation for some groups comes at the expense of excluding others. Building on Young’s insight, Suzanne Dovi (2009) has argued that we should not conceptualize representation simply in terms of how we bring marginalized groups into democratic politics; rather, democratic representation can require limiting the influence of overrepresented privileged groups.

Moreover, based on this way of understanding political representation, Young provides an alterative account of democratic representation. Specifically, she envisions democratic representation as a dynamic process, one that moves between moments of authorization and moments of accountability (2000, 129). It is the movement between these moments that makes the process “democratic.” This fluidity allows citizens to authorize their representatives and for traces of that authorization to be evident in what the representatives do and how representatives are held accountable. The appropriateness of any given representative is therefore partially dependent on future behavior as well as on his or her past relationships. For this reason, Young maintains that evaluation of this process must be continuously “deferred.” We must assess representation dynamically, that is, assess the whole ongoing processes of authorization and accountability of representatives. Young’s discussion of the dynamic of representation emphasizes the ways in which evaluations of representatives are incomplete, needing to incorporate the extent to which democratic citizens need to suspend their evaluations of representatives and the extent to which representatives can face unanticipated issues.

Another insight about democratic representation that comes from the literature on descriptive representation is the importance of contingencies. Here the work of Jane Mansbridge on descriptive representation has been particularly influential. Mansbridge recommends that we evaluate descriptive representatives by contexts and certain functions. More specifically, Mansbridge (1999, 628) focuses on four functions and their related contexts in which disadvantaged groups would want to be represented by someone who belongs to their group. Those four functions are “(1) adequate communication in contexts of mistrust, (2) innovative thinking in contexts of uncrystallized, not fully articulated, interests, … (3) creating a social meaning of ‘ability to rule’ for members of a group in historical contexts where the ability has been seriously questioned and (4) increasing the polity’s de facto legitimacy in contexts of past discrimination.” For Mansbridge, descriptive representatives are needed when marginalized groups distrust members of relatively more privileged groups and when marginalized groups possess political preferences that have not been fully formed. The need for descriptive representation is contingent on certain functions.

Mansbridge’s insight about the contingency of descriptive representation suggests that at some point descriptive representatives might not be necessary. However, she doesn’t specify how we are to know if interests have become crystallized or trust has formed to the point that the need for descriptive representation would be obsolete. Thus, Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation suggests that standards for evaluating representatives are fluid and flexible. For an interesting discussion of the problems with unified or fixed standards for evaluating Latino representatives, see Christina Beltran’s The Trouble with Unity .

Mansbridge’s discussion of descriptive representation points to another trend within the literature on political representation — namely, the trend to derive normative accounts of representation from the representative’s function. Russell Hardin (2004) captured this trend most clearly in his position that “if we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function.” For Hardin, only an empirical explanation of the role of a representative is necessary for determining what a representative should be doing. Following Hardin, Suzanne Dovi (2007) identifies three democratic standards for evaluating the performance of representatives: those of fair-mindedness, critical trust building, and good gate-keeping. In Ruling Passions , Andrew Sabl (2002) links the proper behavior of representatives to their particular office. In particular, Sabl focuses on three offices: senator, organizer and activist. He argues that the same standards should not be used to evaluate these different offices. Rather, each office is responsible for promoting democratic constancy, what Sabl understands as “the effective pursuit of interest.” Sabl (2002) and Hardin (2004) exemplify the trend to tie the standards for evaluating political representatives to the activity and office of those representatives.

There are three persistent problems associated with political representation. Each of these problems identifies a future area of investigation. The first problem is the proper institutional design for representative institutions within democratic polities. The theoretical literature on political representation has paid a lot of attention to the institutional design of democracies. More specifically, political theorists have recommended everything from proportional representation (e.g. Guinier, 1994 and Christiano, 1996) to citizen juries (Fishkin, 1995). However, with the growing number of democratic states, we are likely to witness more variation among the different forms of political representation. In particular, it is important to be aware of how non-democratic and hybrid regimes can adopt representative institutions to consolidate their power over their citizens. There is likely to be much debate about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting representative institutions.

This leads to a second future line of inquiry — ways in which democratic citizens can be marginalized by representative institutions. This problem is articulated most clearly by Young’s discussion of the difficulties arising from one person representing many. Young suggests that representative institutions can include the opinions, perspectives and interests of some citizens at the expense of marginalizing the opinions, perspectives and interests of others. Hence, a problem with institutional reforms aimed at increasing the representation of historically disadvantaged groups is that such reforms can and often do decrease the responsiveness of representatives. For instance, the creation of black districts has created safe zones for black elected officials so that they are less accountable to their constituents. Any decrease in accountability is especially worrisome given the ways citizens are vulnerable to their representatives. Thus, one future line of research is examining the ways that representative institutions marginalize the interests, opinions and perspectives of democratic citizens.

In particular, it is necessary for to acknowledge the biases of representative institutions. While E. E. Schattschneider (1960) has long noted the class bias of representative institutions, there is little discussion of how to improve the political representation of the disaffected — that is, the political representation of those citizens who do not have the will, the time, or political resources to participate in politics. The absence of such a discussion is particularly apparent in the literature on descriptive representation, the area that is most concerned with disadvantaged citizens. Anne Phillips (1995) raises the problems with the representation of the poor, e.g. the inability to define class, however, she argues for issues of class to be integrated into a politics of presence. Few theorists have taken up Phillip’s gauntlet and articulated how this integration of class and a politics of presence is to be done. Of course, some have recognized the ways in which interest groups, associations, and individual representatives can betray the least well off (e.g. Strolovitch, 2004). And some (Dovi, 2003) have argued that descriptive representatives need to be selected based on their relationship to citizens who have been unjustly excluded and marginalized by democratic politics. However, it is unclear how to counteract the class bias that pervades domestic and international representative institutions. It is necessary to specify the conditions under which certain groups within a democratic polity require enhanced representation. Recent empirical literature has suggested that the benefits of having descriptive representatives is by no means straightforward (Gay, 2002).

A third and final area of research involves the relationship between representation and democracy. Historically, representation was considered to be in opposition with democracy [See Dahl (1989) for a historical overview of the concept of representation]. When compared to the direct forms of democracy found in the ancient city-states, notably Athens, representative institutions appear to be poor substitutes for the ways that citizens actively ruled themselves. Barber (1984) has famously argued that representative institutions were opposed to strong democracy. In contrast, almost everyone now agrees that democratic political institutions are representative ones.

Bernard Manin (1997)reminds us that the Athenian Assembly, which often exemplifies direct forms of democracy, had only limited powers. According to Manin, the practice of selecting magistrates by lottery is what separates representative democracies from so-called direct democracies. Consequently, Manin argues that the methods of selecting public officials are crucial to understanding what makes representative governments democratic. He identifies four principles distinctive of representative government: 1) Those who govern are appointed by election at regular intervals; 2) The decision-making of those who govern retains a degree of independence from the wishes of the electorate; 3) Those who are governed may give expression to their opinions and political wishes without these being subject to the control of those who govern; and 4) Public decisions undergo the trial of debate (6). For Manin, historical democratic practices hold important lessons for determining whether representative institutions are democratic.

While it is clear that representative institutions are vital institutional components of democratic institutions, much more needs to be said about the meaning of democratic representation. In particular, it is important not to presume that all acts of representation are equally democratic. After all, not all acts of representation within a representative democracy are necessarily instances of democratic representation. Henry Richardson (2002) has explored the undemocratic ways that members of the bureaucracy can represent citizens. [For a more detailed discussion of non-democratic forms of representation, see Apter (1968). Michael Saward (2008) also discusses how existing systems of political representation do not necessarily serve democracy.] Similarly, it is unclear whether a representative who actively seeks to dismantle democratic institutions is representing democratically. Does democratic representation require representatives to advance the preferences of democratic citizens or does it require a commitment to democratic institutions? At this point, answers to such questions are unclear. What is certain is that democratic citizens are likely to disagree about what constitutes democratic representation.

One popular approach to addressing the different and conflicting standards used to evaluate representatives within democratic polities, is to simply equate multiple standards with democratic ones. More specifically, it is argued that democratic standards are pluralistic, accommodating the different standards possessed and used by democratic citizens. Theorists who adopt this approach fail to specify the proper relationship among these standards. For instance, it is unclear how the standards that Mansbridge identifies in the four different forms of representation should relate to each other. Does it matter if promissory forms of representation are replaced by surrogate forms of representation? A similar omission can be found in Pitkin: although Pitkin specifies there is a unified relationship among the different views of representation, she never describes how the different views interact. This omission reflects the lacunae in the literature about how formalistic representation relates to descriptive and substantive representation. Without such a specification, it is not apparent how citizens can determine if they have adequate powers of authorization and accountability.

Currently, it is not clear exactly what makes any given form of representation consistent, let alone consonant, with democratic representation. Is it the synergy among different forms or should we examine descriptive representation in isolation to determine the ways that it can undermine or enhance democratic representation? One tendency is to equate democratic representation simply with the existence of fluid and multiple standards. While it is true that the fact of pluralism provides justification for democratic institutions as Christiano (1996) has argued, it should no longer presumed that all forms of representation are democratic since the actions of representatives can be used to dissolve or weaken democratic institutions. The final research area is to articulate the relationship between different forms of representation and ways that these forms can undermine democratic representation.

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• Dryzek, John, 1996. “Political Inclusion and the Dynamics of Democratization,” American Political Science Review , 90 (September): 475–487.
• Pateman, Carole, 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Saward, Michael, 2008. “Representation and Democracy: Revisions and Possibilities,” Sociology Compass , 2: 1000–1013.
• Apter, David, 1968. “Notes for a Theory of Nondemocratic Representation,” in Nomos X , Chapter 19, pp. 278–317.
• Brown, Mark, 2006. “Survey Article: Citizen Panels and the Concept of Representation,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 14: 203–225.
• Cohen, Joshua and Joel Rogers, 1995. Associations and Democracy (The Real Utopias Project: Volume 1), Erik Olin Wright (ed.), London: Verso.
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• Montanaro, L., 2012. “The Democratic Legitimacy of Self-appointed Representatives,” The Journal of Politics , 74(4): 1094–1107.
• Ryden, David K., 1996. Representation in Crisis: The Constitution, Interest Groups, and Political Parties , Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Truman, David, 1951. The Governmental Process , New York: Knopf.
• Saward, Michael, 2009. “ Authorisation and Authenticity: Representation and the Unelected,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 17: 1–22.
• Steunenberg, Bernard and J. J. A.Thomassen, 2002. The European Parliament : Moving Toward Democracy in the EU , Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Schmitter, Philippe, 2000. “Representation,” in How to democratize the European Union and Why Bother? , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Ch. 3. pp. 53–74.
• Street, John, 2004. “Celebrity politicians: popular culture and political representation,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations , 6(4): 435–452.
• Strolovitch, Dara Z., 2007. Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics , Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Tormey, S., 2012. “Occupy Wall Street: From representation to post-representation,” Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies , 5: 132–137.
• Richardson, Henry, 2002. “Representative government,” in Democratic Autonomy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, Ch. 14, pp. 193–202
• Runciman, David, 2010. “Hobbes’s Theory of Representation: anti-democratic or protodemoratic,” in Political Representation , Ian Shapiro, Susan C. Stokes, Elisabeth Jean Wood, and Alexander Kirshner (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Warren, Mark, 2001. Democracy and Association , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2008. “Citizen Representatives,” in Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British ColumbiaCitizens’ Assembly , Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 50–69.
• Warren, Mark and Dario Castiglione, 2004. “The Transformation of Democratic Representation,” Democracy and Society , 2(I): 5, 20–22.
• Amy, Douglas, 1996. Real Choices/New Voices: The Case for Proportional Elections in the United States , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Barber, Kathleen, 2001. A Right to Representation: Proportional Election Systems for the 21 st Century , Columbia: Ohio University Press.
• Canon, David, 1999. Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Christiano, Thomas, 1996. The Rule of the Many , Boulder: Westview Press.
• Cotta, Maurizio and Heinrich Best (eds.), 2007. Democratic Representation in Europe Diversity, Change, and Convergence , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Guinier, Lani, 1994. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy , New York: Free Press.
• Przworksi, Adam, Susan C. Stokes, and Bernard Manin (eds.), 1999. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Thompson, Dennis, 2002. Just Elections , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Jacobs, Lawrence R. and Robert Y. Shapiro, 2000. Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Grant, Ruth and Robert O. Keohane, 2005. “Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics,” American Political Science Review , 99 (February): 29–44.
• Mansbridge, Jane, 2004. “Representation Revisited: Introduction to the Case Against Electoral Accountability,” Democracy and Society , 2(I): 12–13.
• –––, 2009. “A Selection Model of Representation,” Journal of Political Philosophy , 17(4): 369–398.
• Pettit, Philip, 2010. “Representation, Responsive and Indicative,” Constellations , 17(3): 426–434.
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• Gutmann, Amy and Dennis Thompson, 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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• Severs, E., 2010. “Representation As Claims-Making. Quid Responsiveness?” Representation , 46(4): 411–423.
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• Young, Iris Marion, 1999. “Justice, Inclusion, and Deliberative Democracy” in Deliberative Politics , Stephen Macedo (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University.
• Bentran, Cristina, 2010. The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Celis, Karen, Sarah Childs, Johanna Kantola and Mona Lena Krook, 2008, “Rethinking Women’s Substantive Representation,” Representation , 44(2): 99–110.
• Childs Sarah, 2008. Women and British Party Politics: Descriptive, Substantive and Symbolic Representation , London: Routledge.
• Dovi, Suzanne, 2002. “Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Or Will Just Any Woman, Black, or Latino Do?,” American Political Science Review , 96: 745–754.
• –––, 2007. “Theorizing Women’s Representation in the United States?,” Politics and Gender , 3(3): 297–319. doi: 10.1017/S1743923X07000281
• –––, 2009. “In Praise of Exclusion,” Journal of Politics , 71 (3): 1172–1186.
• –––, 2016. “Measuring Representation: Rethinking the Role of Exclusion” Political Representation , Marc Bühlmann and Jan Fivaz (eds.), London: Routledge.
• Fenno, Richard F., 2003. Going Home: Black Representatives and Their Constituents , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Gay, Claudine, 2002. “Spirals of Trust?,” American Journal of Political Science , 4: 717–32.
• Gould, Carol, 1996. “Diversity and Democracy: Representing Differences,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University, pp. 171–186.
• Htun, Mala, 2004. “Is Gender like Ethnicity? The Political Representation of Identity Groups,” Perspectives on Politics , 2: 439–458.
• Mansbridge, Jane, 1999. “Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent ‘Yes’,” The Journal of Politics , 61: 628–57.
• –––, 2003. “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review , 97: 515–528.
• Phillips, Anne, 1995. Politics of Presence , New York: Clarendon.
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• Pitkin, Hanna, 1967. The Concept of Representation , Los Angeles: University of Press.
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• Thomas, Sue, 1991. “The Impact of Women on State Legislative Policies,” Journal of Politics , 53 (November): 958–976.
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• Williams, Melissa, 1998. Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
• Young, Iris Marion, 1986. “Deferring Group Representation,” Nomos: Group Rights , Will Kymlicka and Ian Shapiro (eds.), New York: New York University Press, pp. 349–376.
• –––, 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
• –––, 2000. Inclusion and Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

G. Democratic Representation

• Castiglione, D., 2015. “Trajectories and Transformations of the Democratic Representative System”. Global Policy , 6(S1): 8–16.
• Disch, Lisa, 2011. “Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation,” American Political Science Review , 105(1): 100–114.
• –––, 2012. “Democratic representation and the constituency paradox,” Perspectives on Politics , 10(3): 599–616.
• –––, 2016. “Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation,” The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory , Jacob Levy (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198717133.013.24
• Mansbridge, Jane, 2003. “Rethinking Representation,” American Political Science Review , 97: 515–528.
• Näsström, Sofia, 2006. “Representative democracy as tautology: Ankersmit and Lefort on representation,” European Journal of Political Theory , 5(3): 321–342.
• Urbinati, Nadia, 2011. “Political Representation as Democratic Process,” Redescriptions (Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History: Volume 10), Kari Palonen (ed.), Helsinki: Transaction Publishers.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• FairVote Program for Representative Government
• Proportional Representation Library , provides readings proportional representation elections created by Prof. Douglas J. Amy, Dept. of Politics, Mount Holyoke College
• Representation , an essay by Ann Marie Baldonado on the Postcolonial Studies website at Emory University.
• Representation: John Locke, Second Treatise, §§ 157–58 , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press
• Popular Basis of Political Authority: David Hume, Of the Original Contract , in The Founders’ Constitution at the University of Chicago Press

Burke, Edmund | democracy

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Definition of representation noun from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

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Chapter 4: The Symbol

This chapter covers the concept of the symbol. The first portion of this chapter defines the symbol and presents several philosophies of language developed in the 20th century by Kenneth Burke, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Sanders Peirce. Important concepts from these philosophies/philosophers include  identification, the “I” and the “me,”  and the  icon, index, and symbol.  The second part of this chapter addresses Burke’s framework of “Rhetoric as Symbolic Action,” discussing  the terministic screen, the dramatistic pentad,  and  demagoguery.

Please note that some of the written materials (specifically, the section on  icon, index,  and  symbol ) presented in this chapter do not appear in the same order as in the official recording for the class. Also included in the textbook below (but not in the recordings) are written descriptions and YouTube videos about early 20th-century American propagandists. This added material is useful context for symbols as 20th-century American propaganda, but it also provides more detail than is presented in the recordings.

Watching the video clips embedded in the chapters may add to the projected “read time” listed in the headers.  Please also note that the audio recording for this chapter covers the same tested content as is presented in the chapter below.

Chapter Recordings

• Part 1:  What are Symbols?  (Video, ~40m)
• Part 2:  Rhetoric as Symbolic Action  (Video, ~35m)

Read this Next

• Burke, Kenneth. “Definition of Man.” The Hudson Review , vol. 16, no. 4, Hudson Review, Inc, 1963, pp. 491–514.
• Solomon, Martha. “The rhetoric of dehumanization: An analysis of medical reports of the Tuskegee syphilis project.”   Western journal of speech communication  49.4 (1985): 233-247.

Part 1: What are Symbols?

The concept of “the symbol” comes from an ancient Greek word, “symbolon,” which is the union of the words “thrown” and “together.” The ancient use of the word “symbol” had an important social function: they were objects that represented a pact, treaty, or agreement between people and the state. Receiving a “symbolon” was more than receiving a gift or a token: they indicated the presence of a specific relationship between an individual and an institution. This chapter continues this line of reasoning by considering the kinds of relationships created by prominent symbols in the 20th century.  This section covers the concept of  identification,  different 20th-century  theories of the symbol,  and continues an ongoing discussion about dangerous  propaganda  from the previous chapter .

Kenneth Burke and Identification through Rhetoric

Between 1939 and 1945, Kenneth Burke’s theories of identification and symbolic action changed the study of rhetoric by bringing new attention to the powerful effects of speech. Rhetoric and rhetoricians adopt a new framework that considers rhetoric to be a mode of  symbolic action , in which speech is primarily understood to unify and divide a mass public. Whereas rhetorical scholarship had previously concerned itself with effective persuasion, Burke introduces the idea of  identification . As persuasion, rhetoric happens in or as a speech and relies upon the speaker’s conscious choices, their historical circumstances, and the timeliness of the moment. As identification, rhetoric is about  influence . It concerns communicating a meaning that reflects something that the audience shares with the speaker and other listeners.

In other words, identification is a way of talking about rhetoric as collectivizing, or as creating the audiences that it addresses. It is about bringing people together using  symbols . When we identify with or around a symbol, we may come to share a similar system of values, assessment of social hierarchy, and rules of communication. The symbol is how we make not just any meaning but a  shared  meaning that we all hold in common. A related concept is  consubstantiality , or the creation of sameness or likeness between different members of a group. Identification is not just about persuading with the right words. It encourages us to think about groups coming together around a symbol, how it moves the group, and how this symbol comes to mean something similar for everyone within it.

X Gonzalez’s March 24, 2018 Speech at the “March for Our Lives” Rally. An Example of Identification.

The speech above offers a good example of identification. The silence that spans the majority of the recording symbolizes the school shooting that  X Gonzalez  experienced for the gathered audience.  The silence in this speech creates shared meaning with which this audience may identify. Identification does not happen all at once, however. Gonzalez begins the speech with the following statement:

Six minutes and about twenty seconds. In a little over six minutes, seventeen of our friends were taken from us,  fifteen were injured and everyone, absolutely everyone in the Douglas community was forever altered. Everyone who was there understands. Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands. For us, long, tearful, chaotic hours in the scorching afternoon sun were spent not knowing. No one understood the extent of what had happened. No one could believe that there were bodies in that building waiting to be identified for over a day. No one knew that the people who are missing had stopped breathing long before any of us had even known that a code red had been called. No one could comprehend the devastating aftermath or how far this would reach or where this would go.

For those who still can’t comprehend because they refuse to, I’ll tell you where it went, right into the ground, six feet deep. Six minutes and twenty seconds with an AR-15 and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feis would never call Kiera Ms. Sunshine. Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan. Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp. Helen Ramsey would never hang out after school with Max. Do you know Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch? Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan. Alaina Petty would never, Carol Lungren would never, Chris Hixon would never, Luke Hoyer would never, Martin Duque Anguiano would never. Peter Wang would never, Alyssa Alahdeff would never, Jamie Guttenberg would never, Meadow Pollick would never.

At that stage in the speech, Gonzalez pauses for the entire length of time that the students at Stoneman Douglas had to remain silent while an active shooter was in the building. Gonzalez’s silence is uncomfortable for some listeners, who cheer and make noise as if encouraging them to speak.

Since the time that I came out here. It has been six minutes and 20 seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.

Identification describes the creation of a shared experience around the symbol. In this case, Gonzalez’s symbol is silence. This silence, which disrupted the expectation that they would speak, represents Gonzalez’s specific traumatic past experience, which also lasted six minutes and twenty seconds. Identification is clear in the discomfort and uncertainty of the audience during this long silence, simulating the disorientation characteristic of the event itself. Audiences – including its distant viewers on YouTube – come to identify with X because they come to understand the relationship between the speech and the scenario that the symbol represents.

Of course, identification does not always work. When this happens, it is called failed identification: when a meaning that a speaker wishes to share with a wider audience does not create the intended effect. During his 2012 US Presidential election campaign, Mitt Romney was widely criticized for using a false accent in his southern speeches. According to some critics, the former Massachusetts governor and US senator’s choice to use a southern accent was an example of unsuccessful pandering:

Mitt Romney’s “Grits” Moment. An Example of Failed Identification.

As Romney’s clip illustrates, disingenuous or inauthentic rhetoric may lead to effects of failed or (dis-)identification. The intent of this kind of speech may be to create an audience that shares the speaker’s understanding and worldview. However, a speaker who chooses symbols that challenge or their existing  ethos  also risks distancing themselves from their listeners.

In review, rhetoric emerges at the beginning of the 20th century as the study of public address, or as, again, the study of speeches and the systematic way they persuade. But at the same time, there’s also a second notion about rhetoric that is emerging that rhetoric is a mode of identification, that it requires symbols that everyone interpreting the same way.

The Symbol and the Philosophy of Language

There are two early American philosophers of language who independently develop theories of the symbol. The first is George Herbert Mead, who coins the phrase symbolic interactionism. The second is Charles Sanders Peirce, who develops a theory of representation based on the  icon,  the  index,  and the  symbol.

George Herbert Mead argues for a fundamental difference between “the I” and “the me” to explain how social expectations surrounding symbols are created. The “me” is the self that exists in relationship to a generalized, non-specific other. It is the generic response that I would expect from someone else when I execute a gesture or say a phrase. If “the me” says “how are you doing?” to a stranger on the street, they might expect them to say, “I’m fine, how are you?” or “none of your business!” depending on the customary expected response within that social environment.

The “I” describes individual reactions inflected with freedom and unpredictability. If  “I” wave to someone on the street, I might (as “the me”) expect them to wave back or acknowledge my hello. But the I is all of the actions that could happen: they could run up to me and confront me or suddenly run in the other direction. The sense of freedom that is characteristic of “the I” is, in this case, all of the different ways that this other person interprets my gesture differently or in a way that is opposed to the intention of the symbolic gesture I used to interact with them.

A second mid-20th-century philosopher of language who develops a theory of the symbol is Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”). Peirce is the inventor of linguistic pragmatism, in which the meaning of an idea may be understood as the totality of possible observations about it. According to Peirce, meaning must have an actual value; it must be taken from empirical observations. This is “value” occurs in one of three registers: “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness.”

Informational Video on Peirce’s Philosophy of Language

Imagine thinking of nothing but the color blue, not thinking about the color or addressing questions about the experience. The idea would be to perceive one thing alone. This is Peirce’s concept of firstness, the contemplation of the essential qualities of something, the color blue. But we cannot purely experienced this before some secondness (the sun, the landscape) a quality distinct from the blueness that you first perceived enters your consciousness. Perhaps something different or distinct from the original phenomenon, in relation to the foreground of background appears as a secondness. Perhaps it could be a sound. It could be another color or it might be an object that appears in the midst of that color. [It could be] something in a contrasting color that makes it distinguishable, that has characteristics, such as a shape. Finally, Perice recognized that what you experience in your mind is thirdness, the mediation of signs that occurs as a mental process of your experiences, thoughts or ideas. He called this an interpretant. An interpretant is a being with the potential to interpret signs [and who occupies the position of thirdness relative to firstness and secondness]

Signifier, Signified, Referent

Peirce employs three-part distinctions like  firstness, secondness,  and  thirdness  throughout his philosophy of language. One related framework is the distinction between the  signifier,  the  signified,  and the  referent.   The  signifier  is the graphic mark before it comes into contact with a specific meaning. It is also called the ‘shape’ of the word and the sound image. The  signified  is the meaning of the signifier, or the concept the word invokes. It is the ideational component of the word or the shared and similar thought that a word conjures for a person or people. Finally, the  referent  is the actual, literal object, which exists in the world.

For example, “the White House”: the  signifier  is the phonemes and sounds that combine to form this phrase. The  signified  is what this phrase “means,” such as the office of the American presidency that symbolizes the authority of the executive branch. Finally, the  referent  is the literal building or structure that exists in Washington D.C.

Icon, Index, Symbol

A final three-part distinction related to representation is the  icon,  the  index,  and the  symbol.

The  icon  resembles its referent, the literal thing to which it refers. The image of rocks falling is an icon because the thing it warns us against, rocks falling, is represented as a literal depiction of rocks falling.

The  index  is associated with a referent by cause or inference. When we see an index, we can deduce what it means. An image of smoke in the distance means that there is a fire; reasoning rather than a natural resemblance gives away the meaning of the index.

Finally, the  symbol  is related to the referent by convention. The biohazard symbol means that there is radiation present. However, there is no natural resemblance between a biological hazard (such as radiation) and this symbol; this danger does not “look like” anything we can easily represent. Additionally, we cannot use reasoning or deduction to infer that the biohazard symbol means that radiation is present. The symbol does not, for instance, show what the effects of radiation might be, like the image of smoke. Instead, the symbol means “radiation” through convention, circulation, and use.

Here’s another example, an image of a bicycle, a skull and crossbones, and the infinity symbol. The bicycle is an  icon  because it literally resembles the object. The skull and crossbones are an index because the audience may infer that consuming the object will lead to death. Finally, the final image, the leviathan cross, is a symbol because it does not refer specifically or reverentially to an object, and an audience cannot easily infer its meaning. Although it symbolizes protection and balance, this meaning is only attached to the symbol through convention and use.

The final example of icon, index, and symbol is the  Nazar Boncuk . It is an ornament that hangs in many homes to ward off the “evil eye”; many of you may have seen it or own them yourselves. It is an important example because it illustrates how the icon, the index, and the symbol can be part of a single object. It is an  icon  because the object resembles an eye. It is an index because, most often, when it is placed in a home, it hangs above the doorway as a message for guests: someone is always watching, so behave yourself as if you were being watched. Finally, it also has a symbolic value because its meaning is only learned by convention. When I grew up with this symbol in my home, I only realized that it was there as a symbol of protection because it was part of a story that was communicated to me by my family and which is part of a larger cultural tradition of hanging these symbols in homes. However, just seeing the symbol by itself doesn’t necessarily communicate this shared, well-known meaning.

Symbols and 20th-Century Propagandists

The last bit of historical context about the symbol that I want to provide is political  propaganda  in the early 20th century.   Propaganda is an important feature of the early 20th century that still lingers with us today. This time in the United States created a class of professional persuaders whose job was to create symbols and shared identifications on behalf of corporations and government. Several important figures for the history of propaganda in the United States are George Creel, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann. Edward Bernays is widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of public relations.

(1) George Creel.  Seven days after the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda agency acting to release government news, sustain morale in the US, administer voluntary press censorship, and develop propaganda abroad. Creel was named the head of the committee, and he created 37 distinct divisions, most notably the Division of Pictorial Publicity, the Four Minute Men Division, the News Division, and the Censorship Board.

The Division of Pictorial Publicity was staffed by hundreds of the nation’s most talented artists. They created over 1000 designs for paintings, posters, cartoons, and sculptures that instilled patriotism, fear, and interest in the war efforts. Creel himself said that the images were “something that caught even the most indifferent eye.” Between the News Division and Censorship Committee, Creel and the CPI could control the flow of official war information. Creel sought to portray facts without bias, though most pieces of news were “colored by nationalistic assumptions.” Creel’s committee may have produced biased news, but he hoped that the US could avoid rigid censorship during the war, as Creel’s views on censorship were “expression, not repression.” Under Creel’s direction, the CPI sought to repress material that contained “dangerous” or “unfavorable” ideas to avoid demoralizing the population.

(2) Edward Bernays  was born in Vienna, Austria. In 1891 Bernays’s family moved to New York City. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays often consulted his uncle’s work. He was the first to incorporate psychology and other social sciences into PR, yet where Freud sought to uncover motivations, Bernice sought to mobilize them. Bernie’s clients were companies rather than individuals. In one instance, the American Tobacco Company asked him to expand sales. He responded with a campaign (see below) that marketed cigarettes as “torches of freedom” and sought to associate tobacco consumption with the women’s suffrage movement.

(3)  During World War I  Walter Lippmann , an American journalist, became an adviser to Woodrow Wilson and assisted in drafting Wilson’s  Fourteen Points  speech. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had “no doctrinaire belief in free speech,” he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should “never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression.”

Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled  A Test of the News , stated that  The New York Times’  coverage of the  Bolshevik Revolution  was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his newspaper column “Today and Tomorrow,” he wrote several books. He was also the first to bring the phrase “cold war” to a common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.

Lippman also argued that people, including journalists, are more apt to believe “the pictures in their heads” than to come to judgment by critical thinking. He wrote that humans condense ideas into symbols, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed “the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.”

Part 2: Rhetoric as Symbolic Action

Symbolic Action  describes the construction of  social reality  through symbols that foster identification. If rhetoric-as-symbolic action is the expressive human use of symbols, then  social reality  is the reality that we perceive through symbols, as well as the rituals, habits, and practices that use symbols. Additionally, symbolic action must involve  identification  because symbols allow people to see themselves as a group based on common interests and characteristics. Groups may also be broken apart using symbols, for instance, by claiming that some group members hold on to symbols that threaten the whole group’s identity. Symbolic action also occurs in public, out in the open. It means that symbols are leveraged to move people as a group to do things that they otherwise might not do. Symbols move people because they identify with them — because they see something at stake in protecting symbols and see similarity (or difference) in those who cling to them.

Let’s place some firm definitions on this terminology, starting with Symbolic Action.

• Symbolic Action  describes the making or construction of social reality through symbols that foster identification. It is expressive human action, the rhetorical mobilization of symbols to act in the world.
• Rhetoric  is the use of symbolic action by human beings to share ideas, enabling them to work together to make decisions about matters of common concern and to construct social reality.
• A  rhetor  is any person, group, or institution that uses symbolic action.
• A  symbol  is an arbitrary representation of something else, a word, an image, or an artifact representing a thing, concept, or action.  Verbal Symbols  are symbols found in language, whether spoken or written.  Visual Symbols  are symbols that include pictures, images, objects, recordings, enactments, demonstrations, and other collective actions.
• Identification , finally, “is a communicative process through which people are unified into a whole based on common interests or characteristics.” It is how symbolic action allows a rhetor to connect with the audience on a psychological level.

Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic action revolves around his “definition of man.” (see the additional readings for this week). Although the word “man” is both a dated and imprecise way to say “human,” Burke’s definition is significant because it defines the human in terms of their capacity to use symbols (“the symbol-using animal”). Burke points out that animals can understand symbols; birds, for example, interact with symbols regularly. Wrens use food as leverage to goad hatchlings to leave the nest. However, humans manipulate symbols to advance their own purposes and create social groups, which sets them apart.

Burke’s “definition” has five parts. The first is that humans are symbol-using (and misusing) animals. As Burke writes,

“What is our reality for today but all of this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present. In school, as they go from class to class, students turn from one idiom (like mathematics or chemistry) to another (like Communication Studies or Rhetoric). The various courses in the curriculum are in effect but so many different terminologies. And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced first-hand, the whole over-all ‘picture’ is but a construct of our symbol-systems.”

Humans have the capacity to recognize symbols, but they also have the capacity to put them out into the world. They can use these symbols to destructive ends, and most often, substitute symbols for one another, such that a new symbol may carry on the work of an older one. The other aspects of this definition are important as well:

• Inventor of the negative  refers to how symbols are exclusive; for example, a group of people may gather around a symbol like a religious text or a conspiracy theory while excluding others, making them the “negative” of their symbolization.
• The idea that humans are  separated from their natural conditions by instruments of their own making  symbol-use can delude a people; how we may become ‘detached’ from reality based on the stories we elect to read or the news that we choose to watch. It also recalls the famous Clausewitz quotation that “diplomacy is war carried out by other means,” similarly, language allows for a kind of violence that sometimes stands in for acts of physical aggression.
• Goaded by a spirit of hierarchy  refers to the tendency not only to separate other people who are not part of our same symbol system or social group but to think of groups in terms of relative importance or as more and less deserving of recognition or rights. It describes how humans put some principles, ideas, and even people ‘first’ and subordinate others to those in that category.
• The final part,  rotten with perfection , describes how creating these hierarchical and exclusive orders is often the opposite of creating a ‘perfect world.’ The idea of American exceptionalism, for instance, that America is completely or wholly unlike any other country because it is ‘perfect’ in its ideals can be a way to legitimize oppressive laws or violent policing.

That brings us to Martha Solomon’s Article on the “rhetoric of dehumanization,” which discusses the misuse of symbols. Using Burke’s concepts, Solomon argued that the Tuskegee progress reports, printed in major medical journals from 1936 to 1973, functioned as “rhetoric of dehumanization” (p. 231). Specifically, the symbols used in the report show how Black men were treated as less human than the scientists who were conducting the study. The scientists’ “neutral” scientific language normalized inhuman practices of human testing, resulting in the deaths of patients who doctors never told that they were receiving placebos.

What was the Tuskegee Project? (from the CDC’s webpage documenting the Tuskegee Project)  In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for Black Americans … The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the benefit of patients’ informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years. Now that we’ve established what the article was about and how it is related to the topic of ‘symbolic action,’ we will return to Solomon’s article to show other aspects of symbolic action at work.

The Terministic Screen

The Terministic Screen  describes how symbols distort reality or create a partial ‘lens’ to interpret the world. It is connected to the idea from Burke’s “Definition” that symbols create a social reality that may be at odds with the way that other people perceive it. Burke defines the “terministic screen” using the trio of terms “ reflection ,” “ selection ,” and “ deflection .” In his words,

[Humans] “seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. Any  selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.”

First, language  reflects  reality or provides a vocabulary that has scope and breadth to account for things that happen in the world. Language then  selects  reality, placing a sliver or snapshot of the real world under a microscope and elevates it to the status of the ‘whole thing.’  Finally, language  deflects  reality. Humans use language to discard what doesn’t fit within the version of reality they have become accustomed to. Burke’s examples include a color filter on a camera and the interpretation of the ‘same’ dream by psychotherapists who come from different traditions of dream interpretation. A color filter deepens the yellows, reds, and blues while also pushing out other wavelengths. A Freudian interpretation of dreams might likely focus on the patient’s parents; a Jungian one on their religion and mythical beliefs.

Ultimately, the terministic screen is a way that symbols are used to filter our reality. One example is the “national security state,” a framework not just for international relations or the FBI but also for how we think of and organize our homes. The national security state is built on the idea of surveillance, or watching — and that we are somehow safer when there is  more watching . The national security state is a terministic screen because it has become a part of schools, hospitals, cities, and homes. Even “smart home” technology assumes that intelligence means we can watch everything at once. New parents can take this to new extremes by putting cameras literally  everywhere . That idea — that when we’re watching, helicoptering, surveilling, we are somehow more intelligent, more in control — is a terministic screen. Suddenly the national security state isn’t just a way to look at how we pass through airports, but a way to organize our lives.

In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization?” Solomon connects the terministic screen and “neutral” scientific language. According to Solomon,

[scientific language] is a “way that symbols are used to filter our reality” that “is constituted by terms through which humans perceive the world,” and “that directs attention away from some interpretations and toward others.”

Solomon condemns the dehumanizing characteristics of scientific writing, which often removes the author from the essay with the passive voice. (This is also why I don’t discourage students from writing using “I,” it involves the writer as a participant in the writing process, rather than just as a neutral observer.) Because the Tuskegee reports “avoided emotionally connotative language,” researchers emotionally dissociated from patients and deflected attention from human suffering, racism, and the possibility of intervention (pp. 237-238, 244).

The terministic screen of the Tuskeegee report also displays “four features of scientific investigation that “are accepted almost without question.” These include

• The scientific method encourages the perceptions of distinctions and the investigation of their significance.
• Objectivity and detachment are [wanted or needed] characteristics of the people who administered the Tuskeegee study,
• Science assumes knowledge as a primary value, rather than the wellbeing of the patient, and finally,
• The scientific approach is consistent across subject matter areas. These four characteristics were the ‘screen’ that allowed the Tuskeegee patients to be dehumanized.

Dramatism is a theory that describes instances of communication as if they were staged as a play or a fictional human drama. According to Burke, we read and understand the world rhetorically (i.e., as a narrative or theater performance). We process communicative phenomena through a restricted set of categories that Burke likens to a stage-act, consisting of a  scene ,  actors/agents , and  agency . Dramatism tells us that we are not just symbol-using animals but story-telling animals who use dramatistic elements in many different ways.

Dramatism makes two assumptions: First, language is primarily a species of action rather than an instrument of definition. (i.e., its primary function is NOT denotation or to establish the literal meaning of things). Second, that the best way to understand human relations and motives is to analyze symbolic action. There are five elements of dramatism that constitute a “pentad.” These include:

• The Agent  – the person or kind of person who performed the act;
• The Act  – what took place in thought or deed;
• The Agency  – how the act was accomplished;
• The Scene  – the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred;
• The Purpose  – the justification for the act.

Dramatism is like a detective drama, where the rhetorical critic tries to figure out the motives of the people who perpetrated the symbolic act. What is most important about this framework is NOT ‘finding’ these five elements but understanding their relationship to one another. This relationship is what Burke called the ratio. In a ratio, one is the ‘container,’ and the other is the ‘thing contained’. The meaning of the second term depends on the meaning of the first.

• The  scene/act  ratio, for instance, requires some explanation of ‘where’ the act happened to explain ‘what’ happened. The inventor of anesthesia, for instance, discovered ‘oxygen’ but called it “dephlogisticated air.” Unless we know something about the historical “scene,” this “act” of naming would be hard for us to understand.
• The  scene/agent  ratio describes how the “who” is over-determined by the “where.” We might be puzzled by the fact that Brittany Spears has withdrawn from public life and developed increasing hostility toward the paparazzi, for instance, until we recognize the larger ‘scene’ in which such actions have been set: the fact that she has for years been able to go out in public without confronting a sea of microphones, and that she and others have been fighting relentlessly to retain conservatorship of her estate. Without that “where,” we lack a clear understanding of the “who.”
• The  act/agent  ratio describes how a person’s ethos is over-determined by an act attributed to them. In the courtroom, a plaintiff may be symbolized as a ‘criminal’ by repeatedly drawing attention to the “act.” Alternatively, if you send a friend or colleague a basket of baked goods after hearing that they are having a particularly tough day, this act can configure or reconfigure that person’s impression of you as a person.

In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization? ”  Solomon provides several additional examples: the agent/agency and the agent/scene ratio. In the first case, the AGENT (or “who performed the Tuskegee experiments”) explains the rationale for the AGENCY, or how “the experiments were done.” The agents are ‘noble’ doctors pursuing knowledge, and the “means to an end” are the patients. Doctors dehumanized the patients because they were only the “agency” for the doctors (the “agents”) the means of completing the medical experiment.

In the second case, dehumanization occurs because the disease is the AGENT and the patients’ bodies become a SCENE. This choice of language is significant because this ratio erases the fact that the doctors were, in fact, the ones doing harm.

Demagoguery

The last part of this recording is devoted to the topic of  Demagoguery , which is exactly the kind of symbolic action that Kenneth Burke is concerned about when he talks about the “misuse of symbols.” A demagogue is a dangerous speaker who perpetuates conspiracy theories and acts as a political salesperson. They attract an audience by spreading lies that divide a group of people from another group.

Before World War II, Kenneth Burke was concerned with the rhetoric emerging from Nazi Germany and saw a similar pattern of thinking and speaking emerging in the United States. Disturbed by what he saw in Germany, he applied his framework of symbolic action there. He said he identified several key features that were hallmarks of demagogic speech. These features were used to ‘constitute’ a people using language that is similarly hateful to the speech that was delivered by the staged demagogue in the clip just shown. The demagogue encourages “the division of the attention of a people” by focusing on a convenient but phony scapegoat. He noted specifically the treatment of the Jewish people in Germany. The demagogue also fashioned themselves like a religious pattern, using patterns like rituals, and made themselves into a paternalistic ‘father-like figure who would lead the ‘feminized’ public to salvation. These were above all dangerous characteristics because they are so easily picked up and used elsewhere. When analyzing the dangerous speech itself, Burke also came up with the following characteristic progression of ideas.

• First, Inborn Dignity.  This stresses the “natural born” dignity of a group elevated above all others while other people are described as innately inferior.
• Then, the Projection Device.  This gesture associates the target audience’s problems with a scapegoat. If one can attribute their problems to a “cause” outside the self, they can battle an external enemy instead of an enemy within.
• Then, Symbolic Rebirth.  Rebirth involved a symbolic change of lineage by voting oneself and the members of one’s group as different and less-than.
• Finally, Commercial use.  This provides a macroeconomic interpretation of economic problems, such that depression/recession is due to the actions of a particular social group rather than to larger structural forces.

Demagoguery is still prominent in American culture. Watching this final clip, consider the elements of demagoguery and how they are played out in “Dwight’s Speech” from the popular television show,  The Office.  In this clip, Dwight is delivering a speech to  North Eastern Salesmen after winning an award. He has been given a speech that strongly resembles and was adapted from one by Benito Mussolini.

In the clip, Dwight quickly runs through Burke’s criteria: inborn dignity, a projection device, symbolic rebirth, and commercial use. He appeals to inborn dignity when he says that North Eastern salesman stand apart from other people, that they are special and unique because of the difficulty of their work. Next, he appeals to a projection device when referring to “door-to-door charlatans” and those who would be nasty to salespeople in principle. He then tells the audience to “unite” in opposition to these ideas, corresponding with “symbolic rebirth.” Finally, he pushes them to the ultimate purpose: more sales, more money, bringing his speech to its commercial use and application.

Additional Resources

• Fernheimer, Janice W. “Confronting Kenneth Burke’s Anti-Semitism.”   Journal of Communication & Religion  39.2 (2016): 36.

Reading Rhetorical Theory Copyright © 2022 by Atilla Hallsby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Cognitive Representation of Human Action: Theory, Applications, and Perspectives

Christian seegelke.

1 Neurocognition and Action Research Group, Faculty of Psychology and Sport Sciences, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

2 Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), Bielefeld, Germany

Thomas Schack

3 Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CorLab), Bielefeld, Germany

In this perspective article, we propose a cognitive architecture model of human action that stresses the importance of cognitive representations stored in long-term memory as reference structures underlying and guiding voluntary motor performance. We introduce an experimental approach to ascertain cognitive representation structures and provide evidence from a variety of different studies, ranging from basic research in manual action to application-oriented research, such as athlete performance and rehabilitation. As results from these studies strongly support the presence of functional links between cognitive and motor processes, we regard this approach as a suitable and valuable tool for a variety of different disciplines related to cognition and movement. We conclude this article by highlighting current advances in ongoing research projects aimed at improving interaction capabilities in technical systems, particularly for rehabilitation and everyday support of the elderly, and outline future research directions.

Introduction

Motor activities within particular environmental conditions are central dimensions of biological organism since millions of years. Important stages in evolution are mainly based on the establishment of new functional links between the motor system, related memory structures, and the perception of biological systems. Furthermore, motor actions – such as dance or sports – have always been an important element in all human cultures. Stated in a more dramatic language: “from the motor chauvinist’s point of view the entire purpose of the human brain is to produce movement … [and] all sensory and cognitive processes may be viewed as inputs that determine future motor outputs” [Ref. ( 1 ), p. 487]. Consequently, understanding how we plan and control our bodily actions (i.e., the topic of motor control research) is not only of theoretical importance but also has large and diverse practical relevance.

For example, research in motor control contributes at exploring the principles underlying elite performance of professional athletes and musicians and devising training appropriately ( 2 – 5 ). It can also aid clinical practice by consulting physicians, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists in terms of development and implementation of (neurocognitive) motor rehabilitation treatments for people suffering from motor disorders ( 6 – 9 ). More generally, motor control research can therefore contribute to a more independent and self-determined everyday life from childhood to the elderly. Furthermore, it can help engineers and roboticists in developing technical systems and prosthetic devices that dispose more “human-like” action capabilities, and hence, are intuitive and easy to operate for humans users ( 10 – 12 ).

In this article, we take a perceptual–cognitive perspective to motor control emphasizing the strong functional connections between cognitive and motor processes underlying action control. From our point of view, human motor actions are not isolated events with defined start- and endpoints but are built upon evolved hierarchical structures consisting of different levels and modules.

Cognitive Representation of Action: A Theoretical Framework

In planning a movement, the brain must select one of the many possible movements. Known as the degrees of freedom problem ( 13 ), it acknowledges the fact that due to the redundant anatomical, kinematic, and neurophysiological degrees of freedom in the motor system, there are multiple ways in which a movement can be performed to achieve the same action goal. Consequently, motor control can be considered “the process of mastering the redundant degrees of freedom of the moving organ … its conversion to a controllable system” [Ref. ( 13 ), p. 127].

Although the subject of motor control has long been a topic of interest primarily for the neurosciences ( 14 ), in the past few years, a growing interest in this topic emerged in the fields of cognitive science and psychology. Current theoretical conceptions in cognitive psychology on action control share the belief that actions are guided by internally represented action goals and their anticipated (perceptual) features [e.g., Ref. ( 15 – 19 )]. Interestingly, these perspectives are reminiscent of earlier ideas of Bernstein ( 13 ) regarding the construction of movement. Bernstein explicitly emphasized the importance of sensory feedback processing and anticipation in realizing any type of goal-directed motor act, and that any voluntary motor action cannot be initiated without a model of what should result from the planned action. This idea is reflected in his model of the desired future (i.e., a model of what should be), which is supposed to play an important role in controlling motor acts. Such a model must possess the capability to form a representation of future events by integrating information from past (i.e., memory) and present (i.e., sensory) events in order to generate motor commands that transform the current state in the sensory environment into the desired state (i.e., achieving the action goal).

Expanding this idea, we have proposed a cognitive architecture model, which views the functional construction of actions on the basis of a reciprocal assignment of performance-oriented regulation levels and representational levels [Ref. ( 11 , 20 – 22 ); see Figure ​ Figure1]. 1 ]. According to this view, basic action concepts (BACs), stored hierarchically in long-term memory (LTM), are thought to serve as major representation units for movement control. Analogous to the well-established notion of basic concepts for objects ( 23 ), BACs are considered the mental counterparts of functionally relevant elementary components or transitional states (body postures) of movements. BACs are based on the cognitive chunking of body postures and movement events concerning common functions in realizing action goals. In contrast to basic object concepts, they do not refer to behavior-related invariance properties of objects but to perception-linked invariance properties of movements. Consequently, BACs can be understood as representational units in memory that tie together the functional and sensory features of movements. The integration of sensory features refers to the perceptual movement effects, whereas the functional features are derived from the action goals. Taken together, such movement representations provide the basis for action anticipation and control by linking higher level action goals with the lower-level perceptual effects in the form of cognitive reference structures.

Cognitive architecture (levels) of motor action and corresponding tools [modified from Ref. ( 20 , 24 )] .

Measuring Cognitive Representations

A particularly promising method to assess structures of cognitive representation in LTM constitutes the so-called structure dimensional analysis-motorics [SDA-M; ( 20 , 25 )]. The SDA-M procedure ascertains relational structures in a given set of concepts. The internal grouping of conceptual units (i.e., the clustering of BACs) delineates the structure of the cognitive representation of a certain movement. Whereas most of the methods aimed at assessing knowledge-based cognitive representations of movements in LTM focus on explicit knowledge [e.g., interviews, questionnaires; see Ref. ( 26 ) for a review], an important advantage of the SDA-M is that it allows for a psychometric analysis of the structures without necessitating participants to give explicit statements regarding their representation, but rather through means of knowledge-based decisions in an experimental setting. The SDA-M consists of four steps [for further details, see Ref. ( 25 )]: first, a splitting procedure provides an Euclidean distance scaling between BACs of an appropriate predetermined set. Specifically, participants are required to subjectively decide whether or not a given BAC is functionally related to another BAC (i.e., pair-wise comparison). During this process, a randomly selected BAC from a predetermined set is presented as reference item (or anchor), and all other BACs of the set are successively compared to the anchor item. Participants have to decide whether or not the two given concepts are functionally related to each other during movement execution. Through this procedure, the list of BACs is split into two subsets, a positive (i.e., functionally related) and a negative (i.e., functionally not related) subset, and this procedure is repeated until each BAC was once in the anchoring position and compared to all other BACs. Based on these decisions, the positive and negative subsets are summed separately, providing an Euclidean distance scaling between the BACs. Second, a hierarchical cluster analysis transforms the set of BACs into a hierarchical structure (i.e., a dendrogram; Figure ​ Figure2). 2 ). Third, a dimensioning of the cluster solutions through a factor analysis is performed, resulting in a factor matrix classified by clusters. Finally, a within- and between-group comparison of the cluster solutions is used to determine their structural invariance.

Dendrograms for expert players (A) and novice players (B) based on the hierarchical cluster analysis of the golf swing . The numbers on the horizontal axes relate to the basic action concepts (BACs). The numbers on the vertical axes display Euclidean distances. The lower the Euclidean distance between two concepts in feature space, the stronger the link between these concepts. The horizontal dotted line marks the critical distance d crit for a given alpha-level ( d crit  = 3.46, p  = 0.05): links below this line are considered as statistically relevant. BACs are as follows: (1) position club face, (2) grip control, (3) address position, (4) ball position, (5) locking, (6) push club away, (7) pressure inside right foot, (8) bending right knee, (9) arms make wide circle, (10) cock the wrists, (11) back points to target, (12) left side out of the way, (13) head behind the ball, (14) acceleration through the ball, (15) let go, and (16) balance at finish. The experts’ cluster solutions reflect the functional movement phases of the golf swing: preparation (BAC 1–5), backswing and transition (BAC 6–11), and downswing and impact (BAC 12–16), whereas novices’ dendrograms do not exhibit any statistically relevant cluster solutions.

As we will outline in the next section, the SDA-M has been utilized, either alone or in conjunction with other experimental techniques, in a variety of different studies, thereby encompassing basic research in manual action as well as more applied research in the context of athlete performance, rehabilitation, and cognitive robotics ( 11 , 12 , 21 , 22 ). As such the SDA-M provides an effective means by which functional relationships between cognitive representations and motor performance can be assessed, making it a valuable tool for scientists in basic and applied research, as well as practitioners working with athletes or patients.

Empirical Evidence and Applications

One way to ascertain links between motor performance and cognitive representation structures is to examine differences between groups of different motor expertise. Schack and Mechsner ( 27 ) took this approach and compared the cognitive representation of the tennis serve in expert players, amateur players, and novices. Based on ratings given by tennis experts and coaches, the authors defined 11 BACs in relation to the functional movement structure derived from biomechanical movement parameters. The results of this study showed that expert players exhibited representation structures that had a distinct hierarchical organization, were remarkably similar between individuals, and reflected the three functional phases (i.e., pre-activation, strike, and final swing) of the movement. By contrast, novices’ representation structures were organized less hierarchically, exhibited greater variability between individuals, and did not match the functional task demands. Similar systematic relationships between cognitive representation structures and expertise have been reported in a number of sport contexts, such as dancing, judo, windsurfing, soccer, volleyball, and gymnastics ( 24 , 28 – 32 ).

Differences in the cognitive representation structure depending on the level of expertise suggest that improvements in motor performance involve changes in the corresponding representation structure. Accordingly, motor learning can be regarded as the modification of representation structures in LTM ( 12 , 20 ). Frank et al. ( 32 ) directly addressed this assertion by examining the effects of movement practice on the representation structure during early skill acquisition of a gold putt, using a pre–posttest design. Novice golfers were randomly assigned to a practice or control group, and participants in the practice group performed a total of 600 golf putts over the course of three training days. Results indicated that along with improvements in putting performance, there were significant changes within the practice group’s cognitive representation (i.e., it became more similar to an expert structure), suggesting that motor learning is linked to functional adaptations in the cognitive representation structure.

As the cognitive representation structures of complex skills can be analyzed not only on a group level but also on an individual level ( 29 , 33 ), the SDA-M can be used as a diagnosing tool to derive knowledge about an athlete’s individual skill representation. This information can then be utilized by coaches and athletes to identify specific movement problems, and hence, can build the basis for further practical work in coaching, technical preparation, and mental training ( 24 , 30 ).

We would like to emphasize, however, that the usefulness of this approach is by far not limited to complex actions (such as in sports) but has a much broader spectrum of application such as for actions required in everyday life, such as walking ( 34 ) or object manipulation ( 35 ). Thus, this approach might be also a valuable source for people interested in health-related issues. To exemplify our point, consider the following: an important component of (mental) health is that we acquire, maintain, and rebuild (after loss) independence in everyday life ( 36 ). Many everyday activities require that we grasp and manipulate objects (e.g., cooking, cleaning, and getting dressed). Although we typically pay very little attention to how we accomplish such tasks, it is apparent that the inability to perform these actions (be it acquired or congenital) has dramatic consequences for our everyday life. Consequently, we argue that it is important to understand how such manual actions often required in everyday activities are controlled and represented, for example, to diagnose certain motor problems and to develop suitable intervention in order to maintain or rebuild a certain level of independence.

In this regard, the SDA-M has already been proven a promising tool. Specifically, Stöckel et al. ( 35 ) examined links between anticipatory motor planning in manual action and the development of cognitive representations of grasp postures in children aged 7–9 years. Motor planning skills were assessed via the so-called bar-transport task ( 37 ). In this task, participants are required to grasp a horizontally oriented bar (using either an overhand or an underhand grip) and place it with either its left or right end on a target. It is typically found that neurologically healthy adults select initial grasp postures that will result in comfortable thumb-up postures when placing the bar on the target. Termed the end-state comfort effect, this finding supports the notion that people represent future body postures and plan initial grasp postures in anticipation of the future states [see Ref. ( 38 , 39 ) for reviews]. Cognitive representations of grasp postures were assessed via the SDA-M with pictures of a hand grasping common objects (e.g., hammer, scissors, and glass) as BACs. In line with other studies on motor planning during childhood [see Ref. ( 40 ) for a review], Stöckel et al. ( 35 ) found that end-state comfort satisfaction increased with age, and the 9-year-old children had more distinct representation structures of grasp postures than the 7- and 8-year-old children. Importantly, the sensitivity toward comfortable end-postures was related to the cognitive representation structure. Children who exhibited grasp comfort-related and functionally well-structured representations also showed a stronger preference for end-state comfort in the bar-transport task, supporting the notion that cognitive action representation plays an important role in the planning and control of grasp postures.

Of particularly practical relevance for our argument is a study conducted by Braun et al. ( 41 ) in the context of rehabilitation. Specifically, the authors examined the cognitive representation of a common everyday activity – drinking from a cup – in elderly patients recovering from stroke and matched controls. Although the representation structures of the controls reflected the functional action phases and were very similar across participants, the patients’ structures differed largely from each other and hardly featured any functional structure. Thus, this study demonstrates that the SDA-M can also be used as a diagnostic tool for therapists in clinical and rehabilitation contexts ( 34 ).

Current Advances and Perspectives

Although the studies presented above clearly demonstrate that the SDA-M is a viable and versatile tool that can be employed in variety of different contexts, it has not, as of yet, exploited its full potential, especially in clinical settings. Just to name one example, it could be applied to children suffering from developmental coordination disorder (DCD). These children have difficulties in learning new motor skills, are not able to predict the outcome of their movement, and do not easily recognize movement errors ( 42 , 43 ), which affects their performance in the classroom and activities of daily living ( 44 ). As this deficit, according to our view, is likely to be related to non-functional cognitive action representations, the SDA-M could be used to support other commonly used intervention techniques ( 45 ) to improve children’s day-to-day activities.

A similar goal is pursued by the current research project adaptive cognitive training (ACT) in which our research group collaborates with a local non-profit making foundation, in which job-related knowledge (e.g., serving and cooking) is transmitted to mentally handicapped people. By assessing the cognitive representations of such job-related activities in these individuals and providing individualized feedback, a central aim of ACT is to stimulate the developmental potential of handicapped people to foster their integration into normal working and daily routines.

In light of the demographic change, facilitating and maintaining independence in daily activities, particularly for the elderly, are also central objectives of two other ongoing research projects – adaptive and mobile action assistance in daily living activities (ADAMAAS) and KogniHome – in which our group collaborates with several partners from science and industry. Central and common to these projects is that they utilize, integrate, and advance interaction capabilities of state-of-the-art technologies in order to assist people in everyday activities. ADAMAAS focuses on the development of a mobile adaptive assistance system in the form of intelligent glasses that provide unobtrusive and intuitive support in everyday situations (e.g., baking, making coffee, repairing a bike, etc.). It is intended that the system will identify problems in ongoing action processes, react to errors, and provide context-related assistance in textual, pictorial, or avatar-based formats superimposed on a transparent virtual display. The project integrates cognitive representation analysis, eye tracking, physiological measures (pulse, heart rate), computer vision (object and action recognition), and augmented reality with modern diagnostic and corrective intervention techniques. The uniqueness of this system is its ability to react to errors in real-time, provide individualized feedback for action support, and learn from expert models as well as the individual behavior of the user.

To sum up, we put forward a cognitive perspective to action control that stresses the importance of cognitive representations stored in LTM as reference structures underlying and guiding voluntary motor performance. We introduced an experimental method (the SDA-M) used to ascertain cognitive representation structures and provided evidence from both basic and applied research that reinforce the proposition of functional links between cognitive and motor processes. Thus, we view this approach as a viable and versatile tool, capable of providing individualized recommendations across a range of different contexts. Alongside and in combination with the ongoing advances in developing, improving, and integrating interaction capabilities in technical systems, this perspective constitutes a promising route in order to acquire, maintain, and rebuild independence in everyday life activities across human development, and thus, contribute to public health.

Author Contributions

CS and TS contributed to the conception of the present work. CS drafted the first version of the manuscript and TS helped in revising it. All authors approved the final, submitted version of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

This research was supported by the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology “CITEC” (EXC 277) at Bielefeld University, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The authors acknowledge support for the Article Processing Charge by the DFG and the Open Access Publication Funds at Bielefeld University Library.

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Middle English, from Anglo-French representer , from Latin repraesentare , from re- + praesentare to present

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• Published: 30 March 2023

A data-driven investigation of human action representations

• Diana C. Dima 1 , 2 ,
• Martin N. Hebart 3 &
• Leyla Isik 1  

Scientific Reports volume  13 , Article number:  5171 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Cognitive neuroscience
• Data mining
• Human behaviour

Understanding actions performed by others requires us to integrate different types of information about people, scenes, objects, and their interactions. What organizing dimensions does the mind use to make sense of this complex action space? To address this question, we collected intuitive similarity judgments across two large-scale sets of naturalistic videos depicting everyday actions. We used cross-validated sparse non-negative matrix factorization to identify the structure underlying action similarity judgments. A low-dimensional representation, consisting of nine to ten dimensions, was sufficient to accurately reconstruct human similarity judgments. The dimensions were robust to stimulus set perturbations and reproducible in a separate odd-one-out experiment. Human labels mapped these dimensions onto semantic axes relating to food, work, and home life; social axes relating to people and emotions; and one visual axis related to scene setting. While highly interpretable, these dimensions did not share a clear one-to-one correspondence with prior hypotheses of action-relevant dimensions. Together, our results reveal a low-dimensional set of robust and interpretable dimensions that organize intuitive action similarity judgments and highlight the importance of data-driven investigations of behavioral representations.

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Introduction

Our ability to rapidly recognize and respond to others’ actions is remarkable, given the wide variety of human behaviors that span different contexts, goals, and motor sequences. When we see a person acting in the world, we integrate visual information, social cues and prior knowledge to interpret their action. These daily actions in context are often described as activities, which differ from other more basic-level or kinematic-based definitions of action, and despite their ubiquity, still pose a challenge to even state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. How does the mind make sense of this complex action space?

Previous work on action understanding in the mind and brain has focused on hypothesis-driven efforts to identify critical action features and their neural underpinnings. This work has highlighted semantic content 1 , 2 , social and affective features 3 , 4 , 5 , and visual features 3 , 6 as essential components in visual action understanding. However, such an approach requires the experimenter to pre-define actions and their potential organizing dimensions, necessarily limiting the hypothesis space. Action categories have commonly been defined based on the verbs they represent 7 or everyday action categories as listed, for example, in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 3 , 5 , 8 , 9 . Given the diversity of actions, a low-dimensional, flexible representation may be a more efficient way to organize them in the mind and brain; but generating the hypotheses that could uncover this representation remains difficult, especially for naturalistic stimuli that vary along multiple axes.

Data-driven methods provide an alternative to pre-defined representational spaces and have achieved great success in mapping perceptual and psychological representations in other visual domains. In object recognition, a data-driven computational model revealed 49 interpretable dimensions capable of accurately predicting human similarity judgments 10 . Recent work has extended this method to near scenes, known as reachspaces, and identified 30 dimensions capturing their most important characteristics 11 . Low-dimensional representations have been also proposed that explain how people perceive others and their mental states 12 , 13 or psychologically meaningful situations 14 , 15 .

To date there has been only limited data-driven work in the action domain. Using principal component analysis (PCA) of large-scale text data, a low-dimensional taxonomy of actions has been shown to explain neural data and human action judgments 16 , as well as guide predictions about actions 17 . However, since this taxonomy was generated from text data, most of these dimensions were relatively abstract (e.g. creation , tradition , spiritualism ), and it is unclear whether a similar set of dimensions would emerge from visual action representations. In the visual domain, six broad semantic clusters were shown to explain semantic similarity judgments of controlled action images 1 , suggesting that actions may be semantically categorized at the superordinate level. However, it remains unclear how this finding would generalize to more natural and diverse stimulus sets.

We analyzed a dataset containing unconstrained behavioral similarity judgments of two sets of natural action videos from the Moments in Time dataset 18 collected in our prior study 5 . Behavioral similarity has often been used as a proxy for mental representations 19 , 20 , 21 and has been shown to correlate with neural representations 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 . Specifically, the perceived similarity of actions has been found to map onto critical action features, such as their goals or their social-affective content, as well as onto the structure of neural patterns elicited by actions 1 , 5 , 9 .

Here, we employ a data-driven approach, sparse non-negative matrix factorization 27 (NMF) to recover the dimensions underlying behavioral similarity. This approach has two main advantages. First, it allows dimensions to be sparse, so that they need not be present in every action. For example, a single-agent action would have a value of 0 along a social interaction dimension. Second, the method requires the dimensions to be non-negative. Thus, dimensions can add up without canceling each other out, and no dimension can negate another’s importance. Together, these criteria help recover interpretable dimensions, with values that are interpretable as the degree to which they are present in the data.

We show that a cross-validated approach to dimensionality reduction produces a low-dimensional representation that is interpretable by humans and generalizes across stimulus categories. Importantly, the dimensions recovered by NMF are more robust than those generated by the more commonly used PCA. The non-negativity constraint is known to yield a parts-based description, supporting dimension interpretability 28 .

Using human labeling and semantic embeddings, we find that dimensions map to interpretable visual, semantic, and social axes and generalize across two experiments with different experimental structure, stimuli, and participants. Together, our results highlight the semantic structure underlying intuitive action similarity and show that cross-validated NMF is a useful tool for recovering interpretable, low-dimensional cognitive representations.

NMF recovers robust dimensions

We analyzed two datasets consisting of three-second naturalistic videos of everyday actions from the Moments in Time dataset 18 . In two previously conducted experiments 5 , participants arranged two sets of 152 and 65 videos from 18 everyday action categories 8 according to their unconstrained similarity 29 . The first dataset also included videos of natural scenes as a control category (see Stimuli; Supplementary Fig.  1 ; Supplementary Table 1 ).

During the experiments, participants arranged a maximum of 7–8 videos at a time inside a circular arena, and the task continued until sufficient evidence was obtained for each pair of videos 30 or until the experiment timed out (Experiment 1: 90 min; Experiment 2: 120 min). In Experiment 1, participants arranged different subsets of 30 videos from the 152-video set. In Experiment 2, participants arranged all 65 videos.

In both experiments, participants were instructed to arrange the videos according to how similar they were, thus allowing participants to use their own criteria to arrange the videos, as well as to use different criteria for different groupings of videos. This method allowed us to recover a multidimensional, intuitive representation of naturalistic actions.

We used sparse non-negative matrix factorization 27 , 31 with a nested cross-validation approach (see Methods) to recover the optimal number of underlying dimensions in the behavioral data (Fig.  1 ). This approach combines sparsity and non-negativity constraints to generate feature embeddings that can capture both categorical and continuous information 10 , 32 , 33 (see Methods). Using only behavioral similarity matrices as its starting point, this method can thus recover interpretable features that may shed light on how actions are organized in the mind.

Analysis overview. ( A ) Using non-negative matrix factorization, we identified the optimal lower-dimensional approximation of a behavioral similarity matrix. This uncovered the interpretable dimensions underlying the perceived similarity of naturalistic action videos. ( B ) N MF cross-validation procedure. Individual similarity ratings were assigned to a cross-validation fold before averaging the input matrices for each fold. The sparsity parameters ( s ) were optimized using two-fold cross-validation on ~ 60% of the data, with a separate ~ 30% used to determine the number of dimensions ( k ), and a hold-out set of ~ 10% used for final evaluation.

Despite differences in stimulus set size and sampling, both experiments were characterized by similar numbers of dimensions (9 and 10 respectively; Supplementary Fig.  2 ) with a sparsity of 0.1. This suggests that the dimensions tended to be continuous and not categorical. Importantly, our sparse NMF procedure allowed the optimal structure to emerge from the data.

In Experiment 1, the final NMF reconstruction of the entire training set correlated well with the training data (Kendall’s \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.46) and the held-out data ( \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.19, true \({\tau }_{A}\) between the original training set and the hold-out set = 0.14). Performance was better in Experiment 2, with a training \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.75 and a hold-out \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.46 (true \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.45). In both experiments, the hold-out performance of NMF was close to the limit placed on it by the reliability of each dataset, as reflected in the true correlation between the training and hold-out sets.

Importantly, the dimensions were robust to systematic perturbations in the underlying stimulus sets (Fig.  2 ). Even after removing critical stimulus categories (such as all outdoor or indoor videos or certain action categories), the NMF procedure resulted in similar numbers of dimensions in both experiments (mean ± SD 8.4 ± 0.89 and 8.2 ± 1.64). All dimensions were significantly correlated to those resulting from the full stimulus set, suggesting that the NMF results generalize even after modifying the compositon of the underlying datasets.

NMF dimension robustness. ( A ) The NMF procedure was repeated after removing key stimulus categories from the behavioral RDM from Experiment 1 . Each dot shows the maximal correlation between each dimension obtained in the control analysis and any of the original dimensions with the same stimuli removed (repeats allowed). The grey rectangle depicts the chance level (min–max range). ( B ) As for ( A ), for Experiment 2.

NMF dimensionality varied less as a function of stimulus set size (average k range 6–8.3) than as a function of number of action categories (average k range 3.6–10.2; Supplementary Fig.  4 ). Further, NMF dimensions did not map directly onto any single visual, social, or action feature identified in our previous work 5 (Supplementary Fig.  3 ), suggesting that this method is able to capture additional information not revealed by a hypothesis-driven approach.

Finally, NMF performance was better than that achieved by an equivalent cross-validated analysis using PCA, which recovered 8 dimensions in both experiments (Experiment 1: training \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.41, hold-out \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.16; Experiment 2: training \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.63, hold-out \({\tau }_{A}\) = 0.41). In the robustness analysis, the number of dimensions generated by PCA after removing critical stimulus categories was less reliable than those obtained with NMF in Experiment 1 (Experiment 1: 7.8 ± 2.49 vs. 8.4 ± 0.98; Experiment 2: 6 ± 1.58 vs 8.2 ± 1.64). While on average correlations with the original dimensions were high, their variance was also more than twice as high as that obtained with NMF (Supplementary Figs.  5 – 6 ). This suggests that dimensions recovered with PCA are more sensitive to variations in the underlying stimulus set than those found with NMF.

NMF recovers interpretable dimensions

The hypothesis-neutral dimensions generated by NMF suggest a potential structure to the behavioral space of action understanding. However, further validation is needed to show whether (1) these dimensions are reproducible and (2) to what degree they are interpretable.

To test reproducibility, participants in an online experiment selected the odd video out of a group consisting of seven highly weighted videos and one low-weighted video along each dimension. In a separate online experiment to test interpretability, participants were asked to provide up to three labels for each dimension after viewing the eight highest and eight lowest weighted videos. Their labels were quantitatively evaluated using FastText 34 , a 300-dimensional word embedding pretrained on 1 million English words.

All dimensions were reproducible in the odd-one-out experiments (Fig.  3 A; all P  < 0.004), though participants performed significantly better on average in Experiment 1 (mean accuracy 0.8 ± 0.13) than in Experiment 2 (mean accuracy 0.61 ± 0.13, t(15.82) = 3.69, P  = 0.002).

Behavioral results. ( A ) Accuracy on the odd-one-out task for each dimension plotted against the chance level of 12.5% (horizontal line). ( B ) Proportion of participants who agreed on the top label for each dimension, where agreement is defined as a word embedding dissimilarity in the 10th percentile within all dimensions in both experiments. The horizontal line marks a chance level based on embedding dissimilarity across different dimensions.

Participants’ labels were consistent for most dimensions (Fig.  3 B). Agreement, as measured via word embeddings, was higher in Experiment 1 (mean proportion 0.5 ± 0.2) than in Experiment 2 (mean proportion 0.34 ± 0.17), though this difference was not significant (t(15.78) = 1.84, P  = 0.08).

The most common labels (Fig.  4 ) captured different types of information, ranging from visual ( nature/outdoors ), to action-related ( eating, cleaning, working ), as well as social and affective ( children/people, talking, celebration/happiness, chaos ). Dimensions in Experiment 2 included more social information overall, with four dimensions labeled with social or affective terms ( talking, people, celebration, chaos ), compared to one in Experiment 1 ( children ). Although many dimensions reflected action categories included in the dataset ( eating, cleaning, working, driving, reading ) or labeled features that explained the most variance in our previous experiment (relating to people and affect), the information they provided was richer than the a priori category labels and crossed predefined category boundaries. For example, some videos were highly rated along several different dimensions (e.g. work and learning ), thus capturing the complexity of naturalistic stimuli which often depict several actions or lend themselves to different interpretations.

Label correspondence across experiments. Wordclouds showing the labels assigned by participants to each NMF dimension in Experiment 1 (left) and Experiment 2 (right), with larger font sizes representing more frequent labels. Bars connect dimensions from Experiment 1 to their most related dimensions from Experiment 2. The values shown are normalized relative similarities. Dimensions from Experiment 1 are sorted in descending order of their summed weights, while those from Experiment 2 are organized for clarity of visualization.

Further, not all action categories were reflected in NMF dimensions, suggesting that certain action categories are more important than others in organizing behavior. Certain action categories were absorbed by others (e.g. eating included both eating and preparing food ), while other related actions remained separated (e.g. work was split into office work vs chores/cleaning ).

A shared semantic space

To better understand the relationship between dimensions revealed by the two datasets, we calculated Euclidean distances between averaged word embeddings for dimensions in each experiment (see Methods). This analysis revealed several dimensions that were present in both datasets: eating, nature/outdoors, learning/reading, chores/cleaning, and work (Fig.  5 ). Furthermore, some dimensions were moderately related to several others: games: people, celebration; work: talking, working; reading: working, learning . In Experiment 1, the only dimension that did not have a counterpart in Experiment 2 was driving , possibly because of the low number of driving videos in Experiment 2.

T-SNE plot displaying the distances between the averaged embeddings corresponding to each dimension from both experiments in a 2D space. Eating , nature , cleaning , reading , and work are the dimensions that most clearly replicate across experiments.

Here, we used sparse non-negative matrix factorization to recover a low-dimensional representation of intuitive action similarity judgments across two naturalistic video datasets. This resulted in robust and interpretable dimensions that generalized across experiments. Our results highlight the visual, semantic and social axes that organize intuitive visual action understanding.

Non-negative matrix factorization as a viable approach to understanding similarity judgments

In the visual domain, it is reasonable to assume that features can be either absent or present to variable degrees, and that they can be additively combined to characterize a stimulus. Previous work has demonstrated that sparsity and positivity constraints enable the detection of interpretable dimensions underlying object similarity judgments 10 . Here, we showed that a different approach with the same constraints can recover robust, generalizable and interpretable dimensions of human actions. As opposed to those recovered for objects, the action dimensions were only moderately sparse, potentially due to the naturalistic nature of our stimuli. However, optimizing sparsity enabled us to strike the right balance between categorical and continuous descriptions of our data, thus capturing a rich underlying feature space 10 , 32 , 33 .

Our approach recovered a similar number of dimensions across the two experiments (ten and nine), despite their different stimulus set sizes (152 vs. 65 videos). While the dimensions all had an interpretable, semantic description, none mapped directly onto previously used visual, semantic, or social features, suggesting that a data-driven approach can uncover additional information beyond hypothesis-driven analyses. Furthermore, the dimensions generalized across important stimulus categories like action category and scene setting (Fig.  2 ).

While a cross-validated PCA analysis uncovered a similar number of dimensions (eight), there was higher variance in the number and content of dimensions obtained after manipulating stimulus set composition (Supplementary Figs.  5 – 6 ). Visual inspection of the dimensions also suggested that they may be less interpretable than those uncovered by sparse NMF. For example, two dimensions in Experiment 1 appeared to depict driving videos as the highest-weighted, yet these were interspersed with videos from different categories (e.g. cooking or socializing) that would make these dimensions difficult to label. The NMF driving dimension, on the other hand, showed the highest weights for the eight driving videos present in the dataset. Together, these results suggest that the positivity and sparsity constraints applied by NMF enable it to recover more robust and interpretable components from human behavioral data than PCA. These benefits are likely to extend to neural data, as suggested by the recent application of NMF to reveal novel category selectivity in human fMRI data 35 .

Low-dimensional action representations

How should action categories be defined? This is a challenging question, particularly given neuroimaging evidence that actions are processed in the brain at different levels of abstraction 5 , 36 , 37 . Our results suggest that coarse semantic, visual, and social distinctions organize internal representations. Although we started with 18 activity categories, already defined at an arguably broad level, we find that our behavioral data is well-characterized by a lower number of broad dimensions.

The low dimensionality of the NMF reconstruction may seem surprising. Actions bridge visual domains, including scenes, objects, bodies and faces, and thus vary along a wide range of features. Furthermore, our use of naturalistic videos adds a layer of complexity compared to previous work using still images. However, a low-dimensional internal representation is more likely to enable the efficient and flexible action recognition that guides human behavior.

Mapping internal representations

We validated the resulting NMF dimensions in separate behavioral experiments. All dimensions were reproducible in an odd-one-out task (Fig.  3 A) and consistently labeled by participants, as quantified through semantic embeddings (Fig.  3 B). We visualized the most commonly assigned labels and assessed how they related to each other across the two experiments.

These analyses revealed several interpretable and reproducible dimensions, including those related to common everyday actions ( work , cleaning/chores , eating , reading/learning ), environment ( nature/outdoors ), and social information ( children/family, talking, people ). A previous data-driven analysis of semantic action similarity judgments found six clusters of actions related to locomotion, cleaning, food, leisure, and socializing 1 . Here, we found that some semantic categories emerged even in the absence of an explicit semantic task, while other dimensions reflected visual or social-affective features, highlighting the rich and varied information extracted from naturalistic actions.

Importantly, the NMF procedure did not simply return the action categories used to curate the dataset, and in fact none of the dimensions provided a one-to-one correspondence with semantic action category (Figs.  4 and 5 ). Instead, the dimension labels suggest that certain action categories were more salient than others (e.g. work or eating ), while others tended to be grouped together based on other critical features, like scene setting or social structure.

For example, activities that take place outdoors, like hiking and certain sports, were grouped together under a nature/outdoors dimension. In Experiment 1, this dimension included control videos depicting natural scenes, while in Experiment 2, this dimension emerged in the absence of such control videos, suggesting that the natural environment is a salient organizing feature in itself (Fig.  4 ). While such scene-related information may not seem strictly action-related, recent proposals have suggested that these features may be critical for action understanding 38 . Indeed, scenes are often interpreted in terms of their affordance for action 39 , and our work lends further support to these proposals.

Several dimensions were given labels pertaining to people ( children/family, talking, people ), highlighting the social structure of the similarity data revealed by our previous hypothesis-driven work 5 . In Experiment 2, videos depicting different actions were grouped together based on social or affective features like communication (talking face-to-face or on the phone) or negative affect (the chaos dimension, present, among others, in videos of people crying or fighting). These results are in line with previous work suggesting that social features, including others’ intentions and emotions, are important in action perception 5 , 9 , and provide further insight into the specific social information that is prioritized.

The dimension labels revealed differences as well as similarities between the two experiments. Notably, dimensions in Experiments 2 included more social-affective information (Fig.  4 ), despite the fact that the two stimulus sets included the same action categories and were well-matched along social and affective dimensions 5 . However, the stimulus set in Experiment 2 was smaller, and stimulus sampling was conducted differently across the two experiments, resulting in more reliable similarity judgements in Experiment 2 (see Methods: Multiple arrangement). Despite these differences, the majority of dimensions correlated across experiments, suggesting that the NMF reconstructions form a shared semantic space, emerging in spite of stimulus set and sampling differences across experiments.

Neural underpinnings

Though the behavioral representations measured here likely reflect a late stage in action processing, they can reveal insights into the underlying neural representations. Key distinctions between our dimensions, such as the separation of person-directed (e.g., talking and playing games ) versus object-directed (e.g., chores and driving ) actions, are consistent with prior neural findings 4 , 6 , 38 . Sociality has also been identified as a key feature in neural action representations 3 , 5 , as has information about the spatial layout of the environment 3 .

However, the behavioral dimensions extracted here are finer grained than these broad distinctions, suggesting that specific object-directed actions or social content may be processed separately in the brain. These results, and large-scale data-driven experiments more generally, are a fruitful means of hypotehsis generation for future neural studies.

From actions to event representations

Naturalistic actions involve interactions between people, objects, and places, and it is thus no surprise that the dimensions we uncover reflect the richness of this information. This renders actions, as defined here, the ideal stepping stone towards higher-level event understanding. Another action taxonomy derived from data-driven text analysis proposed six broad action distinctions 16 ; however, our dimensions are more concrete and specific, likely reflecting our input of visually depicted everyday human actions. Two dimensions ( food and work ) emerged in both the text data and our two video datasets. This opens exciting avenues for research into visual and language-based action understanding and whether they share a conceptual taxonomy.

Relatedly, stimulus selection is the biggest factor in determining the structure of similarity judgments. Here, both stimulus sets represented 18 everyday action categories based on the American Time Use Survey, curated so as to minimize visual confounds. These action categories may be described as activities or visual events, comprising sets of related actions that occur in daily life. While the number of stimuli does not impact the dimensionality of the final NMF reconstruction, the number of action categories does (Supplementary Fig.  3 ), and thus an accurate map of internal action representations will depend on comprehensive sampling of the relevant action space. Our results highlight a number of critical dimensions that organize how we judge the most common everyday actions; however, future research should expand this with datasets that sample actions in different ways, taking into account cultural and group differences in how we spend our time.

Together, our results highlight the low-dimensional structure that supports human action representations, and open exciting avenues for future research. Our stimuli and the resulting dimensions bridge the boundary between actions and situations, suggesting that our data-driven approach can be extended beyond specific visual domains to investigate how conceptual representations emerge in the mind and brain.

We analyzed two video datasets 5 , each consisting of three-second naturalistic videos of everyday actions from the Moments in Time dataset 18 .

The videos were selected to represent the following 18 common action categories based on the American Time Use Survey 8 : childcare; driving; eating; fighting; gardening; grooming; hiking; housework; instructing; playing games; preparing food; reading; religious activities; sleeping; socializing; sports; telephoning; and working. The dataset used in Experiment 1 included 152 videos, with 8 videos per action category and 8 control videos depicting natural scenes or objects. The dataset used in Experiment 2 included 65 videos, with 3–4 videos per action category. For more details, see Dima et al. 5 .

Participants

We analyzed data from two previously conducted multiple arrangement experiments 5 . Experiment 1 involved 374 participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (300 after exclusions, located in the United States, gender and age not collected). 58 participants recruited through the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Research Portal at Johns Hopkins University took part in Experiment 2 (53 after exclusions, 31 female, 20 male, 1 non-binary, 1 not reported, mean age 19.38 ± 1.09).

Two experiments were conducted to validate the dimensions resulting from Experiments 1 and 2. 54 participants validated the dimensions from Experiment 1 (51 after exclusions, 33 female, 13 male, 1 non-binary, 4 not reported, mean age 19.25 ± 1.18) and a different set of 54 participants validated the dimensions from Experiment 2 (51 after exclusions, 37 female, 11 male, 3 not reported, mean age 20.12 ± 1.78). All subjects were recruited through the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Research Portal at Johns Hopkins University.

All procedures for online data collection were approved by the Johns Hopkins University Institutional Review Board, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. All research was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Multiple arrangement

To measure the intuitive similarity between videos depicting everyday action events, we implemented a multiple arrangement task using the Meadows platform ( www.meadows-research.com ). Participants arranged the videos inside a circular arena according to their similarity. In order to capture intuitive, natural behavior, we did not define or constrain similarity. An adaptive algorithm ensured that different pairs of videos were presented in different trials, until a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio was achieved for each distance estimate. Behavioral representational dissimilarity matrices (RDM) were then constructed using inverse multi-dimensional scaling 30 . See Dima et al. 2022 5 for more details on the experimental procedure.

In Experiment 1, different subsets of 30 videos from the 152-video set were shown to different participants. The resulting behavioral RDM contained 11,476 video pairs with an average of 11.37 ± 3.08 ratings per pair.

In Experiment 2, participants arranged all 65 videos. The resulting behavioral RDM contained 2080 video pairs with 53 ratings per pair.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF)

We used a data-driven approach, sparse NMF 27 , 31 , to investigate the dimensions underlying action representations. This method has two important advantages over other forms of matrix decomposition, such as principal component analysis (PCA).

In aiming to represent each action video through a combination of underlying features, some of these may be assumed to be categorical. Such features would be present in some of the videos, but not in others, such that participants would arrange videos from the same category close together, and those outside the category farther apart. Sparse NMF applies sparsity constraints, allowing us to detect such categorical features that may group specific actions together.

However, the degree to which a feature is present may also distinguish certain actions from others, especially for features that capture non-categorical information. By enforcing positivity, NMF recovers continuous features with interpretable numerical values, reflecting the degree to which each feature is present in each stimulus. These two constraints thus allow both categorical and continuous structure to emerge, an approach well-suited to capture how real-world stimuli are represented in the mind 32 , 33 .

Given a data matrix \(V\) , NMF outputs a basis vector matrix \(W\) and a coefficient matrix \(H\) with specified levels of sparsity and with \(k\) dimensions, such that \(V\approx WH\) . Since NMF can output different results when initialized with random matrices, we used non-negative singular value decomposition for initialization 40 .

We first converted the behavioral RDM to a similarity matrix as used in symmetric applications of NMF 41 . As this matrix was symmetric, the output matrices were highly correlated (Pearson’s r  > 0.93), leading in practice to a similar solution to that given by symmetric NMF, where \(W={H}^{T}\) .

We used a nested cross-validation scheme for NMF (Fig.  1 B). In Experiment 1, in which different videos were arranged by different participants, cross-validation was implemented by leaving out randomly selected similarity ratings for each pair of videos; in Experiment 2, in which all participants arranged all videos, cross-validation was implemented by leaving out randomly selected participants.

Each training and test matrix used in cross-validation was created by averaging across similarity ratings (Experiment 1) or participants (Experiment 2). Due to the random sampling in Experiment 1, there were different numbers of ratings per video pair. Any missing datapoints after averaging (Experiment 1) were imputed (no more than 0.2% of any given similarity matrix). This was done by replacing each missing similarity value S using the following formula: S a,b  = max(min(S a,b , S a,c, … S a,n ), min(S b,c , S b,d , … S b,n )) 42 .

To evaluate the final performance of the NMF procedure, ~ 10% of the data was held out. In Experiment 1, this consisted of one randomly selected similarity rating for each pair of videos. The final test set was thus a complete similarity matrix with a single rating per pair (amounting to 9.52% of the data). In Experiment 2, the final test set consisted of five randomly selected participants’ data (amounting to 9.43% of the data).

For parameter selection, the training data (~ 90% of all data) was divided into three sets (Fig.  1 B).

We searched for the best sparsity parameters for each k (number of dimensions), up to 150 in Experiment 1 and 65 in Experiment 2 (just below the maximum number of videos in each experiment). The two sparsity parameters for W and H were selected using two-fold cross-validation on two thirds of the training data. In a hold-out procedure, the best combination of sparsity parameters for each k was tested on the remaining third of the training data. To speed up computation, we only tested combinations of sparsity parameters ( s ) ranging between 0 (no sparsity) and 0.8 (80% sparsity) in steps of 0.1. We selected the combination with maximal accuracy across the average of both folds, defined as the Kendall’s \({\tau }_{A}\) correlation between the reconstructed \(WH\) matrix and the test matrix.

To increase robustness, this cross-validation procedure for sparsity parameter selection was repeated five times with different training set splits. The average performance curve on the held-out training set was used to select the best number of dimensions ( k ). To avoid overfitting, we identified the elbow point in this performance curve, defined as the point maximally distant from a line linking the two ends of the curve.

The NMF procedure was then reinitialized with the output of the first cross-validation fold and rerun on the whole training set (90% of the data) with the selected combination of parameters. The held-out 10% of the data was used to evaluate performance by calculating the Kendall’s \({\tau }_{A}\) between the reconstructed NMF-based similarity matrix and the held-out test matrix.

Control analyses relating NMF dimensions to stimulus categories

We performed a post-hoc control analysis to assess the robustness of NMF dimensions to perturbations in the stimulus set. The NMF procedure was repeated after leaving out key stimulus categories that correlated with identified NMF dimensions (outdoors, indoors, childcare, driving, and fighting). To ensure these stimulus categories did not drive results, the dimensions obtained from each control analysis were correlated to the original dimensions. The correlations were then tested against chance using one-tailed randomization testing with 1000 iterations of component matrix shuffling.

To evaluate whether NMF dimensions captured any obvious stimulus features (e.g. scene setting, action category or sociality), we assessed the correlation between each NMF dimension and 12 visual, action-related, and social features 5 (Supplementary Fig.  2 ).

Control PCA analysis

To asssess whether NMF provides an advantage over the more commonly used PCA, we conducted a similar cross-validated analysis using PCA, and assessed the resulting reconstruction accuracy and robustness to stimulus set perturbations in both experiments. The cross-validation procedure was exactly the same, except that no search for sparsity parameters was conducted. Instead, only the number of dimensions ( k ) was selected using two-fold cross-validation on the training data (~ 90% of the data).

Dimension validation

We used two tasks in two separate online experiments (corresponding to Experiments 1 and 2) to assess the interpretability of NMF dimensions in separate participant cohorts. We presented the eight highest weighted and eight lowest weighted videos along each dimension obtained from NMF as stimuli to the subjects. The experiment was implemented in JavaScript.

First, participants were asked to select the odd video out of a group consisting of seven highly weighted videos and one low-weighted video (odd-one-out) for a given dimension. This was done 20 times for each dimension with random resampling (from the top and bottom eight) of the videos shown. Participants were excluded if they did not achieve above-chance performance (over 12.5%) on catch trials involving a natural scene video as the odd-one-out among videos containing people. Dimensions were considered reproducible if participants achieved above-chance accuracy in selecting the odd-one-out (sign permutation testing, 5000 iterations, omnibus-corrected for multiple comparisons).

After completing this task, participants were asked to provide up to three labels (words or short phrases) for each dimension based on a visual inspection of the eight highest and eight lowest weighted videos.

Semantic analyses

We visually inspected the labels provided by participants to correct spelling errors and identify cases where pairs of antonyms were used to label a dimension (e.g. nature vs home ); in these cases, we only kept the first label. Next, we visualized the labels by creating word clouds of the most common labels using the MATLAB wordcloud function.

To quantify participant agreement on labels, we used FastText 34 , a 300-dimensional word embedding pretrained on 1 million English words. Embeddings were generated for each of the words and phrases provided by participants. Euclidean distances were then calculated across all labels within each dimension. Labels were considered related if the distance between them was in the 10th percentile across dimensions and experiments (below a threshold of d  = 1.2). To generate a chance level for participant agreement, we calculated the proportion of related labels across different dimensions.

Finally, we assessed whether the NMF dimension labels replicated across the two experiments. To generate a dissimilarity matrix, embeddings were averaged across labels within each dimension before calculating Euclidean distances between dimensions. This allowed us to visualize which dimensions were most semantically related across experiments.

Data availability

Data related to this project is available as an Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/dxba7/ . Analysis code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/dianadima/mot_nmf .

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Christopher Honey and Tyler Tomita for their contribution to the action dataset and their analysis suggestions.

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D.C.D.: conceptualization, methodology, software, analysis, investigation, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing; M.N.H.: conceptualization, methodology, software, writing—review and editing; L.I.: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, resources, writing—review and editing. All authors have reviewed the manuscript.

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Definition of 'representation'

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principle  Provide multiple means of Action & Expression

Learners differ in the ways that they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know. For example, individuals with significant movement impairments (e.g., cerebral palsy), those who struggle with strategic and organizational abilities (executive function disorders), those who have language barriers, and so forth approach learning tasks very differently. Some may be able to express themselves well in written text but not speech, and vice versa. It should also be recognized that action and expression require a great deal of strategy, practice, and organization, and this is another area in which learners can differ. In reality, there is not one means of action and expression that will be optimal for all learners ; providing options for action and expression is essential.

Action & Expression | Guidelines & Checkpoints

Guideline 4 physical action.

Interact with accessible materials and tools.

checkpoint 4.1 Vary the methods for response and navigation

Checkpoint 4.2 optimize access to tools and assistive technologies, guideline 5 expression & communication.

Compose and share ideas using tools that help attain learning goals.

checkpoint 5.1 Use multiple media for communication

Checkpoint 5.2 use multiple tools for construction and composition, checkpoint 5.3 build fluencies with graduated levels of support for practice and performance, guideline 6 executive functions.

Develop and act on plans to make the most out of learning.

checkpoint 6.1 Guide appropriate goal-setting

Checkpoint 6.2 support planning and strategy development, checkpoint 6.3 facilitate managing information and resources, checkpoint 6.4 enhance capacity for monitoring progress, udl guidelines, provide multiple means of engagement, provide options for recruiting interest ( guideline 7), optimize individual choice and autonomy ( checkpoint 7.1), optimize relevance, value, and authenticity ( checkpoint 7.2), minimize threats and distractions ( checkpoint 7.3), provide options for sustaining effort & persistence ( guideline 8), heighten salience of goals and objectives ( checkpoint 8.1), vary demands and resources to optimize challenge ( checkpoint 8.2), foster collaboration and community ( checkpoint 8.3), increase mastery-oriented feedback ( checkpoint 8.4), provide options for self regulation ( guideline 9), promote expectations and beliefs that optimize motivation ( checkpoint 9.1), facilitate personal coping skills and strategies ( checkpoint 9.2), develop self-assessment and reflection ( checkpoint 9.3), provide multiple means of representation, provide options for perception ( guideline 1), offer ways of customizing the display of information ( checkpoint 1.1), offer alternatives for auditory information ( checkpoint 1.2), offer alternatives for visual information ( checkpoint 1.3), provide options for language & symbols ( guideline 2), clarify vocabulary and symbols ( checkpoint 2.1), clarify syntax and structure ( checkpoint 2.2), support decoding of text, mathematical notation, and symbols ( checkpoint 2.3), promote understanding across languages ( checkpoint 2.4), illustrate through multiple media ( checkpoint 2.5), provide options for comprehension ( guideline 3), activate or supply background knowledge ( checkpoint 3.1), highlight patterns, critical features, big ideas, and relationships ( checkpoint 3.2), guide information processing and visualization ( checkpoint 3.3), maximize transfer and generalization ( checkpoint 3.4), provide multiple means of action & expression, provide options for physical action ( guideline 4), vary the methods for response and navigation ( checkpoint 4.1), optimize access to tools and assistive technologies ( checkpoint 4.2), provide options for expression & communication ( guideline 5), use multiple media for communication ( checkpoint 5.1), use multiple tools for construction and composition ( checkpoint 5.2), build fluencies with graduated levels of support for practice and performance ( checkpoint 5.3), provide options for executive functions ( guideline 6), guide appropriate goal-setting ( checkpoint 6.1), support planning and strategy development ( checkpoint 6.2), facilitate managing information and resources ( checkpoint 6.3), enhance capacity for monitoring progress ( checkpoint 6.4), expert learners who are…, purposeful & motivated, resourceful & knowledgeable, strategic & goal-directed.

Natural Language Processing pp 95–113 Cite as

Meaning Representation

• Raymond S. T. Lee 2  
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Before the study of semantic analysis, this chapter explores meaning representation, a vital component in NLP before the discussion of semantic and pragmatic analysis. It studies four major meaning representation techniques which include: first-order predicate calculus (FOPC), semantic net, conceptual dependency diagram (CDD), and frame-based representation. After that it explores canonical form and introduces Fillmore’s theory of universal cases followed by predicate logic and inference work using FOPC with live examples.

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