Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How can we integrate interrelated theories of individual elements of cognition? Computational models of reasoning processes encode an understanding of reasoning. Consequently, a computational modeling language may be ideally suited to the presentation of theories of cognition. By representing theories of a variety of phenomena in a single modeling language, we can potentially explore how these theories might interact. The Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) modeling language evolves from artificial intelligence research on the subject of multistrategy reasoning. TMK models provide a compositional account of reasoning processes; they describe not only what the elements of a process are, but also how the functional properties of these elements combine to form the functional properties of the process as a whole. This paper explores the composition of theories of cognition within the TMK framework, drawing on some existing theories within cognitive science as examples.