Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The extent to which human cognition can be understood as rule-based is a classic issue in Cognitive Science and one which continues to provoke heated debate in a wide variety of areas, ranging from Implicit Learning through Inflectional Morphology to the acquisition of reading skills. Despite its centrality, the central notion of "rule" is far from well-defined. This paper examines a central feature of rule-based models, the concept of rule-following, and clarifies its role, its content, and some of the typical fallacies associated with its use.