Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Systems with inherently spatial primitives have advantages over traditional sentential ones for representing spatial structure. The question is how such representations might be used in reasoning. This paper explores a simple kind of deductive reasoning where picture-like entities, instead of symbol-strings, are given first-class status. It is based on a model of deduction as the composition of mappings between sets, and allows generalized notions of unification and binding, which in turn permit the definition of various formal, "imaginal" deduction systems. The axioms zind rules of inference are all pictures or fimdamentally picture-based, and are used to derive pictorial "theorems". After sketching the generalized theory needed, several possible strategies are mentioned, and a prototype, the BITPICT computation system, is described in some detail.