Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive Science is founded on notions of representation, and shifts in models of representation have constituted the major internal revolutions in the field. Symbol System and related conceptions were long dominant, but the frontiers passed first to connectionism and more recently to autonomous agent orientations. In spite of its foundational role, representation has never received a consensual or adequate characterization within cognitive science. This is not surprising, given that millennia of effort in philosophy have also failed to achieve consensus or adequacy, but the situation nevertheless constitutes something of a scandal or impasse in a field in which representation is so central. More recently, workers in dynamicist and autonomous agent approaches have argued that representation is not even a useful notion. I argue that this confusion and impasse conceming representation is due to a fundamental misconception about the nature of representation, and offer an alternative model.