Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is proposed that the fundamental difference between representations whose constituent symbols have intrinsic meaning (e.g. mental representations) and those whose symbols have meanings w e consider "projected" (e.g. computational representations) is causal. More specifically, this distinction depends on differences in how physical change is brought about, or what w e call "causal mechanisms". These mechanisms serve to physically ground our intuitive notions about syntax and semantiacs.