Many learning tasks, including computer supported modeling, require students to learn and use some kind of structured representational system. In order to use any such system, students must make a match between the perceived world and the representational elements given. There is interplay between student conceptions and the representational ontology, with the ontology guiding student conceptua...

The sensorimotor approach argues that in order to perceive one needs to first “master” the relevant sensorimotor contingencies, and then exercise the acquired practical know-how to become “attuned” to the actual and potential contingencies a particular situation entails. But the approach provides no further detail about how this mastery is achieved or what precisely it means to become attuned t...

Representational state transfer (REST) is an abstraction of the architecture of the World Wide Web; more precisely, REST is an architectural style consisting of a coordinated set of architectural constraints applied to components, connectors, and data elements, within a distributed hypermedia system. REST ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax in order to focus on t...

Machine translation of subordinate clauses, whether finite or non-finite, poses a series of problems within representational issues. In £ U R O T R A this subject has recently been investigated for complements as well as for modifiers to verbal, nominal, adjectival, and prepositioned heads. Some of the problems encountered during these investigations will be addressed in this paper, with a part...

Some animals give specific calls when they discover food or detect a particular type of predator. Companions respond with food-searching behaviour or by adopting appropriate escape responses. These signals thus seem to denote objects in the environment, but this specific mechanism has only been demonstrated for monkey alarm calls. We manipulated whether fowl (Gallus gallus) had recently found a...

Many scientific models are non-representational in that they refer to merely possible processes, background conditions and results. The paper shows how such nonrepresentational models can be appraised, beyond the weak role that they might play as heuristic tools. Using conceptual distinctions from the discussion of how-possibly explanations, six types of models are distinguished by their modal ...

According to the mental continuity claim (MCC), human mental faculties are physical and beneficial to human survival, so they must have evolved gradually from ancestral forms and we should expect to see their precursors across species. Materialism of mind coupled with Darwin’s evolutionary theory leads directly to such claims and even today arguments for animal mental properties are often prese...

Encodingism as a fundamental model of the nature of representation rests on a logical incoherence. This incoherence is manifested, among many other ways, in the empty symbol problem — the inability to provide any representational content to the symbols upon which cognitive science depends. Interactivism is model of representation that avoids the incoherences and aporias of encodingism — in fact...