In this reply we claim that, contra Dreyfus, the kinds of skillful performances Dreyfus discusses are representational. We explain this proposal, and then defend it against an objection to the effect that the representational notion we invoke is a weak one countenancing only some global state of an organism as a representation. According to this objection, such a representation is not a robust,...

Early theories of categorization assumed that either rules, or prototypes, or exemplars were exclusively used to mentally represent categories of objects. More recently, hybrid theories of categorization have been proposed that variously combine these different forms of category representation. Our research addressed the question of whether there are representational shifts during category lear...

In this talk, I present a series of cross-linguistic experiments that investigate the interpretation of different anaphoric forms in representational noun phrases (e.g., picture NPs such as picture of her/herself). I’ll present psycholinguistic data from three Germanic languages, namely English, Dutch, German, as well as results from Finnish, a non-Indo-European language. Broadly speaking, thes...

This paper examines the representational requirements for interactive, collaborative systems intended to support sensemaking and argumentation over contested issues. We argue that a perspective supported by semiotic and cognitively oriented discourse analyses offers both theoretical insights and motivates representational requirements for the semantics of tools for contesting meaning. We introd...

Audience metadiscourse refers to the speech choices made by speakers indicate their metapragmatic awareness of audience. It encompasses expressions including directly referring audience as “you” and “we”, generic expressions, imperative rhetorical interrogative expressions. This study primarily focuses on describing analyzing representational forms, pragmatic functions, different reflected in s...

Evolved representations in evolutionary computation are often fragile, which can impede representation-dependent mechanisms such as self-adaptation. In contrast, evolved representations in nature are robust, evolvable, and creatively exploit available representational features. This paper provides evidence that this disparity may partially result from a key difference between natural evolution ...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the various movements from abstraction to actuality in the context of design, with particular reference to architecture, first in terms of the design process and second in terms of the interpretation of architecture by observers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses on the designers’ use of forms of representation, such as drawings, ...

A wide variety of studies over the last twenty years have demonstrated that our sensory systems are remarkably efficient at coding the sensory environment. Much of this work has focused on the visual system and it has demonstrated that many properties of the early visual system are extremely well matched to the statistical structure of the visual world. However, there remain many questions rega...