ABSTRACT
Representation theorists seem to have chosen to take the “ invisibility” of cognitive processes as a mandate to assert invisible internal processes operating on invisible internal representations. One problem with this strategy is an overa bundance of degrees of freedom; with theories coming in the form of representation-process pairs, there is an indefinite amount of fiddling you can do with the representations in your theory as long as you fiddle with the processes that operate on the representations in a compensatory way (Anderson, 1978). But the real irony of this position is that, despite a thoroughgoing commitment to the detailed study of (mental) process-processes to transform, access, and store knowledge in many forms-the representation theorist ultimately thinks of knowledge (we would say “ knowing” ) itself as a thing. Knowledge is said to be represented in the mind, and the major questions are not about how and what we know, but rather take the form, how is knowledge organized, and in what form(s) is it represented? Although there has been considerable controversy over the latter question, the consensus on the former has been reasonably good that knowledge is organized into concepts. Accordingly, the nature of concepts has become a central issue in psychology. In the classic book A Study o f Thinking by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956), the forming and using of concepts is viewed as “ one of the . . . most ubiquitous phenomena in cognition” (p. ix).
