Partonomies and Depictions: A Hybrid Approach

It is a widely-held view that cognition is based on internal representations of the world, and that reasoning can be seen as manipulation of these representations. Instead of developing and describing a formal model of internal representations and processes of reasoning, we will propose two unifying principles of successful, e cient and cognitively adequate reasoning systems, namely the hybrid representation principle and the granular representation principle (cf. Finke 1989: p. 141 on \unifying principles vs. formal models"). During the last two decades, research on imagery and mental rotation has given overwhelming evidence for analog representations of spatial con gurations, i.e. representations with intrinsic spatial properties (cf. Kosslyn 1980, 1994; Palmer 1978). Such non-propositional representations are induced by both perceptual and linguistic inputs (Habel 1990) and are used successfully in reasoning tasks (see Lindsay 1988). This leads to a principle of hybrid representation and processing, which may be expressed as follows: