Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Cognitive systems are characterized by their ability to construct and pro cess mental representations. Cognitive systems capable of communicating also produce and interpret public representations. Representations, whether mental or public, are themselves objects in the world; they are found inside cognizers and in the vicinity of communicators; they are potential objects of second-order representations or “metarepresenta tions.” While the term “metarepresentation” gained currency only in the late 1980s (early uses are found for instance in Pylyshyn, 1978; Sperber, 1985a; Leslie, 1987), the general idea is much older. Under a variety of other names, philosophers, psychologists, linguists, logicians, semioticians, literary theorists, theologians, and anthropologists have been interested in different types of metarepresentations. To give but one ex ample, the seventeenth-century Port-Royal Logic devotes a chapter to the distinction between “ideas of things” and “ideas of signs,” the latter being mental representations of public representations.