An Ecological Model for the Processing of Symbolic Information

Abstract

This article points out that an adequate cognition-oriented approach to the processing of symbolic information abstracted from verbal expressions must consider running text instead of scattered sentences. It is argued that the dominant cognition models do not give due consideration to the fact that a valid abstraction of information structures has to be based on an explicit encoding of intentionality and valuation. A model must cope with empirical context and novelty instead of truth-values in semantic-logical contexts. The proposed theory has been tested empirically on text material considered to be anamorphic. Its underlying key relations can be extracted by means of discriminant functions and given a meaningful interpretation.