Abstract

Explicitness has usually been approached from two points of view, labelled by Kirsh the structural and the process view, that hold opposite assumptions to determine when information is explicit. In this paper, we offer an intermediate view that retains intuitions from both of them. We establish three conditions for explicit information that preserve a structural requirement, and a notion of explicitness as a continuous dimension. A problem with the former accounts was their disconnection with psychological work on the issue. We review studies by Karmiloff-Smith, and Shanks and St. John to show that the proposed conditions have psychological grounds. Finally, we examine the problem of explicit rules in connectionist systems in the light of our framework.