Abstract

Representational systems need to use symbols as internal stand-ins for distal quantities and events. Barsalou's ideas go a long way towards making the symbol system theory of representation more appealing, by delegating one critical part of the representational burden to image-like entities. The target article, however, leaves the other critical component of any symbol system theory underspecified. We point out that the binding problem can be alleviated if a perceptual symbol system is made to rely on image-like entities not only for grounding the constituent symbols, but also for composing these into structures