Transparent and Opaque Representations – Defining the Concept of a Mental Model

In the debates of cognitive psychologists about the nature and cognitive role of mental models the demarcation of mental models and other types of representation plays a decisive role. The well-known dispute about the role of imagery in human thinking may be cast in the questions: Is pictorial representation really necessary to explain typical, say, inferential or recognitional achievements of humans? Or is it a mere epiphenomenon, playing no explanatory role in comparison with propositional representation? Understanding what this dispute is about requires an understanding of the difference between the propositional and the pictorial format. Similarly, the role of mental models is controversially discussed in a way that may be captured in the following questions: What does the mental models conception contribute to explaining typical inferential or recognitional achievements? Isn’t much the same explanatory work done by the concept of image-like representations? Again, a tacit understanding of mental models as opposed to images is presupposed here. The purpose of this paper is (1) to make the differences between these kinds of mental representation sufficiently precise. Along the way, I will isolate a distinction, largely overlooked in psychological as well as philosophical accounts of mental representation, bu