Index systems: Enumerating their forms and explaining their diversity with representational interpretive structure theory

Abstract

Index systems are central to our everyday and intellectual lives. Their ubiquity and diversity make them an important class of cognitive artifacts, the study of which has implications for our understanding of representational systems in general. This pa- per builds schema-theoretic network models of the nature of the memory structures, that underpin the interpretation of indexing systems. We identify four common classes of index systems. Using Representation Interpretation Structure Theory, we explain how the four basic classes can be responsible for the substantial diversity among index systems.