The Neural Proposition: Structures for Cognitive Systems

Cognitive structures are the foundation of Jean Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology. Yet the elusive question remains: “What are Piaget’s cognitive structures?” and more importantly, “How can they be represented computationally?” Piaget described the monad as an immaterial, weightless, dimensionless entity, while he referred to a scheme as both process and structure. This paper explores an approach to combining the notions of monad and scheme to create a simple knowledge representation. Building upon the work of several authors, notably Jean Piaget, Ryszard Michalski, and Roland Hausser, the neural proposition is the central cognitive structure of the PAM-P2 cognitive system.