2 The study of mental Unraveling mental representations will be an interdisciplinary : ; effort among several cognitive sciences, but distinct from the representations requires a disciplines that we find now: new scientific discipline The project will differ from linguistics, for instance, in similar way as geography differs from plate tectonics. Where linguists study the intrinsic ‘geography’ of languages, and the structural commonalities among them, mental representations uncover the underlying dynamics that produce natural languages (as the solutions to the problem of translating between hierarchical, distributed, associative, ambiguous representations and the discrete strings of symbols that we use as a means of exchanging and organizing ideas). Integ rating concepts from Mental representations lie outside the domain of neuroscience, : ee 5 2 which mostly focuses on material descriptions of the function ling uIstics, cogn itive of the underlying substrate. They cannot be studied well within psychology and contemporary psychology, which favors an experimentalist, neungediencewithin Ehe quansitalive approach, where we need to address qualitative questions by constructing working, implementable systems. methodological framework And needless to say, the study of mental representations is of constructionist Artificial currently not well represented in Artificial Intelligence research, which does provide a productive methodology, but Intelligence has mostly turned towards applications and narrow Al solutions. Despite the lack of acommon methodological ground between the cognitive sciences, we can now observe a growing consensus on how to approach the problem of modeling the mind, and its representational apparatus. During the last decade, a number of initiatives have sprung up within Al, psychology and cognitive science, each with journals, A new common ground workshops and conference series, and a large personal overlap between Al and cog nitive among each commu