Map Users and Mapmakers: The Scope of Cognitive Attribution from Acquired Representations

The paper proposes a framework for delineating how acquired representations expand a system’s cognitive repertoire without necessarily transferring the underlying capacities used to create them. It introduces a five-part attribution table—effective tracking, application of acquired structures, acquisition from explicit specifications, acquisition from identifying observations, and retention and reuse—to specify the limits of this enlargement. The framework is applied to examples such as Andrew Ng’s world‑model interpretation of Othello‑GPT and contemporary machine‑concept accounts, illustrating that even full application competence does not guarantee acquisition capacity and that acquiring a criterion from its description differs from finding it in examples.

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