Perner (1991) identifies meta-representational states in terms of their contents: they are representations of 'representational relations'.
Everyone knows there are no Brillo pads in Warhol's boxes, because they are representations of Brillo boxes.
They are representations of the world gathered, generated, selected, arranged, filtered, collated, analysed and corrected for particular purposes – purposes as diverse as public sector accounting, traffic control, weather prediction, urban planning, and policy evaluation.
Sex is not on the agenda: they're representations of their culture and their art; to be sexual with a client would be the worst thing they could do.
"I mean, if they, like, existed, would they all breathe fire?" Dr. Kendall said that only Western Eurocentric dragons are said to breathe fire, because for us (with our fear of the Other) they are representations of wickedness, or "fallen angels".
Now that tall buildings are for the first time fragile in our memory and imagination, susceptible to a morning's doom, we fill them with feelings, and accept that they are representations of our hopes, rather than wrappers of our necessities.
Here it is of less importance whether the symbolic representations are based on some presumed logical semantics for language, or some theory of mental representation as long as they are representations that can be reasoned with.
Those we choose to be in our lives, they are representations of our inner psyche.
While the trend for filmmakers tackling the challenge of mid-twentieth century culture is to create fiction-i.e., the recent movie Howl, the upcoming On the Road, good as these works may be, they are representations.
