Although we all speak of “representation”, philosophers and psychologists often have quite different referents for the term. Among philosophers, “representation”, or “a representation”, usually refers to a picture of some sort; and concerns with resemblance, realism, abstraction, and the like are prominent (Goodman 1968). Psychologists and some philosophers accept the term more broadly, and by representation mean something like symbol— that is, some mark that stands for, denotes, or represents something else (Howard 1980). I shall use the word in this latter way.
Goodman's treatment of symbols and so, willy-nilly, of representation, is the most sophisticated we háve. He has been concerned largely with reference—with what symbols may mean—and expresses the concern with a theory of the structure and function of symbols.