arXiv:2603.21736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural properties of representational systems: operability, consistency, structural preservation, and compositionality. These properties are demanded to different degrees by different forms of reasoning, from induction through analogy and causal inference to deduction and formal logic. Each property excludes a distinct class of reasoning failure. The analysis reveals a principal structural boundary: reasoning types below it can operate on associative, probabilistic representations, while those above it require all four properties to be fully satisfied. Scaling statistical learning without structural reorganization is insufficient to cross this boundary, because the structural guarantees required by deductive reasoning cannot be approximated through probabilistic means. Converging evidence from AI evaluation, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience supports the framework at different levels of directness. Three testable predictions are derived, including compounding degradation, selective vulnerability to targeted structural disruption, and irreducibility under scaling. The framework is a necessary-condition account, agnostic about representational format, that aims to reorganize existing debates rather than close them.

arXiv:2603.21745v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are the first systems to achieve high cognitive performance without clearly undergoing representation genesis: the transition from a non-representing physical system to one whose states guide behavior in a content-sensitive way. Prior cognitive systems had already made this transition before we could examine it, and philosophy of mind treated genesis as a background condition rather than an explanatory target. LLMs provide a case that does not clearly involve this transition, making the genesis question newly urgent: if genesis did not occur, which cognitive capacities are affected, and why? We currently lack the conceptual resources to answer this. The reason, this paper argues, is structural. Major frameworks in philosophy of mind, including the Language of Thought hypothesis, teleosemantics, predictive processing, enactivism, and genetic phenomenology, share a common feature when applied to the genesis question: at some explanatory step, each deploys concepts whose explanatory purchase depends on the system already being organized as a representer. This pattern, which we call the Representation Presupposition structure, generates systematic explanatory deferral. Attempts to explain the first acquisition of content-manipulable representation within the existing categorical vocabulary import resources from the representational side of the transition itself. We call this the Representation Regress. The paper offers a conceptual diagnosis rather than a new theory, establishing the structure of the problem and deriving two minimum adequacy conditions for any account that avoids this pattern. LLMs make the absence of such a theory consequential rather than merely theoretical.