the empiricist objects of experience; (b) those packages that stand for patterns
of action or operation (praxis or practice) that are causally instrumental for
changing obs, or the relations among obs, in expectable ways—these are
packages that we callpros, that is, the constructivist substrata for the empiri-
cist procedures and operative processes; and (c) those packages of resis-
tances, simple or complex, that functionally serve to provide adjunct infor-
mation about obs, pros, and the situations in which they usefully can be
applied. These packages, which we callads, can describe properties or rela-
tions pertaining to obs or situations, and can also describe conditions or pa-
rameters that pros needs to satisfy in order to be applicable to obs and situa-
tions.Adjectives,adverbs, the meaning of relative clauses, andadvertisements
all have this category ofadjunct-informationas their reality foundation.
For instance, in the quote of Kagan we give in the epigraph, the finger, the
knife, the blood, and the palm are each represented in the person’s brain asob
schemes. The category description “objects that can cause blood to flow” is
anadscheme that causally relatesobssuch as knives to parts of the body (e.g.,
fingers) and to blood. The brain representation of the knife’s action, which
actually caused the blood to flow, is aproscheme.Notice that at a finer, less
molar level, each of these scheme units can be decomposed as constituted by
finer, lower level,ads(releasing conditions),obs(intended distal–cognitive
objects),pros(intended action, e.g., the procedure of cutting), or all of the
above.
Although pros are correlates of people’s blueprints for actions or transfor-
mations, that is, of what Piaget and neo-Piagetians would calloperative proc-
esses(essentially the procedural knowledge of cognitive science), both obs
and ads are correlates of people’s descriptions of states, which Piaget and
neo-Piagetians callfigurative processes(related to declarative knowledge of
cognitive science, but which could be either explicit or implicit). One main
difference between obs and ads seems to be motivational: obs, but not ads,
serve as possible targets for the person’s praxis. Notice further that abstrac-
tion and internalization (i.e., learning) of obs, ads, and pros cannot be made
in a piecemeal manner. The three sorts of functional category constitute a di-
alectical trio. They dynamically emerge together, in the context of activity
within situations, as the functional structure of this activity becomes internal-
ized; that is, the three functional categories are abstracted together in coordi-
nated packages, thus producingorganismic schemes(i.e., collections of neu-
rons distributed over the brain that are cofunctional and often coactivated).
These organismic schemes aresituatedsemantic-pragmatic functional sys-
tems that carry some coherent knowledge or know-how about relevant activi-
ties.Schemesare dynamic systems, abstracted across situations for a given
sort of praxis, coordinating internalized models of obs, ads, and pros in their
interaction. From a structural perspective, a scheme can be understood as ex-
pressing the well-learned coordination of three components: (a) a functional
200 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON