This paper discusses the relationship between symbols and cognition. More specifically, it asks how we can cross what I call the "Great Epistemological Divide" between skills and abilities on the one hand, and structured, manipulable thoughts on the other. The evidence that is coming out of developmental psychology suggests that we are endogenously driven to cross this divide and to present our implicit knowledge to ourselves as explicit structures that we can reflect upon and change. The challenge is to provide an account of the mechanism that makes this possible. The problem is that we don't know how to do so. I suggest that the problem lies in the way we have interpreted the data. The standard interpretation is that we re-represent our knowledge to ourselves in increasingly abstract forms: we change the format of our knowledge and so make it more accessible. A simpler explanation is to say that there is no change in format, but that there is a change in access: the information is there, and we get better at accessing it. The paper develops this reinterpretation and points towards work that is being done at Griffith University to implement a mechanism.
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