representationally

Representationally is an adverb used to describe the manner in which something represents or encodes information, states, or meanings. It is formed from the adjective representational plus the suffix -ly and is commonly found in academic and technical writing to specify the nature of representation rather than performance or process.

In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, representationally describes how mental states and perceptual systems stand for aspects of the external world. For example, a perceptual state may represent spatial relations representationally, encoding information about position, distance, and color. Discussions of accuracy often refer to how representationally faithful a state is to the actual scene.

In linguistics and semiotics, representationally describes how signs carry meaning. Researchers examine the representationally adequate mapping between symbols and the concepts they denote, and how structure in a sign system influences its interpretive reach.

In artificial intelligence and data science, representationally is used to discuss data representations and learned encodings. The quality of a model often depends on how representationally expressive its internal representations are for the tasks at hand, such as classification or retrieval.

Etymology and usage: Representationally derives from representational and the adverbial suffix -ly, with usage primarily in technical or scholarly prose to distinguish manner of representation from other aspects such as function or mechanism. It is less common in everyday language.

See also:

- Representational theory of mind

- Mental representation

- Semantics and semiotics

- Data representation

- Embeddings (machine learning)