Mental representations, a theory espoused very early by Plato (p. 81), renewed by Kant (chapter 3) and now by such linguistic heavy-weights as Noam Chomsky (p. 86), connote meaning constructed by a coding system that, after selective attention to sensory input or signals from an external natural world, re-presents or reconstructs these signals in the mind in some analogic form innate to human mentition. For example, proponents of mental representation would say that a three dimensional “table” would be encoded first as an image or re-presentation of the table within the mind. Reading the word “table” would then elicit either the original image of “table” or some prototypical image of a “table,” signifying that an actual table need not be present because the mind has formed a representation of a table adequate to comprehend the term. Another rather crude way to understand mental representations might be to think of the mind as a type of videotape in which images and data are stored. The mind comprehends the recorded images as representations of but not the original images or data. New knowledge is generated by recombining or reconfiguring mental representations (i.e., cutting and splicing) with the input of new sensory data, and assimilating or accommodating the new configurations to prior schemata (p. 84). Within this epistemological framework of mental representations, the mind is conceived as something greater than, though limited by, the biological parts through which it functions. On the surface, mental representations seem quite plausible. Mental representations explain the phenomena of memories persistent in the absence of the object remembered and they explain the human capacity to imagine an object through close description and analogy without ever having seen it. But mental representations cannot explain, for example, the wordless, imageless flooding panic or nausea a rape or incest victim feels when touched in a certain way—especially if she has “forgotten” the experience that engenders the current response.