We cannot fail to note the large number nor elusive, chimera-like quality of the metaphors of consciousness. Sometimes it is viewed as a state, sometimes as an act; sometimes it is input, sometimes output; sometimes it enjoys a unity, sometimes a diversity, and often a unitas multiplex. One may wonder, as we have, Why this heaping of metaphors of consciousness? Why, after all of human history and speculation, should one school of deep thinkers (e.g., Dewey, 1910; James, 1890/1983) think of consciousness as a biological specialization for dealing with conflict, contradiction, surprise, irregularity, and difficult choice, whereas another (e.g., Huizinga, 1938/1949) conceives of it as the child of play? Cognition, in contrast, is rather more sedate and generates a far more cultivated garden of metaphors. The principal divergence is between those metaphors that depict cognition as a cycle of reflecting and then reproducing the world - a kind of selective, but order-preserving copying machine, with degrees of freedom at the registering, storing, and printout points - and those that depict it as a creator, imposing its categories on whatever it encounters, ending by making a world of its own. Each of these approaches - let us call them the "reproductive" and "productive" theories of cognition - is relatively uncommitted as to the centrality it assigns to consciousness. But each is committed to a different view of its function, one emphasizing how the contents of consciousness reflect, distort, or otherwise mirror the world, however much in a glass darkly; the other how acts of consciousness impose not only structure but direction on experience. (Jerome Bruner and Carol Fleisher Feldman, p. 230-231)