 This distinction between objects and vehicles of understanding leaves open the possibility that mental representations might not be the only vehicles of understanding, or the only way of latching on to real relations in the world. Perhaps a person might come to understand the world by first manually manipulating it, thus noting the possibilities that it affords and how its different elements are connected (cf. Lipton 2009; Kuorikoski and Ylikoski 2015). This would be a way to “directly” grasp causal structure, a structure that could then—cognitively downstream, as it were—be represented by the mind, perhaps in the form of mental maps, or “dependence maps” (see Section 2.2).