Availability of the notion that the brain or mind represents the world by instantiating structures similar to relations amongst external items is crucial to the idea than an AI could represent the world in the same way that a human being does. This paper looks at the historical emergence of this notion within the structuralist movement in science, mathematics and philosophy seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Cassirer’s philosophy is a crystallisation of some these tendencies, and Heidegger’s disagreement with Cassirer over the role of sensory intuition in Kant’s epistemology forms the basis for a Heideggerian critique of AI different from the generalised anti-representationalism of Dreyfus and other proponents of embodied cognition.