Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2000
The dispute concerning Social Constructivism has emerged from being an isolated and esoteric epis... more The dispute concerning Social Constructivism has emerged from being an isolated and esoteric epistemological debate among relatively few academic scholars to being a notorious and widespread public scandal. Challenges to traditional conceptions of science which severely polarized philosophers, historians and sociologists have erupted into heated public disputes—the so-called Science Wars. The issues at stake concern the most fundamental questions about the nature of science, and inevitably these controversies have become prominent among educators where a variety of constructivist doctrines have become entangled.1 Undeniably, if radical social constructivist doctrines are correct, the implications for science education are revolutionary for, on these views, knowledge is merely consensus upon arbitrary convention; and education involves not learning as a cognitive process of reason and understanding, but merely conformity to power and political interests. As I will suggest, there could be no more fundamental challenge to education than the one posed by the radical form of social constructivism, since it purports to overturn the very conception of knowledge in the Western Tradition: The self-advertising grandiosely proclaims, “The foundations of modern thought are at stake here.”2 A major battle in these Science Wars has been fought over the book Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, which brought the polemics surrounding social constructivism to wide popular attention.3 Adding piquancy and creating even greater public attention to social constructivism was the fallout from the so-called “Sokal Hoax.”
Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about r... more Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about realism and anti-realism. The same question has been central to the theorising of radical …
J. R. Lucas has articulated and defended the view that Godel's theorems imply the falsity of ... more J. R. Lucas has articulated and defended the view that Godel's theorems imply the falsity of mechanism as a theory of the mind. In this paper I offer a novel analysis of Lucas's argument which shows why it is, in fact, a compelling one, but also that it derives its persuasiveness from a certain kind of subtle confusion which has not been noticed in subsequent discussions. Clarifying this confusion provides further illumination by suggesting some quite different implications of G6del's theorem for the mind.
This paper is concerned with the application of cognitive science to the problems of pedagogy. My... more This paper is concerned with the application of cognitive science to the problems of pedagogy. My discussion bears on teaching generally but I give some emphasis to the case of science education as illustrative. A voluminous literature professes to explain "How Cognitive Science Can Contribute to Education" (Bruer 1995). My concern is not to directly deny such claims or to impugn work that might W없rant them. However, I survey a sample of cognitive science writing that is demonstrably without any such value. Since the cases are chosen for their shortcomings, there is no suggestion that the work discussed is representative, but only widespread. The exercise is important because, if warranted, the critique reve떠s a malaise in the field where spurious cl떠ms for the educational value of cognitive science including neuroscience are so widespread.
Bringing Together Biological, Psychological and Clinical Models of the Human Brain, 2000
The problem of explaining the mind persists essentially unchanged today since the time of Plato a... more The problem of explaining the mind persists essentially unchanged today since the time of Plato and Aristotle. For the ancients, of course, it was not a question of the relation of mind to brain, though the question was fundamentally the same nonetheless. For Plato, the mind was conceived as distinct from the body and was posited in order to explain knowledge which transcends that available to the senses. For his successor, Aristotle, the mind was conceived as intimately related to the body as form is related to substance. On this conception, the mind is an abstract property or condition of the body itself “enmattered formulable essence”, being always embodied in some material substance. In these two accounts of the mind-body relation we see views which represent the range of conceptions ever since.
... Brand, Myles (1984), Intending and Acting. Toward a Naturalized Action Theory (Cambridge, Mas... more ... Brand, Myles (1984), Intending and Acting. Toward a Naturalized Action Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). Boar, Steven E. and Lycan, William G. (1980), "Who, Me?," The Philosophical Review 89, 427-466. Castaneda, Hector-Ncri (1966), "He: A Study in the Logic ...
PART I: FOUNDATIONS Introduction: Cognitive Science at the Crossraods- Foundational Issues in Cog... more PART I: FOUNDATIONS Introduction: Cognitive Science at the Crossraods- Foundational Issues in Cognitive Science, Terry Dartnall From Simple Processes Does Complex Behavior Emerge: A Methodology for Cognitive Research Based on Nonlinear System Theory, Richard A. Heath Real-world Embedding and Traditional Artificial Intilligence, Steve Torrance Situated Cognition: Empirical Issue, "Paradigm Shift" or Conceptual Confusion? Peter Slezak Cognition, Content, and the Inner Code, Terry Dartnall Subtractive Reasoning, Representationism and False Belief Tasks, Donald M. Peterson and Kevin J. Riggs A Study of Belief Revision Theories, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Renee Elio Kantian Errors in "Classical" Cognitive Science, Hugh Clapin PART II. LEARNING, MEMORY, AND COGNITION Introduction: Computational Methods and Cognitive Phenomena, Janet Wiles Is Skill Acquisition General or Specific? David Grieg and Craig P. Speelman Tensor Product Model of Exemplar-based Category Learning, Yoshihisa Kashmina Modeling the Effects of Arousal on Recognition Performance, Zoltan Schreter and Matthew Kirkcaldie A Connectionist Model of Short-term Cued Recall, Gerald Tehan and Anthony Fallon The Integration of Cognitive Knowledge into a Perceptual Representation: Lessons from Human and Computer Go, Jay Burmeister, Janet Wiles, and Helen Purchase PART III. COMMUNICATIONS, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE Introduction: Communication, Speech and Language, Janet Wiles Word Prosody, Lexical Access and the Perception of Foreign Loan Words, John Ingram A Case Study in Information Processing: Sentence Processing, Bruce Stevenson Syntactic Recovery and Spelling Correction of Ill-formed Sentences, Kyongho Min and William H. Wilson Speech Intelligibility and Noise: The Auditory Interface, Roger Wales and Peter Kremer Informationally Equivalent Representations: An Architecture and Applications, Helen Purchase Author Index Subject Index
Cartesian ‘Ideas’ and the First (C17 th ) Cognitive Revolution Peter Slezak ([email protected]... more Cartesian ‘Ideas’ and the First (C17 th ) Cognitive Revolution Peter Slezak ([email protected]) Program in Cognitive Science, School of History & Philosophy of Science University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 AUSTRALIA of mental representation. Noting that it has received very little attention, Yolton characterizes this significatory relation as a “curious” and “somewhat obscure” doctrine which turns the conventional account on its head (1996, 73). Yolton writes: Abstract Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume’s Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though he concedes that “Descartes got there first.” However, Hume’s “Cartesianism” is an ambiguous inheritance since Hume’s representational account (and Fodor’s) is closer to Malebranche’s version than Descartes’ own. Descartes shared the ‘pragmatism’ and ‘direct realism’ of Arnauld and later Reid – the doctrine that Fodor sees as “the defining catastrophe” in recent philosophy of mind. Since Putnam (1999) and others d...
Robert Cummins (1996, p.1) has characterised the problem of mental representation as "the topic i... more Robert Cummins (1996, p.1) has characterised the problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now". This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the Seventeenth Century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern, confirming Jerry Fodor's disparaging remark: "Cognitive science is where philosophy goes when it dies" (Fodor, 1994b, p. 110). The Tripartite Schema Recently Bechtel (1998, p. 299) states the essentials of a modern theory of representation: "There are ... three interrelated components in a representational story: what is represented, the representation, and the user of the representation".
Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume's Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though... more Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume's Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though he concedes that "Descartes got there first." However, Hume's "Cartesianism" is an ambiguous inheritance since Hume's representational account (and Fodor's) is closer to Malebranche's version than Descartes' own. Descartes shared the 'pragmatism' and 'direct realism' of Arnauld and later Reid-the doctrine that Fodor sees as "the defining catastrophe" in recent philosophy of mind. Since Putnam (1999) and others defend this Arnauld-Reid view today, there has been less progress since the 17 th Century than Fodor suggests. I defend Descartes' conception of representation against misunderstandings that illuminate issues still at the forefront of debate in cognitive science today. For example, despite the wide currency of Dennett's term, Descartes was not guilty of the 'Cartesian Theater' fallacy and, indeed, in his Dioptrics explicitly argued against a conception of representation that would require the notorious homunculus-in the Malebranchean Theater. Not Much of a Revolution? Jerry Fodor (2003, 2) notes that a shift in philosophical fashions has permitted appreciating Hume more as a psychologist than as a philosopher in the traditional sense concerned with 'conceptual analysis.' However, Hume is neither alone, nor the most aggrieved victim of such 'whig' history. Notably, Descartes' work is best seen "as the output of a practicing scientist who, somewhat unfortunately wrote a few short and relatively unimportant philosophical essays" (Clark 1982, 2). This can't be said of Hume. Aside from his physics, Descartes' neuroscience in Optics and Treatise of Man were of staggering originality, right in their fundamentals, and still a corrective to widely held theories such as pictorial accounts of imagery. It is in this light that we may appreciate Chomsky's doubts concerning the radical novelty of the 'cognitive revolution' and his remark "it wasn't all that much of a revolution in my opinion" (1966, 1). He notes that the same convergence of disciplinary interests had taken place in the seventeenth century in what he calls the "first cognitive revolution, perhaps the only real one.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2000
The dispute concerning Social Constructivism has emerged from being an isolated and esoteric epis... more The dispute concerning Social Constructivism has emerged from being an isolated and esoteric epistemological debate among relatively few academic scholars to being a notorious and widespread public scandal. Challenges to traditional conceptions of science which severely polarized philosophers, historians and sociologists have erupted into heated public disputes—the so-called Science Wars. The issues at stake concern the most fundamental questions about the nature of science, and inevitably these controversies have become prominent among educators where a variety of constructivist doctrines have become entangled.1 Undeniably, if radical social constructivist doctrines are correct, the implications for science education are revolutionary for, on these views, knowledge is merely consensus upon arbitrary convention; and education involves not learning as a cognitive process of reason and understanding, but merely conformity to power and political interests. As I will suggest, there could be no more fundamental challenge to education than the one posed by the radical form of social constructivism, since it purports to overturn the very conception of knowledge in the Western Tradition: The self-advertising grandiosely proclaims, “The foundations of modern thought are at stake here.”2 A major battle in these Science Wars has been fought over the book Higher Superstition by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, which brought the polemics surrounding social constructivism to wide popular attention.3 Adding piquancy and creating even greater public attention to social constructivism was the fallout from the so-called “Sokal Hoax.”
Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about r... more Context: The current situation in philosophy of science includes central, ongoing debates about realism and anti-realism. The same question has been central to the theorising of radical …
J. R. Lucas has articulated and defended the view that Godel's theorems imply the falsity of ... more J. R. Lucas has articulated and defended the view that Godel's theorems imply the falsity of mechanism as a theory of the mind. In this paper I offer a novel analysis of Lucas's argument which shows why it is, in fact, a compelling one, but also that it derives its persuasiveness from a certain kind of subtle confusion which has not been noticed in subsequent discussions. Clarifying this confusion provides further illumination by suggesting some quite different implications of G6del's theorem for the mind.
This paper is concerned with the application of cognitive science to the problems of pedagogy. My... more This paper is concerned with the application of cognitive science to the problems of pedagogy. My discussion bears on teaching generally but I give some emphasis to the case of science education as illustrative. A voluminous literature professes to explain "How Cognitive Science Can Contribute to Education" (Bruer 1995). My concern is not to directly deny such claims or to impugn work that might W없rant them. However, I survey a sample of cognitive science writing that is demonstrably without any such value. Since the cases are chosen for their shortcomings, there is no suggestion that the work discussed is representative, but only widespread. The exercise is important because, if warranted, the critique reve떠s a malaise in the field where spurious cl떠ms for the educational value of cognitive science including neuroscience are so widespread.
Bringing Together Biological, Psychological and Clinical Models of the Human Brain, 2000
The problem of explaining the mind persists essentially unchanged today since the time of Plato a... more The problem of explaining the mind persists essentially unchanged today since the time of Plato and Aristotle. For the ancients, of course, it was not a question of the relation of mind to brain, though the question was fundamentally the same nonetheless. For Plato, the mind was conceived as distinct from the body and was posited in order to explain knowledge which transcends that available to the senses. For his successor, Aristotle, the mind was conceived as intimately related to the body as form is related to substance. On this conception, the mind is an abstract property or condition of the body itself “enmattered formulable essence”, being always embodied in some material substance. In these two accounts of the mind-body relation we see views which represent the range of conceptions ever since.
... Brand, Myles (1984), Intending and Acting. Toward a Naturalized Action Theory (Cambridge, Mas... more ... Brand, Myles (1984), Intending and Acting. Toward a Naturalized Action Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). Boar, Steven E. and Lycan, William G. (1980), "Who, Me?," The Philosophical Review 89, 427-466. Castaneda, Hector-Ncri (1966), "He: A Study in the Logic ...
PART I: FOUNDATIONS Introduction: Cognitive Science at the Crossraods- Foundational Issues in Cog... more PART I: FOUNDATIONS Introduction: Cognitive Science at the Crossraods- Foundational Issues in Cognitive Science, Terry Dartnall From Simple Processes Does Complex Behavior Emerge: A Methodology for Cognitive Research Based on Nonlinear System Theory, Richard A. Heath Real-world Embedding and Traditional Artificial Intilligence, Steve Torrance Situated Cognition: Empirical Issue, "Paradigm Shift" or Conceptual Confusion? Peter Slezak Cognition, Content, and the Inner Code, Terry Dartnall Subtractive Reasoning, Representationism and False Belief Tasks, Donald M. Peterson and Kevin J. Riggs A Study of Belief Revision Theories, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Renee Elio Kantian Errors in "Classical" Cognitive Science, Hugh Clapin PART II. LEARNING, MEMORY, AND COGNITION Introduction: Computational Methods and Cognitive Phenomena, Janet Wiles Is Skill Acquisition General or Specific? David Grieg and Craig P. Speelman Tensor Product Model of Exemplar-based Category Learning, Yoshihisa Kashmina Modeling the Effects of Arousal on Recognition Performance, Zoltan Schreter and Matthew Kirkcaldie A Connectionist Model of Short-term Cued Recall, Gerald Tehan and Anthony Fallon The Integration of Cognitive Knowledge into a Perceptual Representation: Lessons from Human and Computer Go, Jay Burmeister, Janet Wiles, and Helen Purchase PART III. COMMUNICATIONS, SPEECH, AND LANGUAGE Introduction: Communication, Speech and Language, Janet Wiles Word Prosody, Lexical Access and the Perception of Foreign Loan Words, John Ingram A Case Study in Information Processing: Sentence Processing, Bruce Stevenson Syntactic Recovery and Spelling Correction of Ill-formed Sentences, Kyongho Min and William H. Wilson Speech Intelligibility and Noise: The Auditory Interface, Roger Wales and Peter Kremer Informationally Equivalent Representations: An Architecture and Applications, Helen Purchase Author Index Subject Index
Cartesian ‘Ideas’ and the First (C17 th ) Cognitive Revolution Peter Slezak ([email protected]... more Cartesian ‘Ideas’ and the First (C17 th ) Cognitive Revolution Peter Slezak ([email protected]) Program in Cognitive Science, School of History & Philosophy of Science University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 AUSTRALIA of mental representation. Noting that it has received very little attention, Yolton characterizes this significatory relation as a “curious” and “somewhat obscure” doctrine which turns the conventional account on its head (1996, 73). Yolton writes: Abstract Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume’s Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though he concedes that “Descartes got there first.” However, Hume’s “Cartesianism” is an ambiguous inheritance since Hume’s representational account (and Fodor’s) is closer to Malebranche’s version than Descartes’ own. Descartes shared the ‘pragmatism’ and ‘direct realism’ of Arnauld and later Reid – the doctrine that Fodor sees as “the defining catastrophe” in recent philosophy of mind. Since Putnam (1999) and others d...
Robert Cummins (1996, p.1) has characterised the problem of mental representation as "the topic i... more Robert Cummins (1996, p.1) has characterised the problem of mental representation as "the topic in the philosophy of mind for some time now". This remark is something of an understatement. The same topic was central to the famous controversy between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld in the Seventeenth Century and remained central to the entire philosophical tradition of "ideas" in the writings of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. I show that the recurrence of certain deep perplexities about the mind is a systematic and pervasive pattern, confirming Jerry Fodor's disparaging remark: "Cognitive science is where philosophy goes when it dies" (Fodor, 1994b, p. 110). The Tripartite Schema Recently Bechtel (1998, p. 299) states the essentials of a modern theory of representation: "There are ... three interrelated components in a representational story: what is represented, the representation, and the user of the representation".
Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume's Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though... more Jerry Fodor (2003) sees Hume's Treatise as the foundational document of cognitive science, though he concedes that "Descartes got there first." However, Hume's "Cartesianism" is an ambiguous inheritance since Hume's representational account (and Fodor's) is closer to Malebranche's version than Descartes' own. Descartes shared the 'pragmatism' and 'direct realism' of Arnauld and later Reid-the doctrine that Fodor sees as "the defining catastrophe" in recent philosophy of mind. Since Putnam (1999) and others defend this Arnauld-Reid view today, there has been less progress since the 17 th Century than Fodor suggests. I defend Descartes' conception of representation against misunderstandings that illuminate issues still at the forefront of debate in cognitive science today. For example, despite the wide currency of Dennett's term, Descartes was not guilty of the 'Cartesian Theater' fallacy and, indeed, in his Dioptrics explicitly argued against a conception of representation that would require the notorious homunculus-in the Malebranchean Theater. Not Much of a Revolution? Jerry Fodor (2003, 2) notes that a shift in philosophical fashions has permitted appreciating Hume more as a psychologist than as a philosopher in the traditional sense concerned with 'conceptual analysis.' However, Hume is neither alone, nor the most aggrieved victim of such 'whig' history. Notably, Descartes' work is best seen "as the output of a practicing scientist who, somewhat unfortunately wrote a few short and relatively unimportant philosophical essays" (Clark 1982, 2). This can't be said of Hume. Aside from his physics, Descartes' neuroscience in Optics and Treatise of Man were of staggering originality, right in their fundamentals, and still a corrective to widely held theories such as pictorial accounts of imagery. It is in this light that we may appreciate Chomsky's doubts concerning the radical novelty of the 'cognitive revolution' and his remark "it wasn't all that much of a revolution in my opinion" (1966, 1). He notes that the same convergence of disciplinary interests had taken place in the seventeenth century in what he calls the "first cognitive revolution, perhaps the only real one.
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