マイクロバス、バス、タイヤ、パンク、トップニュース、ピックアップ、ビジネス、ハイテク、テクノロジー、セクター、ケータイ、カーナビ、ルート、レストラン、トイレ、マップ、インタビュー 、ヌードモデル、トップ、グルメ、ブース、サイエンス、プルサーマル、ランプ、サイクル、メディア、デモ、テクノロジー、ソーシャルゲーム、サマリー、ネルギー、ネット、レポート、ビッグデータ、コンピュータ、ショッピング、テーマ
14:55 2010/09/18
2010年9月18日土曜日
2010年9月13日月曜日
「ツイッターを通じた心の交流」について
参照：「千代田線がストップ ツイッターで人々が慰め合う」 - 2010年9月13日(月)10時5分配信
ツイートはPCやスマートフォン等の画面上に表示される140字内の下記の様な文字列である。
これらのツイートに「心の交流」を見るのは、何故か？
これらが、bot つまり、ロボットによるツイートであるとしたらどうか？その様な教示条件の心理実験は可能である。その場合にも、被験者は「心の交流」をそこに見るであろうか？
これらが人間によるツイートであると信じているから、そこに、「心の交流」を見るのではないか？
ツイートから成る仮想社会(virtual society)に「心」を見るのは、その背後に、realな人間が存在すると信じている事が条件であるように思われる。その信念が崩壊するなら仮想社会の持つ実世界への効果も崩壊するであろう。つまり、仮想社会は幻想社会に成り得る。
「信念の固め方 - The Fixation of Belief」について再考してみよう。
C.S.Peirce: FIXATION,1877 (in Japanese PDF)
Belief and Embodied cognitionとの関係は如何に？
ツイートはPCやスマートフォン等の画面上に表示される140字内の下記の様な文字列である。
- 「千代田線のみんな元気？さぁ、どっちの到着が早いか競争だぞ！よーいドン！（その前にバッテリーが死ぬ）」
- 「千代田船内（原文ママ）に残っているみなさん、綾瀬から先は順調です。今を耐えましょう。希望はすぐそこにあります」
- 「さて、地元の北松戸にまもなく着きます。Tweetにおつきあいいただいたみなさん、本当にありがとうございました！人間の温かみを感じることが出来ました！ bye-bye!!」
- 「無事ついた。皆さん応援やアドバイスありがとうございました。先に降ります。まだ千代田線と常磐線の中の人がんばれ」
- 「Twitterのおかげで心細くなかったです」
- 「TLの不思議な連帯感で乗り切れました。ありがとうございましたｗ」
これらのツイートに「心の交流」を見るのは、何故か？
これらが、bot つまり、ロボットによるツイートであるとしたらどうか？その様な教示条件の心理実験は可能である。その場合にも、被験者は「心の交流」をそこに見るであろうか？
これらが人間によるツイートであると信じているから、そこに、「心の交流」を見るのではないか？
ツイートから成る仮想社会(virtual society)に「心」を見るのは、その背後に、realな人間が存在すると信じている事が条件であるように思われる。その信念が崩壊するなら仮想社会の持つ実世界への効果も崩壊するであろう。つまり、仮想社会は幻想社会に成り得る。
「信念の固め方 - The Fixation of Belief」について再考してみよう。
C.S.Peirce: FIXATION,1877 (in Japanese PDF)
Belief and Embodied cognitionとの関係は如何に？
2010年9月11日土曜日
古典的心身問題とウェブ時代の心身問題
核家族化は人間関係の構築、つまり、関係態の形成に必要な社会化(Socializaition)能力の発展を阻害する力があった。
社会化はDNAで遺伝するのではなく、社会で、学習する事により獲得されると社会学は言っている。
社会化に「失敗」した若者は、昨今、草食系若者と呼ばれている。草食系若者の子供たちは「社会化の担い手」を失う事により、再び、社会化に失敗するかも知れない。
しかし、人間は「社会的動物」であるとアリストテレスが紀元前数百年に看破している。現在、インターネットでは"Social"がキー・ワードに成って来ている。これは核家族化からの揺り戻しである。
ここ暫くは大きくSocialに振れ、極端な社会化へと向かうであろう。実生活での「個」は、ウェブ上で「関係態」を獲得して、これまでの緊張から開放されるであろう。Facebookの人気の秘密はここにある。つまり、それは、個人主義｜Individualism（ 「個人主義は、個々の人間の人格の独自性と自律性を重んじる立場であり、その時々に形成された場の空気に流されることのない、一個人としての一貫性のある深く統合された思想と責任ある行動を高く評価する」は人間の自然に反するので個である事は緊張をもたらす）を含む個の実生活での緊張からの開放の世界的希求である。だが、これはウェブ上での仮想的な社会化である。
マーヴィン・ミンスキーの「心の社会」から予感されるように心は関係態で、ウェブ上で獲得した関係態は仮想的心であるのかも知れない。
【大学サイエンスフェスタ】心の社会性 亀田達也 （北海道大学大学院文学研究科・教授）
2009/12/12 66:35
興味深い実験多数
23:40 2010/09/12
本来の心は希薄に成り、仮想的心が顕在化するにつれて、新たな心身問題が浮上してくる。つまり、"virtual mind - body problems"。
SNSが進展してVR(Virtual Reality)が現実なるとbodyはvirtual bodyとなり、"virtual mind - virtual body problems"が出現するであろう。
ここで、古典的心身問題である"the mind-body problem" とウェブ時代が生む "virtual mind - virtual body problems"との相互関係が心の哲学の新たな課題として浮上して来るように思われる。又、新たな心の病が予感される。
進化上の新たな試練である。ヒトは、如何に、この試練に立ち向かうのか？
社会化はDNAで遺伝するのではなく、社会で、学習する事により獲得されると社会学は言っている。
社会化に「失敗」した若者は、昨今、草食系若者と呼ばれている。草食系若者の子供たちは「社会化の担い手」を失う事により、再び、社会化に失敗するかも知れない。
しかし、人間は「社会的動物」であるとアリストテレスが紀元前数百年に看破している。現在、インターネットでは"Social"がキー・ワードに成って来ている。これは核家族化からの揺り戻しである。
ここ暫くは大きくSocialに振れ、極端な社会化へと向かうであろう。実生活での「個」は、ウェブ上で「関係態」を獲得して、これまでの緊張から開放されるであろう。Facebookの人気の秘密はここにある。つまり、それは、個人主義｜Individualism（ 「個人主義は、個々の人間の人格の独自性と自律性を重んじる立場であり、その時々に形成された場の空気に流されることのない、一個人としての一貫性のある深く統合された思想と責任ある行動を高く評価する」は人間の自然に反するので個である事は緊張をもたらす）を含む個の実生活での緊張からの開放の世界的希求である。だが、これはウェブ上での仮想的な社会化である。
マーヴィン・ミンスキーの「心の社会」から予感されるように心は関係態で、ウェブ上で獲得した関係態は仮想的心であるのかも知れない。
【大学サイエンスフェスタ】心の社会性 亀田達也 （北海道大学大学院文学研究科・教授）
2009/12/12 66:35
興味深い実験多数
23:40 2010/09/12
本来の心は希薄に成り、仮想的心が顕在化するにつれて、新たな心身問題が浮上してくる。つまり、"virtual mind - body problems"。
SNSが進展してVR(Virtual Reality)が現実なるとbodyはvirtual bodyとなり、"virtual mind - virtual body problems"が出現するであろう。
ここで、古典的心身問題である"the mind-body problem" とウェブ時代が生む "virtual mind - virtual body problems"との相互関係が心の哲学の新たな課題として浮上して来るように思われる。又、新たな心の病が予感される。
進化上の新たな試練である。ヒトは、如何に、この試練に立ち向かうのか？
2010年9月10日金曜日
"Situated cognition" Summary
Wikipedia, Situated cognition
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (May 2009)
Situated cognition posits that knowing is inseparable from doing (John Seely Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 1989) by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts (Greeno & Moore, 1993). A recent overview is offered by the collection of papers edited by Philip Robins and Murat Aydede [1]
[ 知るという精神的活動は「する」という身体的活動から分離不可能 ]
[ 全ての知識は社会的、文化的、及び、物理的環境に縛り付けられた活動に根ざしている。 ]
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. This perspective rejects mind-body dualism and person-environment dualism.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Glossary
3 Key principles
3.1 Affordances/Effectivities
3.2 Perception (Variance/Invariance)
3.3 Memory
3.4 Knowing
3.5 Learning
3.6 Language
3.7 Legitimate peripheral participation
3.8 Representation, Symbols, and Schema
3.9 Goals, Intention and Attention
3.10 Transfer
3.11 Embodied cognition
4 Externalism
5 Pedagogical Implications
5.1 Cognitive Apprenticeship
5.2 Anchored Instruction
5.3 Perceiving and Acting in Avatar-based Virtual Worlds
6 Research Methodologies
7 Critiques of Situativity
8 Citations & Further reading
9 See also
10 References
[edit]History
While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), it shares many principles with older fields such as critical theory, (Frankfurt School, 1930; Freire, 1968) anthropology (Jean Lave & Wenger, 1991), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, 1968), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989), and sociolinguistics theories (Bhaktin, 1981) that rejected the notion of truly objective knowledge and the principles of Kantian empiricism.
Situated cognition draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior within communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the ecological psychology of the perception-action cycle (J. J. Gibson, 1986) and intentional dynamics (Shaw, Kadar, Sim & Reppenger, 1992), and even research on robotics with work on autonomous agents at NASA and elsewhere (e.g., work by W. J. Clancey). Early attempts to define situated cognition focused on contrasting the emerging theory with information processing theories dominant in cognitive psychology (Bredo, 1994).
Recent perspectives of situated cognition have focused on and draw from the concept of identity formation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as people negotiate meaning (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Clancey, 1994) through interactions within communities of practice. Situated cognition perspectives have been adopted in education (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), instructional design (Young, 2004), online communities and artificial intelligence (see Brooks, Clancey). Grounded Cognition, concerned with the role of simulations and embodiment in cognition, encompasses Cognitive Linguistics, Situated Action, Simulation and Social Simulation theories. Research has contributed to the understanding of embodied language, memory, and the representation of knowledge (Barsalou, 2007).
Recently theorists have recognized a natural affinity between situated cognition, New Literacy Studies and new literacies research (Gee, 2010). This connection is made by understanding that situated cognition maintains that individuals learn through experiences. It could be stated that these experiences, and more importantly the mediators that affect attention during these experiences is affected by the tools, technologies and languages used by a socio-cultural group and the meanings given to these by the collective group. New literacies research examines the context and contingencies that language and tool use by individuals and how this changes as the Internet and other communication technologies affect literacy (Leu et al., 2009).
Glossary
Term
Definition
affordance
properties of the environment, specified in the information array (flow field) of the individual, that present possibilities for action and are available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon
attention and intention
Once an intention (goal) is adopted, the agent’s perception (attention) is attuned to the affordances of the environment.
attunement
attunement is a persisting state of awareness of the affordances in the environment and how they may be acted upon
community of practice
The concept of a **community of practice** (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.
detection of invariants
perception of what doesn't change across different situations
direct perception (pick up)
describes the way an agent in an environment senses affordances without the need for computation or symbolic representation
effectivities
The agents ability to recognize and use affordances of the environment.
embodiment
as an explanation of cognition emphasizes first that the body exists as part of the world. In a dynamic process, perception and action occurring through and because of the body being in the world, interact to allow for the processes of simulation and representation.
legitimate peripheral participation
the initial stage(s) of a person's active membership in a community of practice to which he or she has access and the opportunity to become a full participant.
perceiving and acting cycle
Gibson (1986) described a continuous perception-action cycle, which is dynamic and ongoing. Agents perceive and act with intentionality in the environment at all times.
[edit]Key principles
[edit]Affordances/Effectivities
J. J. Gibson introduced the idea of affordances as part of a relational account of perception (Gibson, 1977). Perception should not be considered solely as the encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind, but as an element of an individual's interaction with her environment (Gibson, 1977). Central to his proposal of an ecological psychology was the notion of affordances. Gibson proposed that in any interaction between an agent and the environment, inherent conditions or qualities of the environment allow the agent to perform certain actions with the environment (Greeno, 1994). He defined the term as properties in the environment that presented possibilities for action and were available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon (Gibson 1979/1986). Gibson focused on the affordances of physical objects, such as doorknobs and chairs, and suggested that these affordances were directly perceived by an individual instead of mediated by mental representations such as mental models. It is important to note that Gibson's notion of direct perception as an unmediated process of noticing, perceiving, and encoding specific attributes from the environment, has long been challenged by proponents of a more category-based model of perception.
This focus on agent-situation interactions in ecological psychology was consistent with the situated cognition program of researchers such as James G. Greeno (1994, 1998), who appreciated Gibson's apparent rejection of the factoring assumptions underlying experimental psychology. The situated cognition perspective focused on "perception-action instead of memory and retrieval…A perceiving/acting agent is coupled with a developing/adapting environment and what matters is how the two interact" (Young, Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997, p. 139). Greeno (1994) also suggested that affordances are "preconditions for activity," and that while they do not determine behavior, they increase the likelihood that a certain action or behavior will occur.
Shaw, Turvey, & Mace (as cited by Greeno, 1994) later introduced the term effectivities, the abilities of the agent that determined what the agent could do, and consequently, the interaction that could take place. Perception and action were co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which acted 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young et al., 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceived and interacted with the environment, determining what affordances could be picked up, based on his effectivities. This view is consistent with Norman's (1988) theory of "perceived affordances," which emphasizes the agent's perception of an object's utility as opposed to focusing on the object itself.
An interesting question is the relationship between affordances and mental representations as set forth in a more cognitivist perspective. While Greeno (1998) argues that attunements to affordances are superior to constructs such as schemata and mental models, Glenberg & Robertson (1999) suggested that affordances are the building blocks of mental models.
[edit]Perception (Variance/Invariance)
The work of Gibson (1986) in the field of visual perception greatly influences situated cognition (Greeno,1994). Gibson argued that visual perception is not a matter of the eye translating inputs into symbolic representation in the brain. Instead the viewer perceives and picks up on the infinite amount of information available in the environment. Specifically, an agent perceives affordances by discovering the variants, what changes, and more importantly the invariants, what does not change across different situations. Given a specific intention (or intentional set), perceptions of invariants are co-determined by the agent and the affordances of the environment, and are then built upon over time.
[edit]Memory
Situated cognition and ecological psychology perspectives emphasize perception and propose that memory plays a significantly diminished role in the learning process. Rather, focus is on the continuous tuning of perceptions and actions across situations based on the affordances of the environment and the interaction of the agent within that environment (Greeno, 1994). Representations are not stored and checked against past knowledge, but are created and interpreted in activity (Clancey, 1990).
Situated cognition understands memory as an interaction with the world, bounded by meaningful situations, that brings an agent toward a specified goal (intention). Thus, perception and action are co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which act 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceives and interacts with the environment, determining what affordances can be picked up, based on his effectivities, and does not simply recall stored symbolic representations.
[edit]Knowing
Situativity theorists recast knowledge not as an entity, thing, or noun, but as knowing as an action or verb (Greeno, 1994). It is not an entity which can be collected as in knowledge acquisition models. Instead knowing is reciprocally co-determined between the agent and environment (Barab & Roth, 2006). This reciprocal interaction can not be separated from the context and its cultural and historical constructions (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Therefore knowing isn't a matter at arriving at any single truth but instead it is a particular stance that emerges from the agent-environment interaction (Barab & Roth, 2006).
Knowing emerges as individuals develop intentions (Young, 1997) through goal-directed activities within cultural contexts which may in turn have larger goals and claims of truth. The adoption of intentions relates to the direction of the agent's attention to the detection of affordances in the environment that will lead to accomplishment of desired goals. Knowing is expressed in the agent's ability to act as an increasingly competent participant in a community of practice. As agents participate more fully within specific communities of practice, what constitutes knowing continuously evolves (Lave & Wenger, 1991). For example a novice environmentalist may not look at water quality by examining oxygen levels but may consider the color and smell (Barab & Roth, 2006). Through participation and enculturation within different communities, agents express knowing through action.
[edit]Learning
Since knowing is rooted in action and can not be decontextualized from individual, social, and historical goals (Barab & Roth, 2006) teaching approaches that focus on conveying facts and rules separately from the contexts within which they are meaningful in real-life do not allow for learning that is based on the detection of invariants. They are therefore considered to be impoverished methods that are unlikely to lead to transfer. Learning must involve more than the transmission of knowledge but must instead encourage the expression of effectivities and the development of attention and intention (Young, 2004b) through rich contexts (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990) that reflect real life learning processes (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Learning, more specifically literacy learning is affected by the Internet and other communication technologies as also evidenced in other segments of society. As a result of this youth are recently using affordances provided by these tools to become experts in a variety of domains (Gee, 2010). These practices by youth are viewed as them becoming "pro-ams" and becoming experts in whatever they have developed a passion for (Anderson, 2006; Leadbeater & Miller, 2004)
[edit]Language
Individuals don't just read or write texts, they interact with them, and often these interactions involve others in various socio-cultural contexts. Since language is often the basis for monitoring and tracking learning gains in comprehension, content knowledge and tool use in and out of school the role of situated cognition in language learning activities is important. Membership and interaction in social and cultural groups is often determined by tools, technologies and discourse use for full participation. Language learning or literacy in various social and cultural groups must include how the groups work with and interact with these texts (Gee, 2010). Language instruction in the context of situated cognition also involves the skilled or novice use of language by members of the group, and instruction of not only the elements of language, but what is needed to bring a student to the level of expert. Originating from emergent literacy (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006; Gee, 2004), specialist-language lessons (Gee, 2004; 2007) examines the formal and informal styles and discourses of language use in socio-cultural contexts. A function of specialist-language lessons includes "lucidly functional language", or complex specialist language is usually accompanied by clear and lucid language used to explain the rules, relationships or meanings existing between language and meaning (Gee, 2010).
[edit]Legitimate peripheral participation
According to Jean Lave and Wenger (1991) legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) provides a framework to describe how individuals ('newcomers') become part of a community of learners. Legitimate peripheral participation was central to Lave and Wenger's take on situated cognition (referred to as "situated activity") because it introduced socio-cultural and historical realizations of power and access to the way thinking and knowing are legitimated. They stated, "Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations" (p. 42). Lave and Wenger's (1991) research on the phenomenon of apprenticeship in communities of practice not only provided a unit of analysis for locating an individual's multiple, changing levels and ways of participation, but also implied that all participants, through increased involvement, have access to, acquire, and use resources available to their particular community. To illustrate the role of LPP in situated activity, Lave and Wenger (1991) examined five apprenticeship scenarios (Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and nondrinking alcoholics involved in AA). Their analysis of apprenticeship across five different communities of learners lead them to several conclusions about the situatedness of LPP and its relationship to successful learning. Key to newcomers' success included:
[edit]Representation, Symbols, and Schema
In situated theories, the term "representation" refers to external forms in the environment that are created through social interactions to express meaning (language, art, gestures, etc.) and are perceived and acted upon in the first person sense. "Representing" in the first person sense is conceived as an act of re-experiencing in the imagination that involves the dialectic of ongoing perceiving and acting in coordination with the activation of neural structures and processes. This form of reflective representation is considered to be a secondary type of learning, while the primary form of learning is found in the “adaptive recoordination that occurs with every behavior" (Clancey, 1993). Conceptualizing is considered to be a "prelinguistic" act, while "knowing" involves creative interaction with symbols in both their interpretation and use for expression. "Schema" develop as neural connections become biased through repeated activations to reactivate in situations that are perceived and conceived as temporally and compositionally similar to previous generalized situations (Clancey, 1993).
[edit]Goals, Intention and Attention
Young-Barab Model (1998)
The Young-Barab Model (1998) pictured to the left, illustrates the dynamics of intentions and intentional dynamics involved in the agent’s interaction with his environment when problem solving.
Dynamics of Intentions (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young et al., 1997): goal (intention) adoption from among all possible goals (ontological descent). This describes how the learner decides whether or not to adopt a particular goal when presented with a problem. Once a goal is adopted, the learner proceeds by interacting with their environment through intentional dynamics. There are many levels of intentions, but at the moment of a particular occasion, the agent has just one intention, and that intention constrains his behavior until it is fulfilled or annihilated.
Intentional Dynamics (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young, et al., 1997): dynamics that unfold when the agent has only one intention (goal) and begins to act towards it, perceiving and acting (Gibson 1979/1986). It is a trajectory towards the achievement of a solution or goal, the process of tuning one’s perception (attention). Each intention is meaningfully bounded, where the dynamics of that intention inform the agent of whether or not he is getting closer to achieving his goal. If the agent is not getting closer to his goal, he will take corrective action, and then continue forward. This is the agent’s intentional dynamics, and continues on until he achieves his goal.
[edit]Transfer
There are various definition of transfer found within the situated cognition umbrella.Researchers interested in social practice often define transfer as increased participation(Lave & Wenger, 1991). Ecological psychology perspectives define transfer as the detection of invariance across different situations. (Young & McNeese, 1995). Furthermore transfer can only "occur when there is a confluence of an individual's goals and objectives, their acquired abilities to act, and a set of affordances for action"(Young et al., 1997, p. 147).
[edit]Embodied cognition
The traditional cognition approach assumes that perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices (Niedenthal, 2007; Wilson, 2002). However, embodied cognition posits that the mind and body interact ‘on the fly’ as a single entity. An example of embodied cognition is seen in the area of robotics, where movements are not based on internal representations, rather, they are based on the robot’s direct and immediate interaction with its environment (Wilson, 2002). Additionally, research has shown that embodied facial expressions influence judgments (Niedenthal, 2007), and arm movements are related to a person’s evaluation of a word or concept (Markman, & Brendl, 2005). In the later example, the individual would pull or push a lever towards his name at a faster rate for positive words, then for negative words. These results appeal to the embodied nature of situated cognition, where knowledge is the achievement of the whole body in its interaction with the world.
[edit]Externalism
As to the mind, by and large, situated cognition paves the way to various form of externalism. The issue is whether the situated aspect of cognition has only a practical value or it is somehow constitutive of cognition and perhaps of consciousness itself. As to the latter possibility, there are different positions. David Chalmers and Andy Clark, who developed the hugely debated model of the extended mind, explicitly rejected the externalization of consciousness [2]. For them, only cognition is extended. On the other hand, others, like Riccardo Manzotti [3] or Teed Rockwell[4], explicitly considered the possibility to situate conscious experience in the environment.
[edit]Pedagogical Implications
Since situated cognition views knowing as an action within specific contexts and views Direct Instruction models of knowledge transmission as impoverished, there are significant implications for pedagogical practices. First, curriculum requires instructional design that draws on apprenticeship models common in real life (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Second, curricular design should rely on contextual narratives that situate concepts in practice. Classroom practices such as Project Based Learning and Problem Based Learning would qualify as consistent with the situated learning perspective, as would techniques such as Case Base Learning, Anchored Instruction, and Cognitive Apprenticeship.
[edit]Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive Apprenticeships were one of the earliest pedagogical designs to incorporate the theories of situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship uses four dimensions (e.g., content, methods, sequence, sociology) to embed learning in activity and make deliberate the use of the social and physical contexts present in the classroom (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship includes the enculturation of students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). The technique draws on the principles of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and reciprocal teaching (Palinscar & Brown, 1984; 1989) in that a more knowledgeable other, i.e. a teacher, engages in a task with a more novice other, i.e. a learner, by describing their own thoughts as they work on the task, providing "just in time" scaffolding, modeling expert behaviors, and encouraging reflection (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985; Scardamalia, Bereiter. & Steinbach, 1984). . The reflection process includes having students alternate between novice and expert strategies in a problem-solving context, sensitizing them to specifics of an expert performance, and adjustments that may be made to their own performance to get them to the expert level (Collins & Brown, 1988; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Thus, the function of reflection indicates “co-investigation” and/or abstracted replay by students (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983; Collins & Brown, 1988).
Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989) emphasized six critical features of a cognitive apprenticeship that included observation, coaching, scaffolding, modeling, fading, and reflection. Using these critical features, expert(s) guided students on their journey to acquire the cognitive and metacognitive processes and skills necessary to handle a variety of tasks, in a range of situations (Collins et al.,1989). Reciprocal teaching, a form of cognitive apprenticeship, involves the modeling and coaching of various comprehension skills as teacher and students take turns in assuming the role of instructor.
[edit]Anchored Instruction
Anchored instruction is grounded in an story or narrative that presents a realistic (but fictional) situation and raises an over-arching question or problem (compare with an essential question posed by a teacher). This approach is designed to 1) engage the learner with a problem or series of related problems, 2) require the learner to develop goals and discover subgoals related to solving the problem(s), and 3) provide the learner with extensive and diverse opportunities to explore the problem(s) in a shared context with classmates. For example, a Spanish teacher uses a video drama series focused on the murder of a main character. Students work in small groups to summarize parts of the story, to create hypotheses about the murderer and motive, and to create a presentation of their solution to the class. Stories are often paired so that across the set students can detect the invariant structure of the underlying knowledge (so 2 episodes about distance-rate-time, one about boats and one about planes, so students can perceive how the distance-rate-time relationship holds across differences in vehicles). The ideal smallest set of instances needed provide students the opportunity to detect invariant structure has been referred to as a "generator set" of situations.
The goal of anchored instruction is the engagement of intention and attention. Through authentic tasks across multiple domains, educators present situations that require students to create or adopt meaningful goals (intentions). One of the educator’s objectives can be to set a goal through the use of an anchor problem (Barab & Roth, 2006; Young et al., 1997). A classic example of anchored instruction is the Jasper series (The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990; Young et al., 1997; Young & McNeese, 1995). The Jasper series includes a variety of videodisc adventures focused on problem formulation and problem solving. Each videodisc used a visual narrative to present an authentic, realistic everyday problem. The objective was for students to adopt specific goals (intentions) after viewing the story and defining a problem. These newly adopted goals guided students through the collaborative process of problem formulation and problem solving.
[edit]Perceiving and Acting in Avatar-based Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds provide unique affordances for embodied learning, i.e. hands on, interactive, spatially oriented, that ground learning in experience. Here "embodied" means acting in a virtual world enabled by an avatar (computing).
Contextual affordances of online games and virtual environments allow learners to engage in goal-driven activity, authentic interactions, and collaborative problem-solving - all considered in situated theories of learning to be features of optimal learning. In terms of situated assessment, virtual worlds have the advantage of facilitating dynamic feedback that directs the perceiving/acting agent, through an avatar, to continually improve performance.
[edit]Research Methodologies
The situative perspective is focused on interactive systems in which individuals interact with one another and physical and representational systems. Research takes place in situ and in real-world settings, reflecting assumptions that knowledge is constructed within specific contexts which have specific situational affordances. Mixed methods and qualitative methodologies are the most prominently used by researchers.
In qualitative studies, methods used are varied but the focus is often on the increased participation in specific communities of practice, the affordances of the environment that are acted upon by the agent, and the distributed nature of knowing in specific communities. A major feature of quantitative methods used in situated cognition is the absence of outcome measures. Quantitative variables used in mixed methods often focus on process over product. For example trace nodes, dribble files, and hyperlink pathways (Shaw, Effken, Fajen, Garret & Morris, 1997) are often used to track how students interact in the environment.
[edit]Critiques of Situativity
In "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation" Vera and Simon wrote: " . . . the systems usually regarded as exemplifying Situated Action are thoroughly symbolic (and representational), and, to the extent that they are limited in these respects, have doubtful prospects for extension to complex tasks" (Vera & Simon, 1993, p. 7). Vera and Simon (1993) also claimed that the information processing view is supported by many years of research in which symbol systems simulated "broad areas of human cognition" and that that there is no evidence of cognition without representation.
Anderson, Reder and Simon (1996) summarized what they considered to be the four claims of situated learning and argued against each claim from a cognitivist perspective. The claims and their arguments were:
Claim: Activity and learning are bound to the specific situations in which they occur. Argument: Whether learning is bound to context or not depends on both the kind of learning and the way that it is learned.
Claim: Knowledge does not transfer between tasks. Argument: There is ample evidence of successful transfer between tasks in the literature. Transfer depends on initial practice and the degree to which a successive task has similar cognitive elements to a prior task.
Claim: Teaching abstractions is ineffective. Argument: Abstract instruction can be made effective by combining of abstract concepts and concrete examples.
Claim: Instruction must happen in complex social contexts. Argument: Research shows value in individual learning and on focusing individually on specific skills in a skill set.
Anderson, Reder and Simons summarize their concerns when they say: "What is needed to improve learning and teaching is to continue to deepen our research into the circumstances that determine when narrower or broader contexts are required and when attention to narrower or broader skills are optimal for effective and efficient learning" (p.10).
[edit]Citations & Further reading
Anderson, J. R., Greeno, J. G., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Perspectives on learning, thinking, and activity. Educational Researcher, 29, 11-13.
Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York: Hyperion.
Brown, A. L. (1992). "Design experiments:Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating in complext interventions in classroom settings". Journal of the Learning Sciences 2 (2): 141–178. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2.
Clancey, William J. (1997). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representation. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.2277/0521448719. ISBN 0-521-44871-9.
"Special Issue: Situated Action". Cognitive Science (Norwood, NJ: Ablex) 17 (1). Jan-March 1993.
Collins, A., & Brown, J. (1988). The computer as a tool for learning through reflection. In H. Mandi & A. Lesgold (Eds.), Learning issues for intelligent tutoring systems (pp. 1–18). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Collins, A., Brown, J., & Newman, S. (1989). Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-83828-1.
Dickinson, D. K., & Neuman, S. B. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2. New York: Guilford Press.
Gallagher, S., Robbins, B.D., & Bradatan, C. (2007). Special issue on the situated body. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 9(2). URL: http://www.janushead.org/9-2/
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games and good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: Lang.
Gee, J. P. (2010). A Situated-Sociocultural Approach to Literacy and Technology. In E. Baker (Ed.), The New Literacies: Multiple Perspectives on Research and Practice, pp. 165–193. New York: Guilford Press.
Greeno, J. G. (1994). Gibson's affordances. Psychological Review, 101 (2), 336-342.
Greeno, J. G. (1997). On claims that answer the wrong question. Educational Research, 26(1), 5-17.
Greeno, J.G., and Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project Group (1998). The situativity of knowing, learning, and research. American Psychologist, 53(1), 5-26.
Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. Journal of the Learning Sciences 15(4) 539-550.
Griffin, M. M. (1995). You can't get there from here: Situated learning, transfer, and map skills. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 20, 65-87.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press (A Bradford Book). ISBN 0-262-58146-9.
Kirshner, D. & Whitson, J. A. (1997) Situated Cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (ISBN# 0-8058-2038-8)
Kirshner, D., & Whitson, J. A. (1998). Obstacles to understanding cognition as situated. Educational Researcher, 27(8), 22-28.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice. ISBN 0-521-35018-8.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr.. ISBN 978-0-521-42374-8.
Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our society and economy. London: Demos.
Leu, D. J., O'Byrne, W. I., Zawilinski, L., McVerry, J. G., & Everett-Cacopardo, H. (2009). Expanding the new literacies conversation. Educational Researcher, 39, 264-269.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1983). Child as co-investigator: Helping children gain insight into their own mental processes. In S. Paris, G. Olson, & H. Stevenson (Eds.), Learning and motivation in the classroom (pp. 83–107). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children’s knowledge processing. In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and open questions (pp. 563–577). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Steinbach, R. (1984). Teachability of reflective processes in written composition. Cognitive Science, 8, 173-190.
[edit]See also
Activity theory
Computer-supported collaborative learning
Distributed cognition
Ecological psychology
Embodied cognition
Externalism
Enactivism
Group cognition
Relational frame theory
Situational awareness
Situated learning
[edit]References
^ Robbins, P. and M. Aydede, Eds, (2009), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
^ Clark, A., (2008), Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
^ Clark, A., (2008), Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
^ {Rockwell, 2005 #1561}
Anderson, J.R., Reder, L.M., Simon, H.A. (1996). Situated learning and education. Educational Researcher, 25 (4), 5-11.
Bredo, E. (1994). "Reconstructing educational psychology: Situated cognition and Deweyian pragmatism". Educational Psychologist 29 (1): 23–35. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep2901_3.
Brown, J. S.; Collins, A. & Duguid, S. (1989). "Situated cognition and the culture of learning". Educational Researcher 18 (1): 32–42.
Clancey, W. J (1993). "Situated action: A neuropsychological interpretation response to Vera and Simon". Cognitive Science 17: 87–116. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1701_7.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1990). "Anchored instruction and its relationship to situated cognition". Educational Research 19 (6): 2–10.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1993). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited. Educational Technology March Issue, 52-70.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1994). From visual word problems to learning communities: Changing conceptions of cognitive research. In K. McGilly (Ed.) Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom proactice. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Driscoll, M. P. (2004). Psychology of learning for instruction (3 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0-20-537519-7.
Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). "A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality". Psychological Review 95: 256–273. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.256.
Engle, R.A. (2006). Framing interactions to foster generative learning: A situative explanation of transfer in a community of learners classroom. 15. pp. 451–498.
Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2005). Cognitive psychology (5 ed.). New York: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-359-6.
Gagne, R. M., Wager, W.W., Golas, K. C., & Keller, J. M. (2005). Principles of Instructional Design (5 ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. ISBN 0-534-58284-2.
Gibson, James J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-898-59959-8.
Glenberg, A. M. & Robertson, D. A. (1999). Indexical understanding of instructions. Discourse Processes, 28 (1), 1-26.
Greeno, J. G. (1989). "A perspective on thinking". American Psychologist 44: 134–141. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.44.2.134.
Greeno, J. G. (1994). "Gibson's affordances". Psychological Review 101 (2): 336–342. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.2.336. PMID 8022965.
Greeno, J. G. (1998). "The situativity of knowing, learning, and research". American Psychologist 53 (1): 5–26. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.53.1.5.
Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. J. of the Learning Sciences 15(4) 539-550.
Hart, L. A. (1990). Human Brain & Human Learning. Black Diamond, WA: Books for Educators. ISBN 978-0962447594.
Kugler, P. N., Shaw, R. E., Vicente, K. J., & Kinsella-Shaw, J. (1991). The role of attractors in the self-organization of intentional systems. In R. R. Hoffman and D. S. Palermo (Eds.) Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lave, J. (1977). "Cognitive consequences of traditional apprenticeship training in West Africa". Anthroppology and Education Quarterly 18 (3): 1776–180.
Markman, A. B., & Brendl, C. M. (2005). "Constraining theories of embodied cognition". Psychological Science 16 (1): 6–10. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00772.x. PMID 15660844.
Niedenthal, P. M. (2007). "Embodying emotion". Science 316 (5827): 1002–1005. doi:10.1126/science.1136930. PMID 17510358.
Ormrod, J. E. (2004). Human learning (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 0-13-094199-9.
Palinscar, A.S., & Brown, A.L. (1984). "Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and monitoring activities". Cognition and Instruction 1: 117–115. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci0102_1.
Roth, W-M (1996). "Knowledge diffusion in a grade 4-5 classroom during a unit on civil engineering: An analysis of a classroom community in terms of its changing resources and practices". Cognition and Instruction 14 (2): 179–220. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci1402_2.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Education (2nd Ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York: Macmillan Reference.
Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-61556-9.
Shaw, R.E.Effken, J.A., Fajen, B.R., Garrett, S.R., & Morris, A. (1997). An ecological approach to the on-line assessment of problem-solving paths: Principles and applications. Instructional Science,25,151-166.
Shaw, R. E., Kadar, E., Sim, M. & Repperger, D. W. (1992). The intentional spring: A strategy for modeling systems that learn to perform intentional acts. Journal of Motor Behavior 24(1), 3-28.
Weiner, B. (1994). "Ability versus effort revisited: The moral determinants of achievement evaluation and achievement as a moral system". Educational Psychology Review 12: 1–14. doi:10.1023/A:1009017532121.
Wilson, M. (2002). "Six views of embodied cognition". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9 (4): 625–636.
Wilson, B.B., & Myers, K. M. (2000). Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context. In D. Jonassen, & S. Land (Eds.) Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. (pp. 57–88). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Young, M. F. , Kulikowich, J. M., & Barab, S. A. (1997). The unit of analysis for situated assessment. Instructional Science, 25(2), 133-150.
Young, M., & McNeese, M.(1995). A Situated Cognition Approach to Problem Solving. In P. Hancock, J. Flach, J. Caid, & K. Vicente (Eds.) Local Applications of the Ecological Approach to Human Machine Systems.(pp. 359–391). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Young, M. (2004a). An Ecological Description of Video Games in Education. Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and Information Systems Technologies and Applications (EISTA), July 22, Orlando, FL, pp. 203–208.
Young, M. (2004b). An ecological psychology of instructional design: Learning and thinking by perceiving-acting systems. In D.H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, 2nd Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
This page was last modified on 4 September 2010 at 03:45.
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (May 2009)
Situated cognition posits that knowing is inseparable from doing (John Seely Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 1989) by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts (Greeno & Moore, 1993). A recent overview is offered by the collection of papers edited by Philip Robins and Murat Aydede [1]
[ 知るという精神的活動は「する」という身体的活動から分離不可能 ]
[ 全ての知識は社会的、文化的、及び、物理的環境に縛り付けられた活動に根ざしている。 ]
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. This perspective rejects mind-body dualism and person-environment dualism.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Glossary
3 Key principles
3.1 Affordances/Effectivities
3.2 Perception (Variance/Invariance)
3.3 Memory
3.4 Knowing
3.5 Learning
3.6 Language
3.7 Legitimate peripheral participation
3.8 Representation, Symbols, and Schema
3.9 Goals, Intention and Attention
3.10 Transfer
3.11 Embodied cognition
4 Externalism
5 Pedagogical Implications
5.1 Cognitive Apprenticeship
5.2 Anchored Instruction
5.3 Perceiving and Acting in Avatar-based Virtual Worlds
6 Research Methodologies
7 Critiques of Situativity
8 Citations & Further reading
9 See also
10 References
[edit]History
While situated cognition gained recognition in the field of educational psychology in the late twentieth century (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), it shares many principles with older fields such as critical theory, (Frankfurt School, 1930; Freire, 1968) anthropology (Jean Lave & Wenger, 1991), philosophy (Martin Heidegger, 1968), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989), and sociolinguistics theories (Bhaktin, 1981) that rejected the notion of truly objective knowledge and the principles of Kantian empiricism.
Situated cognition draws a variety of perspectives, from an anthropological study of human behavior within communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the ecological psychology of the perception-action cycle (J. J. Gibson, 1986) and intentional dynamics (Shaw, Kadar, Sim & Reppenger, 1992), and even research on robotics with work on autonomous agents at NASA and elsewhere (e.g., work by W. J. Clancey). Early attempts to define situated cognition focused on contrasting the emerging theory with information processing theories dominant in cognitive psychology (Bredo, 1994).
Recent perspectives of situated cognition have focused on and draw from the concept of identity formation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as people negotiate meaning (Brown & Duguid, 2000; Clancey, 1994) through interactions within communities of practice. Situated cognition perspectives have been adopted in education (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989), instructional design (Young, 2004), online communities and artificial intelligence (see Brooks, Clancey). Grounded Cognition, concerned with the role of simulations and embodiment in cognition, encompasses Cognitive Linguistics, Situated Action, Simulation and Social Simulation theories. Research has contributed to the understanding of embodied language, memory, and the representation of knowledge (Barsalou, 2007).
Recently theorists have recognized a natural affinity between situated cognition, New Literacy Studies and new literacies research (Gee, 2010). This connection is made by understanding that situated cognition maintains that individuals learn through experiences. It could be stated that these experiences, and more importantly the mediators that affect attention during these experiences is affected by the tools, technologies and languages used by a socio-cultural group and the meanings given to these by the collective group. New literacies research examines the context and contingencies that language and tool use by individuals and how this changes as the Internet and other communication technologies affect literacy (Leu et al., 2009).
Glossary
Term
Definition
affordance
properties of the environment, specified in the information array (flow field) of the individual, that present possibilities for action and are available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon
attention and intention
Once an intention (goal) is adopted, the agent’s perception (attention) is attuned to the affordances of the environment.
attunement
attunement is a persisting state of awareness of the affordances in the environment and how they may be acted upon
community of practice
The concept of a **community of practice** (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.
detection of invariants
perception of what doesn't change across different situations
direct perception (pick up)
describes the way an agent in an environment senses affordances without the need for computation or symbolic representation
effectivities
The agents ability to recognize and use affordances of the environment.
embodiment
as an explanation of cognition emphasizes first that the body exists as part of the world. In a dynamic process, perception and action occurring through and because of the body being in the world, interact to allow for the processes of simulation and representation.
legitimate peripheral participation
the initial stage(s) of a person's active membership in a community of practice to which he or she has access and the opportunity to become a full participant.
perceiving and acting cycle
Gibson (1986) described a continuous perception-action cycle, which is dynamic and ongoing. Agents perceive and act with intentionality in the environment at all times.
[edit]Key principles
[edit]Affordances/Effectivities
J. J. Gibson introduced the idea of affordances as part of a relational account of perception (Gibson, 1977). Perception should not be considered solely as the encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind, but as an element of an individual's interaction with her environment (Gibson, 1977). Central to his proposal of an ecological psychology was the notion of affordances. Gibson proposed that in any interaction between an agent and the environment, inherent conditions or qualities of the environment allow the agent to perform certain actions with the environment (Greeno, 1994). He defined the term as properties in the environment that presented possibilities for action and were available for an agent to perceive directly and act upon (Gibson 1979/1986). Gibson focused on the affordances of physical objects, such as doorknobs and chairs, and suggested that these affordances were directly perceived by an individual instead of mediated by mental representations such as mental models. It is important to note that Gibson's notion of direct perception as an unmediated process of noticing, perceiving, and encoding specific attributes from the environment, has long been challenged by proponents of a more category-based model of perception.
This focus on agent-situation interactions in ecological psychology was consistent with the situated cognition program of researchers such as James G. Greeno (1994, 1998), who appreciated Gibson's apparent rejection of the factoring assumptions underlying experimental psychology. The situated cognition perspective focused on "perception-action instead of memory and retrieval…A perceiving/acting agent is coupled with a developing/adapting environment and what matters is how the two interact" (Young, Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997, p. 139). Greeno (1994) also suggested that affordances are "preconditions for activity," and that while they do not determine behavior, they increase the likelihood that a certain action or behavior will occur.
Shaw, Turvey, & Mace (as cited by Greeno, 1994) later introduced the term effectivities, the abilities of the agent that determined what the agent could do, and consequently, the interaction that could take place. Perception and action were co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which acted 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young et al., 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceived and interacted with the environment, determining what affordances could be picked up, based on his effectivities. This view is consistent with Norman's (1988) theory of "perceived affordances," which emphasizes the agent's perception of an object's utility as opposed to focusing on the object itself.
An interesting question is the relationship between affordances and mental representations as set forth in a more cognitivist perspective. While Greeno (1998) argues that attunements to affordances are superior to constructs such as schemata and mental models, Glenberg & Robertson (1999) suggested that affordances are the building blocks of mental models.
[edit]Perception (Variance/Invariance)
The work of Gibson (1986) in the field of visual perception greatly influences situated cognition (Greeno,1994). Gibson argued that visual perception is not a matter of the eye translating inputs into symbolic representation in the brain. Instead the viewer perceives and picks up on the infinite amount of information available in the environment. Specifically, an agent perceives affordances by discovering the variants, what changes, and more importantly the invariants, what does not change across different situations. Given a specific intention (or intentional set), perceptions of invariants are co-determined by the agent and the affordances of the environment, and are then built upon over time.
[edit]Memory
Situated cognition and ecological psychology perspectives emphasize perception and propose that memory plays a significantly diminished role in the learning process. Rather, focus is on the continuous tuning of perceptions and actions across situations based on the affordances of the environment and the interaction of the agent within that environment (Greeno, 1994). Representations are not stored and checked against past knowledge, but are created and interpreted in activity (Clancey, 1990).
Situated cognition understands memory as an interaction with the world, bounded by meaningful situations, that brings an agent toward a specified goal (intention). Thus, perception and action are co-determined by the effectivities and affordances, which act 'in the moment' together (Gibson 1979/1986; Greeno, 1994; Young Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997). Therefore, the agent directly perceives and interacts with the environment, determining what affordances can be picked up, based on his effectivities, and does not simply recall stored symbolic representations.
[edit]Knowing
Situativity theorists recast knowledge not as an entity, thing, or noun, but as knowing as an action or verb (Greeno, 1994). It is not an entity which can be collected as in knowledge acquisition models. Instead knowing is reciprocally co-determined between the agent and environment (Barab & Roth, 2006). This reciprocal interaction can not be separated from the context and its cultural and historical constructions (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Therefore knowing isn't a matter at arriving at any single truth but instead it is a particular stance that emerges from the agent-environment interaction (Barab & Roth, 2006).
Knowing emerges as individuals develop intentions (Young, 1997) through goal-directed activities within cultural contexts which may in turn have larger goals and claims of truth. The adoption of intentions relates to the direction of the agent's attention to the detection of affordances in the environment that will lead to accomplishment of desired goals. Knowing is expressed in the agent's ability to act as an increasingly competent participant in a community of practice. As agents participate more fully within specific communities of practice, what constitutes knowing continuously evolves (Lave & Wenger, 1991). For example a novice environmentalist may not look at water quality by examining oxygen levels but may consider the color and smell (Barab & Roth, 2006). Through participation and enculturation within different communities, agents express knowing through action.
[edit]Learning
Since knowing is rooted in action and can not be decontextualized from individual, social, and historical goals (Barab & Roth, 2006) teaching approaches that focus on conveying facts and rules separately from the contexts within which they are meaningful in real-life do not allow for learning that is based on the detection of invariants. They are therefore considered to be impoverished methods that are unlikely to lead to transfer. Learning must involve more than the transmission of knowledge but must instead encourage the expression of effectivities and the development of attention and intention (Young, 2004b) through rich contexts (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990) that reflect real life learning processes (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Learning, more specifically literacy learning is affected by the Internet and other communication technologies as also evidenced in other segments of society. As a result of this youth are recently using affordances provided by these tools to become experts in a variety of domains (Gee, 2010). These practices by youth are viewed as them becoming "pro-ams" and becoming experts in whatever they have developed a passion for (Anderson, 2006; Leadbeater & Miller, 2004)
[edit]Language
Individuals don't just read or write texts, they interact with them, and often these interactions involve others in various socio-cultural contexts. Since language is often the basis for monitoring and tracking learning gains in comprehension, content knowledge and tool use in and out of school the role of situated cognition in language learning activities is important. Membership and interaction in social and cultural groups is often determined by tools, technologies and discourse use for full participation. Language learning or literacy in various social and cultural groups must include how the groups work with and interact with these texts (Gee, 2010). Language instruction in the context of situated cognition also involves the skilled or novice use of language by members of the group, and instruction of not only the elements of language, but what is needed to bring a student to the level of expert. Originating from emergent literacy (Dickinson & Neuman, 2006; Gee, 2004), specialist-language lessons (Gee, 2004; 2007) examines the formal and informal styles and discourses of language use in socio-cultural contexts. A function of specialist-language lessons includes "lucidly functional language", or complex specialist language is usually accompanied by clear and lucid language used to explain the rules, relationships or meanings existing between language and meaning (Gee, 2010).
[edit]Legitimate peripheral participation
According to Jean Lave and Wenger (1991) legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) provides a framework to describe how individuals ('newcomers') become part of a community of learners. Legitimate peripheral participation was central to Lave and Wenger's take on situated cognition (referred to as "situated activity") because it introduced socio-cultural and historical realizations of power and access to the way thinking and knowing are legitimated. They stated, "Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations" (p. 42). Lave and Wenger's (1991) research on the phenomenon of apprenticeship in communities of practice not only provided a unit of analysis for locating an individual's multiple, changing levels and ways of participation, but also implied that all participants, through increased involvement, have access to, acquire, and use resources available to their particular community. To illustrate the role of LPP in situated activity, Lave and Wenger (1991) examined five apprenticeship scenarios (Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and nondrinking alcoholics involved in AA). Their analysis of apprenticeship across five different communities of learners lead them to several conclusions about the situatedness of LPP and its relationship to successful learning. Key to newcomers' success included:
- access to all that community membership entails,
- involvement in productive activity,
- learning the discourse(s) of the community including "talking about and talking within a practice," (p. 109), and
- willingness of the community to capitalize on the inexperience of newcomers, "Insofar as this continual interaction of new perspectives is sanctioned, everyone's participation is legitimately peripheral in some respect. In other words, everyone can to some degree be considered a 'newcomer' to the future of a changing community" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 117).
[edit]Representation, Symbols, and Schema
In situated theories, the term "representation" refers to external forms in the environment that are created through social interactions to express meaning (language, art, gestures, etc.) and are perceived and acted upon in the first person sense. "Representing" in the first person sense is conceived as an act of re-experiencing in the imagination that involves the dialectic of ongoing perceiving and acting in coordination with the activation of neural structures and processes. This form of reflective representation is considered to be a secondary type of learning, while the primary form of learning is found in the “adaptive recoordination that occurs with every behavior" (Clancey, 1993). Conceptualizing is considered to be a "prelinguistic" act, while "knowing" involves creative interaction with symbols in both their interpretation and use for expression. "Schema" develop as neural connections become biased through repeated activations to reactivate in situations that are perceived and conceived as temporally and compositionally similar to previous generalized situations (Clancey, 1993).
[edit]Goals, Intention and Attention
Young-Barab Model (1998)
The Young-Barab Model (1998) pictured to the left, illustrates the dynamics of intentions and intentional dynamics involved in the agent’s interaction with his environment when problem solving.
Dynamics of Intentions (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young et al., 1997): goal (intention) adoption from among all possible goals (ontological descent). This describes how the learner decides whether or not to adopt a particular goal when presented with a problem. Once a goal is adopted, the learner proceeds by interacting with their environment through intentional dynamics. There are many levels of intentions, but at the moment of a particular occasion, the agent has just one intention, and that intention constrains his behavior until it is fulfilled or annihilated.
Intentional Dynamics (Kugler et al., 1991; Shaw et al., 1992; Young, et al., 1997): dynamics that unfold when the agent has only one intention (goal) and begins to act towards it, perceiving and acting (Gibson 1979/1986). It is a trajectory towards the achievement of a solution or goal, the process of tuning one’s perception (attention). Each intention is meaningfully bounded, where the dynamics of that intention inform the agent of whether or not he is getting closer to achieving his goal. If the agent is not getting closer to his goal, he will take corrective action, and then continue forward. This is the agent’s intentional dynamics, and continues on until he achieves his goal.
[edit]Transfer
There are various definition of transfer found within the situated cognition umbrella.Researchers interested in social practice often define transfer as increased participation(Lave & Wenger, 1991). Ecological psychology perspectives define transfer as the detection of invariance across different situations. (Young & McNeese, 1995). Furthermore transfer can only "occur when there is a confluence of an individual's goals and objectives, their acquired abilities to act, and a set of affordances for action"(Young et al., 1997, p. 147).
[edit]Embodied cognition
The traditional cognition approach assumes that perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices (Niedenthal, 2007; Wilson, 2002). However, embodied cognition posits that the mind and body interact ‘on the fly’ as a single entity. An example of embodied cognition is seen in the area of robotics, where movements are not based on internal representations, rather, they are based on the robot’s direct and immediate interaction with its environment (Wilson, 2002). Additionally, research has shown that embodied facial expressions influence judgments (Niedenthal, 2007), and arm movements are related to a person’s evaluation of a word or concept (Markman, & Brendl, 2005). In the later example, the individual would pull or push a lever towards his name at a faster rate for positive words, then for negative words. These results appeal to the embodied nature of situated cognition, where knowledge is the achievement of the whole body in its interaction with the world.
[edit]Externalism
As to the mind, by and large, situated cognition paves the way to various form of externalism. The issue is whether the situated aspect of cognition has only a practical value or it is somehow constitutive of cognition and perhaps of consciousness itself. As to the latter possibility, there are different positions. David Chalmers and Andy Clark, who developed the hugely debated model of the extended mind, explicitly rejected the externalization of consciousness [2]. For them, only cognition is extended. On the other hand, others, like Riccardo Manzotti [3] or Teed Rockwell[4], explicitly considered the possibility to situate conscious experience in the environment.
[edit]Pedagogical Implications
Since situated cognition views knowing as an action within specific contexts and views Direct Instruction models of knowledge transmission as impoverished, there are significant implications for pedagogical practices. First, curriculum requires instructional design that draws on apprenticeship models common in real life (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Second, curricular design should rely on contextual narratives that situate concepts in practice. Classroom practices such as Project Based Learning and Problem Based Learning would qualify as consistent with the situated learning perspective, as would techniques such as Case Base Learning, Anchored Instruction, and Cognitive Apprenticeship.
[edit]Cognitive Apprenticeship
Cognitive Apprenticeships were one of the earliest pedagogical designs to incorporate the theories of situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship uses four dimensions (e.g., content, methods, sequence, sociology) to embed learning in activity and make deliberate the use of the social and physical contexts present in the classroom (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship includes the enculturation of students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). The technique draws on the principles of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and reciprocal teaching (Palinscar & Brown, 1984; 1989) in that a more knowledgeable other, i.e. a teacher, engages in a task with a more novice other, i.e. a learner, by describing their own thoughts as they work on the task, providing "just in time" scaffolding, modeling expert behaviors, and encouraging reflection (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985; Scardamalia, Bereiter. & Steinbach, 1984). . The reflection process includes having students alternate between novice and expert strategies in a problem-solving context, sensitizing them to specifics of an expert performance, and adjustments that may be made to their own performance to get them to the expert level (Collins & Brown, 1988; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Thus, the function of reflection indicates “co-investigation” and/or abstracted replay by students (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983; Collins & Brown, 1988).
Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989) emphasized six critical features of a cognitive apprenticeship that included observation, coaching, scaffolding, modeling, fading, and reflection. Using these critical features, expert(s) guided students on their journey to acquire the cognitive and metacognitive processes and skills necessary to handle a variety of tasks, in a range of situations (Collins et al.,1989). Reciprocal teaching, a form of cognitive apprenticeship, involves the modeling and coaching of various comprehension skills as teacher and students take turns in assuming the role of instructor.
[edit]Anchored Instruction
Anchored instruction is grounded in an story or narrative that presents a realistic (but fictional) situation and raises an over-arching question or problem (compare with an essential question posed by a teacher). This approach is designed to 1) engage the learner with a problem or series of related problems, 2) require the learner to develop goals and discover subgoals related to solving the problem(s), and 3) provide the learner with extensive and diverse opportunities to explore the problem(s) in a shared context with classmates. For example, a Spanish teacher uses a video drama series focused on the murder of a main character. Students work in small groups to summarize parts of the story, to create hypotheses about the murderer and motive, and to create a presentation of their solution to the class. Stories are often paired so that across the set students can detect the invariant structure of the underlying knowledge (so 2 episodes about distance-rate-time, one about boats and one about planes, so students can perceive how the distance-rate-time relationship holds across differences in vehicles). The ideal smallest set of instances needed provide students the opportunity to detect invariant structure has been referred to as a "generator set" of situations.
The goal of anchored instruction is the engagement of intention and attention. Through authentic tasks across multiple domains, educators present situations that require students to create or adopt meaningful goals (intentions). One of the educator’s objectives can be to set a goal through the use of an anchor problem (Barab & Roth, 2006; Young et al., 1997). A classic example of anchored instruction is the Jasper series (The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1990; Young et al., 1997; Young & McNeese, 1995). The Jasper series includes a variety of videodisc adventures focused on problem formulation and problem solving. Each videodisc used a visual narrative to present an authentic, realistic everyday problem. The objective was for students to adopt specific goals (intentions) after viewing the story and defining a problem. These newly adopted goals guided students through the collaborative process of problem formulation and problem solving.
[edit]Perceiving and Acting in Avatar-based Virtual Worlds
Virtual worlds provide unique affordances for embodied learning, i.e. hands on, interactive, spatially oriented, that ground learning in experience. Here "embodied" means acting in a virtual world enabled by an avatar (computing).
Contextual affordances of online games and virtual environments allow learners to engage in goal-driven activity, authentic interactions, and collaborative problem-solving - all considered in situated theories of learning to be features of optimal learning. In terms of situated assessment, virtual worlds have the advantage of facilitating dynamic feedback that directs the perceiving/acting agent, through an avatar, to continually improve performance.
[edit]Research Methodologies
The situative perspective is focused on interactive systems in which individuals interact with one another and physical and representational systems. Research takes place in situ and in real-world settings, reflecting assumptions that knowledge is constructed within specific contexts which have specific situational affordances. Mixed methods and qualitative methodologies are the most prominently used by researchers.
In qualitative studies, methods used are varied but the focus is often on the increased participation in specific communities of practice, the affordances of the environment that are acted upon by the agent, and the distributed nature of knowing in specific communities. A major feature of quantitative methods used in situated cognition is the absence of outcome measures. Quantitative variables used in mixed methods often focus on process over product. For example trace nodes, dribble files, and hyperlink pathways (Shaw, Effken, Fajen, Garret & Morris, 1997) are often used to track how students interact in the environment.
[edit]Critiques of Situativity
In "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation" Vera and Simon wrote: " . . . the systems usually regarded as exemplifying Situated Action are thoroughly symbolic (and representational), and, to the extent that they are limited in these respects, have doubtful prospects for extension to complex tasks" (Vera & Simon, 1993, p. 7). Vera and Simon (1993) also claimed that the information processing view is supported by many years of research in which symbol systems simulated "broad areas of human cognition" and that that there is no evidence of cognition without representation.
Anderson, Reder and Simon (1996) summarized what they considered to be the four claims of situated learning and argued against each claim from a cognitivist perspective. The claims and their arguments were:
Claim: Activity and learning are bound to the specific situations in which they occur. Argument: Whether learning is bound to context or not depends on both the kind of learning and the way that it is learned.
Claim: Knowledge does not transfer between tasks. Argument: There is ample evidence of successful transfer between tasks in the literature. Transfer depends on initial practice and the degree to which a successive task has similar cognitive elements to a prior task.
Claim: Teaching abstractions is ineffective. Argument: Abstract instruction can be made effective by combining of abstract concepts and concrete examples.
Claim: Instruction must happen in complex social contexts. Argument: Research shows value in individual learning and on focusing individually on specific skills in a skill set.
Anderson, Reder and Simons summarize their concerns when they say: "What is needed to improve learning and teaching is to continue to deepen our research into the circumstances that determine when narrower or broader contexts are required and when attention to narrower or broader skills are optimal for effective and efficient learning" (p.10).
[edit]Citations & Further reading
Anderson, J. R., Greeno, J. G., Reder, L. M., & Simon, H. A. (2000). Perspectives on learning, thinking, and activity. Educational Researcher, 29, 11-13.
Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York: Hyperion.
Brown, A. L. (1992). "Design experiments:Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating in complext interventions in classroom settings". Journal of the Learning Sciences 2 (2): 141–178. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2.
Clancey, William J. (1997). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representation. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.2277/0521448719. ISBN 0-521-44871-9.
"Special Issue: Situated Action". Cognitive Science (Norwood, NJ: Ablex) 17 (1). Jan-March 1993.
Collins, A., & Brown, J. (1988). The computer as a tool for learning through reflection. In H. Mandi & A. Lesgold (Eds.), Learning issues for intelligent tutoring systems (pp. 1–18). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Collins, A., Brown, J., & Newman, S. (1989). Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-83828-1.
Dickinson, D. K., & Neuman, S. B. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2. New York: Guilford Press.
Gallagher, S., Robbins, B.D., & Bradatan, C. (2007). Special issue on the situated body. Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts, 9(2). URL: http://www.janushead.org/9-2/
Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated Language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games and good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York: Lang.
Gee, J. P. (2010). A Situated-Sociocultural Approach to Literacy and Technology. In E. Baker (Ed.), The New Literacies: Multiple Perspectives on Research and Practice, pp. 165–193. New York: Guilford Press.
Greeno, J. G. (1994). Gibson's affordances. Psychological Review, 101 (2), 336-342.
Greeno, J. G. (1997). On claims that answer the wrong question. Educational Research, 26(1), 5-17.
Greeno, J.G., and Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project Group (1998). The situativity of knowing, learning, and research. American Psychologist, 53(1), 5-26.
Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. Journal of the Learning Sciences 15(4) 539-550.
Griffin, M. M. (1995). You can't get there from here: Situated learning, transfer, and map skills. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 20, 65-87.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press (A Bradford Book). ISBN 0-262-58146-9.
Kirshner, D. & Whitson, J. A. (1997) Situated Cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (ISBN# 0-8058-2038-8)
Kirshner, D., & Whitson, J. A. (1998). Obstacles to understanding cognition as situated. Educational Researcher, 27(8), 22-28.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice. ISBN 0-521-35018-8.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr.. ISBN 978-0-521-42374-8.
Leadbeater, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our society and economy. London: Demos.
Leu, D. J., O'Byrne, W. I., Zawilinski, L., McVerry, J. G., & Everett-Cacopardo, H. (2009). Expanding the new literacies conversation. Educational Researcher, 39, 264-269.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1983). Child as co-investigator: Helping children gain insight into their own mental processes. In S. Paris, G. Olson, & H. Stevenson (Eds.), Learning and motivation in the classroom (pp. 83–107). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children’s knowledge processing. In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and open questions (pp. 563–577). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., & Steinbach, R. (1984). Teachability of reflective processes in written composition. Cognitive Science, 8, 173-190.
[edit]See also
Activity theory
Computer-supported collaborative learning
Distributed cognition
Ecological psychology
Embodied cognition
Externalism
Enactivism
Group cognition
Relational frame theory
Situational awareness
Situated learning
[edit]References
^ Robbins, P. and M. Aydede, Eds, (2009), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
^ Clark, A., (2008), Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
^ Clark, A., (2008), Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
^ {Rockwell, 2005 #1561}
Anderson, J.R., Reder, L.M., Simon, H.A. (1996). Situated learning and education. Educational Researcher, 25 (4), 5-11.
Bredo, E. (1994). "Reconstructing educational psychology: Situated cognition and Deweyian pragmatism". Educational Psychologist 29 (1): 23–35. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep2901_3.
Brown, J. S.; Collins, A. & Duguid, S. (1989). "Situated cognition and the culture of learning". Educational Researcher 18 (1): 32–42.
Clancey, W. J (1993). "Situated action: A neuropsychological interpretation response to Vera and Simon". Cognitive Science 17: 87–116. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1701_7.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1990). "Anchored instruction and its relationship to situated cognition". Educational Research 19 (6): 2–10.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1993). Anchored instruction and situated cognition revisited. Educational Technology March Issue, 52-70.
Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt. (1994). From visual word problems to learning communities: Changing conceptions of cognitive research. In K. McGilly (Ed.) Classroom lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom proactice. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Driscoll, M. P. (2004). Psychology of learning for instruction (3 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Allyn & Bacon. ISBN 0-20-537519-7.
Dweck, C. S., & Leggett, E. L. (1988). "A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality". Psychological Review 95: 256–273. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.256.
Engle, R.A. (2006). Framing interactions to foster generative learning: A situative explanation of transfer in a community of learners classroom. 15. pp. 451–498.
Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2005). Cognitive psychology (5 ed.). New York: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-359-6.
Gagne, R. M., Wager, W.W., Golas, K. C., & Keller, J. M. (2005). Principles of Instructional Design (5 ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. ISBN 0-534-58284-2.
Gibson, James J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-898-59959-8.
Glenberg, A. M. & Robertson, D. A. (1999). Indexical understanding of instructions. Discourse Processes, 28 (1), 1-26.
Greeno, J. G. (1989). "A perspective on thinking". American Psychologist 44: 134–141. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.44.2.134.
Greeno, J. G. (1994). "Gibson's affordances". Psychological Review 101 (2): 336–342. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.2.336. PMID 8022965.
Greeno, J. G. (1998). "The situativity of knowing, learning, and research". American Psychologist 53 (1): 5–26. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.53.1.5.
Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. J. of the Learning Sciences 15(4) 539-550.
Hart, L. A. (1990). Human Brain & Human Learning. Black Diamond, WA: Books for Educators. ISBN 978-0962447594.
Kugler, P. N., Shaw, R. E., Vicente, K. J., & Kinsella-Shaw, J. (1991). The role of attractors in the self-organization of intentional systems. In R. R. Hoffman and D. S. Palermo (Eds.) Cognition and the Symbolic Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lave, J. (1977). "Cognitive consequences of traditional apprenticeship training in West Africa". Anthroppology and Education Quarterly 18 (3): 1776–180.
Markman, A. B., & Brendl, C. M. (2005). "Constraining theories of embodied cognition". Psychological Science 16 (1): 6–10. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00772.x. PMID 15660844.
Niedenthal, P. M. (2007). "Embodying emotion". Science 316 (5827): 1002–1005. doi:10.1126/science.1136930. PMID 17510358.
Ormrod, J. E. (2004). Human learning (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. ISBN 0-13-094199-9.
Palinscar, A.S., & Brown, A.L. (1984). "Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and monitoring activities". Cognition and Instruction 1: 117–115. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci0102_1.
Roth, W-M (1996). "Knowledge diffusion in a grade 4-5 classroom during a unit on civil engineering: An analysis of a classroom community in terms of its changing resources and practices". Cognition and Instruction 14 (2): 179–220. doi:10.1207/s1532690xci1402_2.
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Education (2nd Ed., pp. 1370–1373). New York: Macmillan Reference.
Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-61556-9.
Shaw, R.E.Effken, J.A., Fajen, B.R., Garrett, S.R., & Morris, A. (1997). An ecological approach to the on-line assessment of problem-solving paths: Principles and applications. Instructional Science,25,151-166.
Shaw, R. E., Kadar, E., Sim, M. & Repperger, D. W. (1992). The intentional spring: A strategy for modeling systems that learn to perform intentional acts. Journal of Motor Behavior 24(1), 3-28.
Weiner, B. (1994). "Ability versus effort revisited: The moral determinants of achievement evaluation and achievement as a moral system". Educational Psychology Review 12: 1–14. doi:10.1023/A:1009017532121.
Wilson, M. (2002). "Six views of embodied cognition". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9 (4): 625–636.
Wilson, B.B., & Myers, K. M. (2000). Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context. In D. Jonassen, & S. Land (Eds.) Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. (pp. 57–88). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Young, M. F. , Kulikowich, J. M., & Barab, S. A. (1997). The unit of analysis for situated assessment. Instructional Science, 25(2), 133-150.
Young, M., & McNeese, M.(1995). A Situated Cognition Approach to Problem Solving. In P. Hancock, J. Flach, J. Caid, & K. Vicente (Eds.) Local Applications of the Ecological Approach to Human Machine Systems.(pp. 359–391). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Young, M. (2004a). An Ecological Description of Video Games in Education. Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and Information Systems Technologies and Applications (EISTA), July 22, Orlando, FL, pp. 203–208.
Young, M. (2004b). An ecological psychology of instructional design: Learning and thinking by perceiving-acting systems. In D.H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, 2nd Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
This page was last modified on 4 September 2010 at 03:45.
2010年9月9日木曜日
"Philosophy of mind" Summary
Wikipedia, Philosophy of mind
A phrenological mapping[1] of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.[2]
Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato,[3] Aristotle[4][5][6] and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy,[7] but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century.[8] Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.[9]
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[10] Physicalists argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.[11]
Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body.[11] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.[12][13][14][15] Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct. Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states.[16][17][18] Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.[19][20] Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.[21][22]
Contents [hide]
1 The mind-body problem
2 Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem
2.1 Arguments for dualism
2.2 Interactionist dualism
2.3 Other forms of dualism
3 Monist solutions to the mind-body problem
3.1 Physicalistic monisms
3.1.1 Behaviorism
3.1.2 Identity theory
3.1.3 Functionalism
3.1.4 Nonreductive physicalism
3.2 Emergentism
3.3 Eliminative materialism
4 Linguistic criticism of the mind-body problem
5 Externalism and internalism
6 Naturalism and its problems
6.1 Qualia
6.2 Intentionality
7 Philosophy of mind and science
7.1 Neurobiology
7.2 Computer science
7.3 Psychology
8 Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
9 Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
10 Consequences of philosophy of mind
10.1 Free will
10.2 The self
11 Notes and references
12 Further reading
13 External links
1 [edit]The mind-body problem
Main article: Mind-body dichotomy
The mind-body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes.[2] The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.
Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.[11]
A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.[8]
2 [edit]Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.[9] One of the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism was expressed in the eastern Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance).[7] Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.
In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Each of these maintained, but for different reasons, that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[3][4] However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans".[8] Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it still exists today.[8]
2.1 [edit]Arguments for dualism
The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism is that it appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If asked what the mind is, the average person would usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or some other such entity. They would almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic, or simply unintelligible.[9] Many modern philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading and that we should use our critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these assumptions to determine whether there is any real basis to them.[9]
Another important argument in favor of dualism is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties.[23] Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the hippocampus feels like.
The Argument from Reason holds that if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing this—or anything else not the direct result of a physical cause—and we could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.
Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events 'qualia' or 'raw feels'.[23] There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on. There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical.[24]
If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind-body interactions require the direct intervention of God. Another possible explanation has been proposed by C. S. Lewis. Although at the time Lewis wrote Miracles,[25] Quantum Mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, he stated the logical possibility that if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non physical entity on physical reality.
The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind. The basic idea is that one can imagine, and therefore conceive the existence of, one's body without any conscious states being associated with it. Chalmers' argument is that it seems very plausible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie must be true of it. Since none of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one.[26] Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent,[27] or unlikely,[28] concept. It has been argued under physicalism, that one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think, they are conscious, think, they have qualia, think, they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" [27]
2.2 [edit]Interactionist dualism
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)
Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations.[8] In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles.[29] It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.[9]
Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing which has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.[8]
At the same time, however, it is clear that Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice-versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell (physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.
Descartes' argument crucially depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this.[30][31][32] For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud has shown that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than the person herself can.[33][34]
2.3 Other forms of dualism
Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.
Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each other.[35] This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.[36]
Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche which asserts that all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different substances, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.[37]
Property dualism asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. Hence, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism.[9] These emergent properties have an independent ontological status and cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate from which they emerge. A form of property dualism has been espoused by David Chalmers and the concept has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years,[38] but was already suggested in the 19th century by William James.
Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley.[39] It consists of the view that mental phenomena are causally ineffectual, where one or more mental states do not have any influence on physical states. Physical events can cause other physical events and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epiphenomena) of the physical world.[35] This view has been defended most strongly in recent times by Frank Jackson.[40]
Non-reductive Physicalism is the view that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties: mental states (such as qualia) are not reducible to physical states. The ontological stance towards qualia in the case of non-reductive physicalism does not imply that qualia are causally inert; this is what distinguishes it from epiphenomenalism.
[edit]Monist solutions to the mind-body problem
In contrast to dualism, monism states that there are no fundamental divisions. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist.[11] Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science.[41] However, a variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by some philosophers such as William Seager.[38]
Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century.[42] A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance which is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza[10] and was popularized by Ernst Mach[43] in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.
3.1 Physicalistic monisms
3.1.1 [edit]Behaviorism
Main article: Behaviorism
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half.[11] In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism.[41] Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot be scientific.[41] The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.[44]
Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed.[41] This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life senseless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict others' behavior.[45]
Philosophical behaviorism, notably held by Wittgenstein, has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.[2] Cognitivists reject behaviorism due to several perceived problems. For example, behaviorism could be said to be counter-intuitive when it maintains that someone is talking about behavior in the event that a person is experiencing a painful headache.
3.1.2 [edit]Identity theory
Main article: Type physicalism
Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart[18] and Ullin Place[46] as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".[18]
The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token-token correspondences can fall outside of the type-type correspondences. The result is token identity.
Despite its initial plausibility, the identity theory faces a strong challenge in the form of the thesis of multiple realizability, first formulated by Hilary Putnam.[20] It is obvious that not only humans, but many different species of animal can, for example, experience pain. However, it seems highly unlikely that all of these diverse organisms with the same pain experience are in the same identical brain state. And if the latter is the case, then pain cannot be identical to a specific brain state. The identity theory is thus empirically unfounded.[20]
On the other hand, even granted all above, it does not follow that identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that there is an absolute correlation between types of mental states and types of brain state. The type-token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along with one each of the others. The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events.[47] Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories.[48] Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.[18]
3.1.3 [edit]Functionalism
Main article: Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory.[20] Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind.[49] At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism which analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles.[50] Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by naturalistic Philosophy of Mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.
What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism abstracts away from the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney.[49]
3.1.4 Nonreductive physicalism
Main article: Non-reductive physicalism
Non reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind-body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.[41] Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism[19] is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism.
Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical–causal reducibility between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.[51]
Because nonreductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological distinction between mind and body and to try to solve the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle' in some way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to epiphenomenalism, in that it is the brain that is seen as the root 'cause' not the mind, and the mind seems to be rendered inert.
Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain states, having no influence on physical states. The interaction is one-way (solving the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle') but leaving us with non-reducible mental states (as a byproduct of brain states) - both ontologically and causally irreducible to physical states. Pain would be seen by epiphenomenaliasts as being caused by the brain state but as not having effects on other brain states, though it might have effects on other mental states (i.e. cause distress).
3.2 Emergentism
Main article: Emergentism
Emergentism is a form of "nonreductive physicalism" that involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter group therefore holds a stricter definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically possible for another object to lack property P even if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.
Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen H and Oxygen O combine to form H2O (water). In this example there "emerges" a new property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding hydrogen and oxygen as a gas. This is analogous to physical properties of the brain giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve the notorious mind-body gap this way. One problem for emergentism is the idea of "causal closure" in the world that does not allow for a mind-to-body causation.[52]
3.3 Eliminative materialism
Main article: Eliminative materialism
If one is a materialist but believes that not all aspects of our common sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive-neuroscience, and that a non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.
There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition. Eliminativists regard folk psychology as a falsifiable theory, and one likely to be falsified by future cognitive-neuroscientific research. Should better theories of the mental come along they argue, we might need to discard certain basic common-sense mental notions that we have always taken for granted, such as belief, consciousness, emotion, qualia, or propositional attitudes.
Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works.[16]
The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies which have arisen in the course of history.[16][17] For example, Ptolemaic astronomy served to explain and roughly predict the motions of the planets for centuries, but eventually this model of the solar system was eliminated in favor of the Copernican model. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-like states called "propositional attitudes."
4 Linguistic criticism of the mind-body problem
Each attempt to answer the mind-body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion.[53] These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory.[54] They argue that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human experience can be described in different ways—for instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts.[54] This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary—the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.[54]
Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker.[53] However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind-body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein.[55]
5 Externalism and internalism
Where is the mind located? If the mind is a physical phenomenon of some kind, it has to be located somewhere. There are two possible options: either the mind is internal to the body internalism or the mind is external to it externalism. More generally, either the mind depends only on events and properties taking place inside the subject's body or it depends also on factors external to it.
Proponents of internalism are committed to the view that neural activity is sufficient to produce the mind. Proponents of externalism maintain that the surrounding world is in some sense constitutive of the mind.
Externalism differentiates into several versions. The main ones are semantic externalism, cognitive externalism, phenomenal externalism. Each of these versions of externalism can further be divided whether they refer only to the content or to the vehicles of mind.
Semantic externalism holds that the semantic content of the mind is totally or partially defined by state of affairs external to the body of the subject. Hilary Putnam's Twin earth thought experiment is a good example.
Cognitive externalism is a very broad collections of views that suggests the role of the environment, of tools, of development, and of the body in fleshing out cognition. Embodied cognition, The extended mind, enactivism are good example.
Phenomenal externalism suggests that the phenomenal aspects of the mind are external to the body. Authors who addressed this possibility are Ted Honderich, Edwin Holt, Francois Tonneau, Kevin O'Regan, Riccardo Manzotti, Teed Rockwell.
6 Naturalism and its problems
The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties that no other material thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental."[41] Some of the crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and the nature of intentionality.[41]
6.1 Qualia
Main article: Qualia
Many mental states have the property of being experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals.[24] For example, it is characteristic of the mental state of pain that it hurts. Moreover, the sensation of pain between two individuals may not be identical, since nor has one a way of measuring how much something hurts nor of describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Philosophers and scientists ask where these experiences come from. Nothing indicates that a neural or functional state can be accompanied by such a pain experience. Often the point is formulated as follows: the existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. The puzzle of why many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness seems impossible to explain.[23]
Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences.[41] This follows from the logic of reductive explanations. If an attempt is made to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), then it must be explained why the phenomenon has all of its properties (e.g., fluidity, transparency).[41] In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way.
The problem of explaining the introspective first-person aspects of mental states and consciousness in general in terms of third-person quantitative neuroscience is called the explanatory gap.[56] There are several different views of the nature of this gap among contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories involved and one cannot be reduced to the other.[57] An alternative view is taken by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is epistemological in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of knowledge that is required. We are not even able to formulate the problem coherently.[24] For McGinn, on other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent biological limitations. We are not able to resolve the explanatory gap because the realm of subjective experiences is cognitively closed to us in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to elephants.[58] Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem.
6.2 Intentionality
Main article: Intentionality
John Searle - one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)
Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world.[22] This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen.[59] It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.[21]
7 Philosophy of mind and science
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are intimately related to bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind.[2] There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and psychology.[60]
7.1 Neurobiology
Main article: Neurobiology
The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and behavior.[61] The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."[60]
Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines which are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states and processes:[61] Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation.[62] Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes.[62] Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain.[62] Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages.[60]
Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.
The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate).[61] Several groups are inspired by these advances. New approaches to this question are being pursued by Steven Ericsson-Zenith at the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering, where they propose a new mechanics for devices called 'machines that experience', designed to implement sentience and the fundamental mechanisms of motility and recognition. Jeff Hawkins has established the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Berkeley, where they explore biomimicry for recognition algorithms.
7.2 Computer science
Main article: Computer science
Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers.[63] From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs which permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence.
Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings.[64] The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test.[65] Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room which contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.[64]
The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).[66]
7.3 Psychology
Main article: Psychology
Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.[67]
An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other.[60] This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind-body problem already described.
8 Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
Most of the discussion in this article has focused on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy).[68] Many other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad label of continental philosophy.[68] In any case, though topics and methods here are numerous, in relation to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take in other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely involve the analysis of linguistic forms.[68]
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the subjective mind, the mind of an individual; the objective mind, the mind of society and of the State; and the Absolute mind, a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia.[69]
In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how phenomenological processes shape our experiences.[70] Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, focuses on the content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences.
An example (though not very well known) of a philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist who tries to synthesize ideas from both traditions is Ron McClamrock. Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that humans' condition of being-in-the-world ("Dasein", "In-der-welt-sein") makes it impossible for them to understand themselves by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which they themselves are not an integral part.[71]
Another philosopher of this type is Sean Dorrance Kelly, who is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Harvard. Kelly, who has taught courses on 20th century French and German Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, as well as Philosophy of Cognitive Science, may be seen as building upon the work of his mentor Hubert Dreyfus, an existentialist who has engaged his colleague in philosophy at Berkeley, John Searle, in extensive debate on these issues over a period of decades.
9 Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
"If one were to ask, 'Which aging & death? And whose is this aging & death?' and if one were to ask, 'Is aging & death one thing, and is this the aging & death of someone/something else?' both of them would have the same meaning, even though their words would differ. When there is the view that the jiva is the same as the body, there isn't the leading of the holy life. And when there is the view that the jiva is one thing and the body another, there isn't the leading of the holy life. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata points out the Dhamma in between: From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death."[72]
Eastern traditions such as Buddhism do not hold to the dualistic mind/body model but do assert that the mind and body are separate entities. Buddhism in particular does not hold to the notion of a soul, or ātman. Some forms of Buddhism assert that a very subtle level of mind leaves the body at the time of death and goes to a new life. According to Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti, the definition of mind is that which is clarity and cognizes. In this definition, 'clarity' refers to the nature of mind, and 'cognizes' to the function of mind. Mind is clarity because it always lacks form and because it possesses the actual power to perceive objects. Mind cognizes because its function is to know or perceive objects. In Ornament of the Seven Sets, Buddhist scholar Khedrubje says that thought, awareness, mind and cognizer are synonyms. Buddha explained that although mind lacks form, it can nevertheless be related to form. Thus, our mind is related to our body and is "located" at different places throughout the body. This is to be understood in the context of how the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness are generated. There are many different types of mind—sense awarenesses, mental awarenesses, gross minds, subtle minds, and very subtle minds—and they are all formless (lacking shape, color, sound, smell, taste or tactile properties) and they all function to cognize or know. There is no such thing as a mind without an object known by that mind. Even though none of these minds is form, they can be related to form.[73]
10 Consequences of philosophy of mind
There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self.[2]
10.1 Free will
Main article: Free will
In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity. This is certainly the case, at least, for materialistic determinists.[2] According to this position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.[74]
This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true.[74] The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume.[75] More recently, this position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett,[76] and, from a dual-aspect perspective, by Max Velmans.[77]
On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism.[74] These philosophers affirm the course of the world is either a) not completely determined by natural law where natural law is intercepted by physically independent agency,[78] b) determined by indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by indeterministic natural law in line with the subjective effort of physically non-reducible agency.[79] Under Libertarianism, the will does not have to be deterministic and, therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the second proposition (b) accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.[74]
10.2 The self
Main article: Self
The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists.[80] The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to most contemporary philosophers, due to their physicalistic orientations, and due to a general acceptance among philosophers of the scepticism of the concept of 'self' by David Hume, who could never catch himself doing, thinking or feeling anything.[81] However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus—an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connections—seems reasonable.[82] The view of the self as an illusion is widely accepted by many philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger.
11 Notes and references
12 Further reading
13 External links
This page was last modified on 6 September 2010 at 19:04.
A phrenological mapping[1] of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain.
Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.[2]
Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato,[3] Aristotle[4][5][6] and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy,[7] but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century.[8] Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.[9]
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza.[10] Physicalists argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monists adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.[11]
Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body.[11] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, especially in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.[12][13][14][15] Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct. Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states.[16][17][18] Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science.[19][20] Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be explained in naturalistic terms.[21][22]
Contents [hide]
1 The mind-body problem
2 Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem
2.1 Arguments for dualism
2.2 Interactionist dualism
2.3 Other forms of dualism
3 Monist solutions to the mind-body problem
3.1 Physicalistic monisms
3.1.1 Behaviorism
3.1.2 Identity theory
3.1.3 Functionalism
3.1.4 Nonreductive physicalism
3.2 Emergentism
3.3 Eliminative materialism
4 Linguistic criticism of the mind-body problem
5 Externalism and internalism
6 Naturalism and its problems
6.1 Qualia
6.2 Intentionality
7 Philosophy of mind and science
7.1 Neurobiology
7.2 Computer science
7.3 Psychology
8 Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
9 Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
10 Consequences of philosophy of mind
10.1 Free will
10.2 The self
11 Notes and references
12 Further reading
13 External links
1 [edit]The mind-body problem
Main article: Mind-body dichotomy
The mind-body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes.[2] The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body.
Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties.[11]
A related problem is how someone's propositional attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes.[8]
2 [edit]Dualist solutions to the mind-body problem
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter (or body). It begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.[9] One of the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism was expressed in the eastern Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE), which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakriti (material substance).[7] Specifically, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali presents an analytical approach to the nature of the mind.
In Western Philosophy, the earliest discussions of dualist ideas are in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Each of these maintained, but for different reasons, that humans' "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[3][4] However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-extended, non-physical substance, a "res cogitans".[8] Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness, and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. He was therefore the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it still exists today.[8]
2.1 [edit]Arguments for dualism
The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism is that it appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter. If asked what the mind is, the average person would usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or some other such entity. They would almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain, or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic, or simply unintelligible.[9] Many modern philosophers of mind think that these intuitions are misleading and that we should use our critical faculties, along with empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these assumptions to determine whether there is any real basis to them.[9]
Another important argument in favor of dualism is that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different, and perhaps irreconcilable, properties.[23] Mental events have a subjective quality, whereas physical events do not. So, for example, one can reasonably ask what a burnt finger feels like, or what a blue sky looks like, or what nice music sounds like to a person. But it is meaningless, or at least odd, to ask what a surge in the uptake of glutamate in the dorsolateral portion of the hippocampus feels like.
The Argument from Reason holds that if, as monism implies, all of our thoughts are the effects of physical causes, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if monism is correct, there would be no way of knowing this—or anything else not the direct result of a physical cause—and we could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.
Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events 'qualia' or 'raw feels'.[23] There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on. There are qualia involved in these mental events that seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical.[24]
If consciousness (the mind) can exist independently of physical reality (the brain), one must explain how physical memories are created concerning consciousness. Dualism must therefore explain how consciousness affects physical reality. One possible explanation is that of a miracle, proposed by Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, where all mind-body interactions require the direct intervention of God. Another possible explanation has been proposed by C. S. Lewis. Although at the time Lewis wrote Miracles,[25] Quantum Mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, he stated the logical possibility that if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non physical entity on physical reality.
The zombie argument is based on a thought experiment proposed by Todd Moody, and developed by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind. The basic idea is that one can imagine, and therefore conceive the existence of, one's body without any conscious states being associated with it. Chalmers' argument is that it seems very plausible that such a being could exist because all that is needed is that all and only the things that the physical sciences describe about a zombie must be true of it. Since none of the concepts involved in these sciences make reference to consciousness or other mental phenomena, and any physical entity can be by definition described scientifically via physics, the move from conceivability to possibility is not such a large one.[26] Others such as Dennett have argued that the notion of a philosophical zombie is an incoherent,[27] or unlikely,[28] concept. It has been argued under physicalism, that one must either believe that anyone including oneself might be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie—following from the assertion that one's own conviction about being (or not being) a zombie is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument has been expressed by Dennett who argues that "Zombies think, they are conscious, think, they have qualia, think, they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!" [27]
2.2 [edit]Interactionist dualism
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)
Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations.[8] In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles.[29] It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states.[9]
Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Seth has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing which has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on). He also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties.[8]
At the same time, however, it is clear that Seth's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice-versa: A child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes her yell (physical event), this in turn provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the caregiver (mental event), and so on.
Descartes' argument crucially depends on the premise that what Seth believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Many contemporary philosophers doubt this.[30][31][32] For example, Joseph Agassi suggests that several scientific discoveries made since the early 20th century have undermined the idea of privileged access to one's own ideas. Freud has shown that a psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than the person himself does. Duhem has shown that a philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than that person herself does, while Malinowski has shown that an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than the person whose customs and habits they are. He also asserts that modern psychological experiments that cause people to see things that are not there provide grounds for rejecting Descartes' argument, because scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than the person herself can.[33][34]
2.3 Other forms of dualism
Four varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Occasionalism is not shown.
Psychophysical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another. Instead, they run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each other.[35] This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was an ontological monist who believed that only one type of substance, the monad, exists in the universe, and that everything is reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.[36]
Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche which asserts that all supposedly causal relations between physical events, or between physical and mental events, are not really causal at all. While body and mind are different substances, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion.[37]
Property dualism asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. Hence, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism.[9] These emergent properties have an independent ontological status and cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate from which they emerge. A form of property dualism has been espoused by David Chalmers and the concept has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years,[38] but was already suggested in the 19th century by William James.
Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley.[39] It consists of the view that mental phenomena are causally ineffectual, where one or more mental states do not have any influence on physical states. Physical events can cause other physical events and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epiphenomena) of the physical world.[35] This view has been defended most strongly in recent times by Frank Jackson.[40]
Non-reductive Physicalism is the view that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties: mental states (such as qualia) are not reducible to physical states. The ontological stance towards qualia in the case of non-reductive physicalism does not imply that qualia are causally inert; this is what distinguishes it from epiphenomenalism.
[edit]Monist solutions to the mind-body problem
In contrast to dualism, monism states that there are no fundamental divisions. Today, the most common forms of monism in Western philosophy are physicalist.[11] Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science.[41] However, a variety of formulations (see below) are possible. Another form of monism, idealism, states that the only existing substance is mental. Although pure idealism, such as that of George Berkeley, is uncommon in contemporary Western philosophy, a more sophisticated variant called panpsychism, according to which mental experience and properties may be at the foundation of physical experience and properties, has been espoused by some philosophers such as William Seager.[38]
Phenomenalism is the theory that representations (or sense data) of external objects are all that exist. Such a view was briefly adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century.[42] A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance which is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would then both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza[10] and was popularized by Ernst Mach[43] in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism.
3.1 Physicalistic monisms
3.1.1 [edit]Behaviorism
Main article: Behaviorism
Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half.[11] In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism.[41] Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and cannot be used to form predictive generalizations. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, psychology cannot be scientific.[41] The way out, therefore, was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.[44]
Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed.[41] This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life senseless. For the behaviorist, mental states are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports. They are just descriptions of behavior or dispositions to behave in certain ways, made by third parties to explain and predict others' behavior.[45]
Philosophical behaviorism, notably held by Wittgenstein, has fallen out of favor since the latter half of the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of cognitivism.[2] Cognitivists reject behaviorism due to several perceived problems. For example, behaviorism could be said to be counter-intuitive when it maintains that someone is talking about behavior in the event that a person is experiencing a painful headache.
3.1.2 [edit]Identity theory
Main article: Type physicalism
Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart[18] and Ullin Place[46] as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not behavioral, then mental states are probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".[18]
The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token-token correspondences can fall outside of the type-type correspondences. The result is token identity.
Despite its initial plausibility, the identity theory faces a strong challenge in the form of the thesis of multiple realizability, first formulated by Hilary Putnam.[20] It is obvious that not only humans, but many different species of animal can, for example, experience pain. However, it seems highly unlikely that all of these diverse organisms with the same pain experience are in the same identical brain state. And if the latter is the case, then pain cannot be identical to a specific brain state. The identity theory is thus empirically unfounded.[20]
On the other hand, even granted all above, it does not follow that identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with only one mental state of a person does not have to mean that there is an absolute correlation between types of mental states and types of brain state. The type-token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r, e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along with one each of the others. The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events.[47] Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories.[48] Despite these problems, there is a renewed interest in the type identity theory today, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.[18]
3.1.3 [edit]Functionalism
Main article: Functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory.[20] Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind.[49] At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism which analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles.[50] Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by naturalistic Philosophy of Mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.
What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that mental states are characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism abstracts away from the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney.[49]
3.1.4 Nonreductive physicalism
Main article: Non-reductive physicalism
Non reductionist philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind-body relations: 1) Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states, but 2) All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.[41] Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism[19] is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism.
Davidson uses the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical–causal reducibility between the mental and physical without ontological reducibility.[51]
Because nonreductive physicalist theories attempt to both retain the ontological distinction between mind and body and to try to solve the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle' in some way; critics often see this as a paradox and point out the similarities to epiphenomenalism, in that it is the brain that is seen as the root 'cause' not the mind, and the mind seems to be rendered inert.
Epiphenomenalism regards one or more mental states as the byproduct of physical brain states, having no influence on physical states. The interaction is one-way (solving the 'surfeit of explanations puzzle') but leaving us with non-reducible mental states (as a byproduct of brain states) - both ontologically and causally irreducible to physical states. Pain would be seen by epiphenomenaliasts as being caused by the brain state but as not having effects on other brain states, though it might have effects on other mental states (i.e. cause distress).
3.2 Emergentism
Main article: Emergentism
Emergentism is a form of "nonreductive physicalism" that involves a layered view of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity and each corresponding to its own special science. Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental levels, while others maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction. The latter group therefore holds a stricter definition of emergentism, which can be rigorously stated as follows: a property P of composite object O is emergent if it is metaphysically possible for another object to lack property P even if that object is composed of parts with intrinsic properties identical to those in O and has those parts in an identical configuration.
Sometimes emergentists use the example of water having a new property when Hydrogen H and Oxygen O combine to form H2O (water). In this example there "emerges" a new property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding hydrogen and oxygen as a gas. This is analogous to physical properties of the brain giving rise to a mental state. Emergentists try to solve the notorious mind-body gap this way. One problem for emergentism is the idea of "causal closure" in the world that does not allow for a mind-to-body causation.[52]
3.3 Eliminative materialism
Main article: Eliminative materialism
If one is a materialist but believes that not all aspects of our common sense psychology will find reduction to a mature cognitive-neuroscience, and that a non-reductive materialism is mistaken, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism.
There are several varieties of eliminative materialism, but all maintain that our common-sense "folk psychology" badly misrepresents the nature of some aspect of cognition. Eliminativists regard folk psychology as a falsifiable theory, and one likely to be falsified by future cognitive-neuroscientific research. Should better theories of the mental come along they argue, we might need to discard certain basic common-sense mental notions that we have always taken for granted, such as belief, consciousness, emotion, qualia, or propositional attitudes.
Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works.[16]
The Churchlands often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies which have arisen in the course of history.[16][17] For example, Ptolemaic astronomy served to explain and roughly predict the motions of the planets for centuries, but eventually this model of the solar system was eliminated in favor of the Copernican model. The Churchlands believe the same eliminative fate awaits the "sentence-cruncher" model of the mind in which thought and behavior are the result of manipulating sentence-like states called "propositional attitudes."
4 Linguistic criticism of the mind-body problem
Each attempt to answer the mind-body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion.[53] These philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers in the tradition of linguistic criticism, therefore reject the problem as illusory.[54] They argue that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that human experience can be described in different ways—for instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts.[54] This is the case, for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary—the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a sort of fallacy of reasoning.[54]
Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker.[53] However, Hilary Putnam, the originator of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind-body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein.[55]
5 Externalism and internalism
Where is the mind located? If the mind is a physical phenomenon of some kind, it has to be located somewhere. There are two possible options: either the mind is internal to the body internalism or the mind is external to it externalism. More generally, either the mind depends only on events and properties taking place inside the subject's body or it depends also on factors external to it.
Proponents of internalism are committed to the view that neural activity is sufficient to produce the mind. Proponents of externalism maintain that the surrounding world is in some sense constitutive of the mind.
Externalism differentiates into several versions. The main ones are semantic externalism, cognitive externalism, phenomenal externalism. Each of these versions of externalism can further be divided whether they refer only to the content or to the vehicles of mind.
Semantic externalism holds that the semantic content of the mind is totally or partially defined by state of affairs external to the body of the subject. Hilary Putnam's Twin earth thought experiment is a good example.
Cognitive externalism is a very broad collections of views that suggests the role of the environment, of tools, of development, and of the body in fleshing out cognition. Embodied cognition, The extended mind, enactivism are good example.
Phenomenal externalism suggests that the phenomenal aspects of the mind are external to the body. Authors who addressed this possibility are Ted Honderich, Edwin Holt, Francois Tonneau, Kevin O'Regan, Riccardo Manzotti, Teed Rockwell.
6 Naturalism and its problems
The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the problem that the mind has certain properties that no other material thing seems to possess. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can nonetheless emerge from a material thing. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental."[41] Some of the crucial problems that this project attempts to resolve include the existence of qualia and the nature of intentionality.[41]
6.1 Qualia
Main article: Qualia
Many mental states have the property of being experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals.[24] For example, it is characteristic of the mental state of pain that it hurts. Moreover, the sensation of pain between two individuals may not be identical, since nor has one a way of measuring how much something hurts nor of describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Philosophers and scientists ask where these experiences come from. Nothing indicates that a neural or functional state can be accompanied by such a pain experience. Often the point is formulated as follows: the existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. The puzzle of why many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness seems impossible to explain.[23]
Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences.[41] This follows from the logic of reductive explanations. If an attempt is made to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), then it must be explained why the phenomenon has all of its properties (e.g., fluidity, transparency).[41] In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way.
The problem of explaining the introspective first-person aspects of mental states and consciousness in general in terms of third-person quantitative neuroscience is called the explanatory gap.[56] There are several different views of the nature of this gap among contemporary philosophers of mind. David Chalmers and the early Frank Jackson interpret the gap as ontological in nature; that is, they maintain that qualia can never be explained by science because physicalism is false. There are two separate categories involved and one cannot be reduced to the other.[57] An alternative view is taken by philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. According to them, the gap is epistemological in nature. For Nagel, science is not yet able to explain subjective experience because it has not yet arrived at the level or kind of knowledge that is required. We are not even able to formulate the problem coherently.[24] For McGinn, on other hand, the problem is one of permanent and inherent biological limitations. We are not able to resolve the explanatory gap because the realm of subjective experiences is cognitively closed to us in the same manner that quantum physics is cognitively closed to elephants.[58] Other philosophers liquidate the gap as purely a semantic problem.
6.2 Intentionality
Main article: Intentionality
John Searle - one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)
Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world.[22] This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen.[59] It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.[21]
7 Philosophy of mind and science
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are intimately related to bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind.[2] There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, and psychology.[60]
7.1 Neurobiology
Main article: Neurobiology
The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and behavior.[61] The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."[60]
Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines which are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states and processes:[61] Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation.[62] Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes.[62] Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain.[62] Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages.[60]
Since the 1980s, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.
The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate).[61] Several groups are inspired by these advances. New approaches to this question are being pursued by Steven Ericsson-Zenith at the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering, where they propose a new mechanics for devices called 'machines that experience', designed to implement sentience and the fundamental mechanisms of motility and recognition. Jeff Hawkins has established the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Berkeley, where they explore biomimicry for recognition algorithms.
7.2 Computer science
Main article: Computer science
Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers.[63] From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs which permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence.
Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings.[64] The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test.[65] Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room which contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out to be indistinguishable from those of the human. Essentially, Turing's view of machine intelligence followed the behaviourist model of the mind—intelligence is as intelligence does. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.[64]
The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the "mind body problem". They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain (wetware).[66]
7.3 Psychology
Main article: Psychology
Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.[67]
An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other.[60] This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind-body problem already described.
8 Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
Most of the discussion in this article has focused on one style or tradition of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes described as Anglo-American philosophy).[68] Many other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes subsumed under the broad label of continental philosophy.[68] In any case, though topics and methods here are numerous, in relation to the philosophy of mind the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) can globally be seen to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis alone but also take in other forms of understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some sense that does not merely involve the analysis of linguistic forms.[68]
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the subjective mind, the mind of an individual; the objective mind, the mind of society and of the State; and the Absolute mind, a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia.[69]
In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are phenomenology and existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how phenomenological processes shape our experiences.[70] Existentialism, a school of thought founded upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, focuses on the content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences.
An example (though not very well known) of a philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist who tries to synthesize ideas from both traditions is Ron McClamrock. Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that humans' condition of being-in-the-world ("Dasein", "In-der-welt-sein") makes it impossible for them to understand themselves by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which they themselves are not an integral part.[71]
Another philosopher of this type is Sean Dorrance Kelly, who is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Harvard. Kelly, who has taught courses on 20th century French and German Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, as well as Philosophy of Cognitive Science, may be seen as building upon the work of his mentor Hubert Dreyfus, an existentialist who has engaged his colleague in philosophy at Berkeley, John Searle, in extensive debate on these issues over a period of decades.
9 Philosophy of mind in Buddhism
"If one were to ask, 'Which aging & death? And whose is this aging & death?' and if one were to ask, 'Is aging & death one thing, and is this the aging & death of someone/something else?' both of them would have the same meaning, even though their words would differ. When there is the view that the jiva is the same as the body, there isn't the leading of the holy life. And when there is the view that the jiva is one thing and the body another, there isn't the leading of the holy life. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata points out the Dhamma in between: From birth as a requisite condition comes aging & death."[72]
Eastern traditions such as Buddhism do not hold to the dualistic mind/body model but do assert that the mind and body are separate entities. Buddhism in particular does not hold to the notion of a soul, or ātman. Some forms of Buddhism assert that a very subtle level of mind leaves the body at the time of death and goes to a new life. According to Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti, the definition of mind is that which is clarity and cognizes. In this definition, 'clarity' refers to the nature of mind, and 'cognizes' to the function of mind. Mind is clarity because it always lacks form and because it possesses the actual power to perceive objects. Mind cognizes because its function is to know or perceive objects. In Ornament of the Seven Sets, Buddhist scholar Khedrubje says that thought, awareness, mind and cognizer are synonyms. Buddha explained that although mind lacks form, it can nevertheless be related to form. Thus, our mind is related to our body and is "located" at different places throughout the body. This is to be understood in the context of how the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness are generated. There are many different types of mind—sense awarenesses, mental awarenesses, gross minds, subtle minds, and very subtle minds—and they are all formless (lacking shape, color, sound, smell, taste or tactile properties) and they all function to cognize or know. There is no such thing as a mind without an object known by that mind. Even though none of these minds is form, they can be related to form.[73]
10 Consequences of philosophy of mind
There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self.[2]
10.1 Free will
Main article: Free will
In the context of philosophy of mind, the problem of free will takes on renewed intensity. This is certainly the case, at least, for materialistic determinists.[2] According to this position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states, which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this reasoning a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.[74]
This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if it had chosen otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true.[74] The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume.[75] More recently, this position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett,[76] and, from a dual-aspect perspective, by Max Velmans.[77]
On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called libertarianism.[74] These philosophers affirm the course of the world is either a) not completely determined by natural law where natural law is intercepted by physically independent agency,[78] b) determined by indeterministic natural law only, or c) determined by indeterministic natural law in line with the subjective effort of physically non-reducible agency.[79] Under Libertarianism, the will does not have to be deterministic and, therefore, it is potentially free. Critics of the second proposition (b) accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.[74]
10.2 The self
Main article: Self
The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists.[80] The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to most contemporary philosophers, due to their physicalistic orientations, and due to a general acceptance among philosophers of the scepticism of the concept of 'self' by David Hume, who could never catch himself doing, thinking or feeling anything.[81] However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and neuroscience, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus—an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connections—seems reasonable.[82] The view of the self as an illusion is widely accepted by many philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Thomas Metzinger.
11 Notes and references
- ^ Oliver Elbs, Neuro-Esthetics: Mapological foundations and applications (Map 2003), (Munich 2005)
- ^ a b c d e f Kim, J. (1995). Honderich, Ted. ed. Problems in the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ a b Plato (1995). E.A. Duke, W.F. Hicken, W.S.M. Nicoll, D.B. Robinson, J.C.G. Strachan. ed. Phaedo. Clarendon Press.
- ^ a b Robinson, H. (1983): ‘Aristotelian dualism’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1, 123–44.
- ^ Nussbaum, M. C. (1984): ‘Aristotelian dualism’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2, 197–207.
- ^ Nussbaum, M. C. and Rorty, A. O. (1992): Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- ^ a b Sri Swami Sivananda. "Sankhya:Hindu philosophy: The Sankhya".
- ^ a b c d e f Descartes, René (1998). Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Hacket Publishing Company. ISBN 0-87220-421-9.
- ^ a b c d e f Hart, W.D. (1996) "Dualism", in Samuel Guttenplan (org) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell, Oxford, 265-7.
- ^ a b Spinoza, Baruch (1670) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (A Theologico-Political Treatise).
- ^ a b c d e Kim, J., "Mind-Body Problem", Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ted Honderich (ed.). Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1995.
- ^ Pinel, J. Psychobiology, (1990) Prentice Hall, Inc. ISBN 8815071741
- ^ LeDoux, J. (2002) The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, New York:Viking Penguin. ISBN 8870787958
- ^ Russell, S. and Norvig, P. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, New Jersey:Prentice Hall. ISBN 0131038052
- ^ Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene (1976) Oxford:Oxford University Press. ISBN
- ^ a b c Churchland, Patricia (1986). Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain.. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-03116-7.
- ^ a b Churchland, Paul (1981). "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes". Journal of Philosophy (Journal of Philosophy, Inc.) 78 (2): 67–90. doi:10.2307/2025900.
- ^ a b c d Smart, J.J.C. (1956). "Sensations and Brain Processes". Philosophical Review.
- ^ a b Donald Davidson (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924627-0.
- ^ a b c d Putnam, Hilary (1967). "Psychological Predicates", in W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill, eds., Art, Mind and Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
- ^ a b Dennett, Daniel (1998). The intentional stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-54053-3.
- ^ a b Searle, John (2001). Intentionality. A Paper on the Philosophy of Mind. Frankfurt a. M.: Nachdr. Suhrkamp. ISBN 3-518-28556-4.
- ^ a b c Jackson, F. (1982) “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Reprinted in Chalmers, David ed. :2002. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press.
- ^ a b c Nagel, T. (1974.). "What is it like to be a bat?". Philosophical Review (83): 435–456.
- ^ Lewis, C.S (1947). Miracles.
- ^ Chalmers, David (1997). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511789-1.
- ^ a b Dennett, Daniel (1995). "The unimagined preposterousness of zombies". J Consciousness Studies 2: 322\u20136.
- ^ Dennett, Daniel (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Co.. p. 95. ISBN 0316180653.
- ^ Popper, Karl and Eccles, John (2002). The Self and Its Brain. Springer Verlag. ISBN 3-492-21096-1.
- ^ Dennett D., (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown & Company
- ^ Stich, S., (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Bradford)
- ^ Ryle, G., 1949, The Concept of Mind, New York: Barnes and Noble
- ^ Agassi, J. (1975). Privileged Access; Science in Flux, Boston Stidues in the Philosophy of Science, 80. Dordrecht: Reidel.
- ^ Agassi, J. (1997). La Scienza in Divenire. Rome: Armando.
- ^ a b Robinson, Howard (2003-08-19). "Dualism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition). Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Retrieved 2006-09-25.
- ^ Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1714). Monadology.
- ^ Schmaltz, Tad (2002). "Nicolas Malebranche". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition). Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Retrieved 2006-09-25.
- ^ a b Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195117899.
- ^ Huxley, T. H. [1874] "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History", The Fortnightly Review, n.s.16:555\u2013580. Reprinted in Method and Results: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898).
- ^ Jackson, Frank (1986,). "What Mary didn't know". Journal of Philosophy.: 291\u2013295.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Stoljar, Daniel (2005). "Physicalism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition). Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Retrieved 2006-09-24.
- ^ Russell, Bertrand (1918) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: Longmans, Green.
- ^ Mach, E. (1886) Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen. Fifth edition translated as The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of Physical to the Psychical, New York: Dover. 1959
- ^ Skinner, B.F. (1972). Beyond Freedom & Dignity. New York: Bantam/Vintage Books.
- ^ Ryle, Gilbert (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ISBN 0-226-73295-9.
- ^ Place, Ullin (1956). "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?". British Journal of Psychology.
- ^ Smart, J.J.C, "Identity Theory", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- ^ Davidson, D. (2001). Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 88-7078-832-6.
- ^ a b Block, Ned. "What is functionalism" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols. Vol 1. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980).
- ^ Armstrong, D., 1968, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, Routledge.
- ^ Stanton, W.L. (1983) "Supervenience and Psychological Law in Anomalous Monism", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 72-9
- ^ Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, Westview Press; 2 edition (July 8, 2005) ISBN 0813342694
- ^ a b Hacker, Peter (2003). Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwel Pub.. ISBN 1-4051-0838-X.
- ^ a b c Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1954). Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.
- ^ Putnam, Hilary (2000). The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-10286-0.
- ^ Joseph Levine, Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, in: Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 4, October, 1983, 354–361
- ^ Jackson, F. (1986) "What Mary didn't Know", Journal of Philosophy, 83, 5, pp. 291–295.
- ^ McGinn, C. "Can the Mind-Body Problem Be Solved", Mind, New Series, Volume 98, Issue 391, pp. 349–366. a (online)
- ^ Fodor, Jerry (1993). Psychosemantics. The problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-06106-6.
- ^ a b c d Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works. tr. It: Come Funziona la Mente. Milan:Mondadori, 2000. ISBN 88-04-49908-7
- ^ a b c Bear, M. F. et al. Eds. (1995). Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain. Baltimore, Maryland, Williams and Wilkins. ISBN 0-7817-3944-6
- ^ a b c Pinel, J.P.J (1997). Psychobiology. Prentice Hall. ISBN 88-15-07174-1.
- ^ Sipser, M. (1998). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Boston, Mass.: PWS Publishing Co.. ISBN 0-534-94728-X.
- ^ a b Searle, John (1980). "Minds, Brains and Programs". The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (3): 417–424.
- ^ Turing, Alan (October 1950), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind LIX (236): 433–460, doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433, ISSN 0026-4423, retrieved 2008-08-18
- ^ Russell, S. and Norvig, R. (1995). Artificial Intelligence:A Modern Approach. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.. ISBN 0-13-103805-2.
- ^ "Encyclopedia of Psychology".
- ^ a b c Dummett, M. (2001). Origini della Filosofia Analitica. Einaudi. ISBN 88-06-15286-6.
- ^ Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit., translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) ISBN 0-19-824597-1 .
- ^ Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen. trans.: Giovanni Piana. Milan: EST. ISBN 88-428-0949-7
- ^ McClamrock, Ron (1995). Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- ^ Avijjapaccaya Sutta :http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.035.than.html
- ^ Understanding the Mind: The Nature and Power of the Mind, Tharpa Publications (2nd. ed., 1997) ISBN 978-0-948006-78-4
- ^ a b c d "Philosopher Ted Honderich's Determinism web resource".
- ^ Russell, Paul, Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility Oxford University Press: New York & Oxford, 1995.
- ^ Dennett, Daniel (1984). The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge MA: Bradford Books-MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-54042-8.
- ^ Velmans, Max (2003). How could conscious experiences affect brains?. Exeter: Imprint Academic. ISBN 0907845-39-8.
- ^ Descartes, René (1649). Passions of the Soul.
- ^ Kane, Robert (2009). "Libertarianism". Philosophical Studies (Springer Netherlands) 144 (1): 39. doi:10.1007/s11098-009-9365-y.
- ^ Dennett, C. and Hofstadter, D.R. (1981). The Mind's I. Bantam Books. ISBN 0-553-01412-9.
- ^ Searle, John (Jan 2005). Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press Inc, USA. ISBN 0-19-515733-8.
- ^ LeDoux, Joseph (2002). The Synaptic Self. New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 88-7078-795-8.
12 Further reading
- Wikibooks: Consciousness Studies
- The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Philosophy of Mind
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1980), p. 120, 125.
Pedro Jesús Teruel, Mente, cerebro y antropología en Kant (Madrid, 2008). ISBN 978-84-309-4688-4. - Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World (1925; reprinted London, 1985), pp. 68–70.
- Edwin Burtt The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd ed. (London, 1932), pp. 318–19.
- Felix Deutsch (ed.) On the Mysterious Leap from the Mind to the Body (New York, 1959).
- Herbert Feigl The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript (1967), in H. Feigl et al., (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis, 1958), Vol. 2, pp. 370–497, at p. 373.
- Celia Green The Lost Cause: Causation and the Mind-Body Problem. (Oxford: Oxford Forum, 2003). Applies a sceptical view on causality to the problems of interactionism.
- Gyatso, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Understanding the Mind: The Nature and Power of the Mind, Tharpa Publications (2nd. ed., 1997) ISBN 978-0-948006-78-4
13 External links
- Guide to Philosophy of Mind, compiled by David Chalmers.
- Research articles in Philosophy of Mind - PhilPapers (Successor of MindPapers below)
- MindPapers: A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Mind and the Science of Consciousness, compiled by David Chalmers (Editor) & David Bourget (Assistant Editor).
- Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, edited by Chris Eliasmith.
- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners.
- A list of online papers on consciousness and philosophy of mind, compiled by David Chalmers
- Field guide to the Philosophy of Mind
- The Argument from Physical Minds
- The Mind and the Brain A site exploring J. Krishnamurti's view of the Mind.
- Mind Field: The Playground of Gods, from the Indian Psychology series by Swami Veda Bharati.
This page was last modified on 6 September 2010 at 19:04.
登録:
投稿 (Atom)