From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 20:31:19 MDT
At 06:43 PM 8/13/02 -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>if I were to describe the foundation of
>knowledge, I'd say it's a life raft of general intelligence and sensory
>perception floating in a vast ocean of mystery. I wouldn't single out either
>element.
Nicely expressed. This is how I put it in THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
=======
Is our joint, somewhat blurrily-shared universe fundamentally constructed
by practices of discourse in which we are constituted, as postmodern theory
claims? Or is there, after all, a fiercely resistant noumenon embedded like
reinforcing bars through the wet-poured slabs of phenomenal appearance?
While cognitive science aims to provide definitive answers strung like
beads on a single intellectual catenary, what one finds is a skein of
contestation within a multi-dimensional manifold. Consider the problem for
which Kant's solution effectively closed the debate for a century: how we
know anything at all. Kant argues that it is individual consciousness
through which all we can ever know is given us. That consciousness is
itself internally structured with categories and schemata, rules and
images, stimulated into action by the strictly unknowable *Ding an sich*
(or `things in themselves') of material reality.
If the 20th century was marked by several versions of radical anti-Kantian
mindlessness, most notably behaviorism - I mean this literally: it rejected
the very concept of mind - a strikingly effective cognitive-empirical
response came from Chomsky. As infants we seem much too easily learn the
shape and articulation of both physical and social worlds, on too little
evidence, for mind to be fresh-minted with each baby.
While transcendental intuition of essences can no longer be regarded as an
even remotely plausible explanation for the way we categorize the world and
function within it, might it not be that mental symbols - coded as
arbitrarily as any Saussurean might wish - crystallize on an innate grid?
Impressive neurological evidence for this possibility is discussed by
Jean-Pierre Changeux. For Jerry Fodor (whose theories guide
neurophysiologist Changeux's anatomical investigations), `people are born
with a full set of representations, onto which they can then map any new
forms of information that happen to emerge from their experiences in the
world' (Gardner's precis). If this is so, we parse the world according to
the syntax of the language of thought.
The immediate objection, no doubt, is to gaze incredulously at the
uncurbed plenty of human culture - an easy task if, as I do, you live in a
neighborhood where athletic women in brief garments jog past their faceless
Muslim sisters each encased in something like a linen letterbox - and
wonder if Fodor has had a restricted upbringing. But from the standpoint of
cognitive research, the differences of mental structure between theologian
Hans Kung and a !Kung San sorcerer are doubtless infinitely less compelling
than the gap between the thought processes of human and chimpanzee, though
we share more than 99 percent of our genetic coding with those ape-cousins.
Yet alternative views continue to be pressed powerfully. For the late
James J. Gibson and his empirical followers, Fodorian representational
models are simply unnecessary. In Gardner's summary:
"[O]rganisms are so constituted, and live in a world so constituted, that
they will readily gain the information they need to survive and to thrive.
In particular, our sense organs are designed to pick up information from
the external world. [...T]here is no need to operate upon it or process it;
there is no need to draw on prior knowledge, on mental models, on
interpretive schemata."
If the Gestalt school argued many decades ago that we see what we do
because our biology makes us look for patterns, Gibson turned the tables
and asserted that the densities of texture and gradient in the world, a
world we move through at will, provide all the cues we need to thrive in
it. In short, we are organisms adapted by evolution to this world. Its
affordances - `potentialities for action inherent in object or scene' - are
its meanings. `Invariance in the ambient optic array,' Gibson claimed, `is
not constructed or deduced; it is there to be discovered.'
====================
Damien Broderick
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