From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Oct 12 1999 - 12:01:46 MDT
At 12:40 AM 11/10/99 -0400, Matt wrote:
>I view concepts like causality, duration, weight, etc. in the same
>way. They don't have to be hard coded - they are learned because they
>are so useful under the universal physical constraints imposed upon
>all human beings.
This is the argument developed classically by James J. Gibson. Much
information is coded into the world, so we don't need to represent it
internally, just access it. (Although obviously in order to *think* about
the world, *some* kind of reliable inner mapping is needed.) Here's a bit
from my book THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS that cites Howard Gardner's useful
THE MIND'S NEW SCIENCE on the matter:
===========
While transcendental intuition of essences can no longer be regarded as an
even remotely plausible explanation for the way we categorise the world and
function within it, might it not be that mental symbols - coded as
arbitrarily as any Saussurean might wish - crystallise on an innate grid?
Impressive neurological evidence for this possibility is discussed in
Jean-Pierre Changeux (1986). 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, p. 83). 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
neighbourhood 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. (pp. 308-9)
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' (p.
310) - are its meanings. `Invariance in the ambient optic array,' Gibson
claimed, `is not constructed or deduced; it is there to be discovered.' It
is a position in harmony with philosopher Roy Bhaskar's `transcendental
realism', though hardly with any version of high {poststructuralism].
==================
See. eg, Gibson, THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO VISUAL PERCEPTION (1979,
Houghton-Miflin).
Damien Broderick
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