The Functionalist’s Dilemma George Lakoff reviews Ray Jackendorf’s Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. Constructing Cognition Ethan Remmel reviews Katherine Nelson’s Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory.
I’ve recently become the Associate Reviews Editor of the Journal of Mind and Behavior (JMB). JMB is a well-regarded refereed journal, now in its 27th year, with an impressive subscription base. What I find congenial is that JMB appeals to a multidisciplinary audience, offering a healthy and ecumenical dialogue. Subject areas include: The psychology, philosophy,and sociology of experimentation and…
Cass Sunstein writes on the TPM Blog that Hayek’s ideas of distributed knowledge “bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more”. Yes, indeed. The mechanism that captures this aggregating phenomenon is called STIGMERGY: the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Indeed, much of what goes on in the complex…
Some four months ago I commented on how swarm behavior is entering the public consciousness. Well there is an article in yesterday’s the science section of the New York Times that continues this trend. But if you want a really good recent article on swarm intelligence, I would refer you to the paper “The biological principles…
Blaise Cronin’s comments that the term social epistemology has provenance going back to the 1950s library science is absolutely correct. The point that needs to be made, however, is that this “in vogue” term does not denote a unified tradition. Given the rather amorphous and diffuse nature of social epistemology its domain, approach, structure and value are highly…
My recent co-authored paper now available to download through MindPapers. The abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex…
A journalistic take on what is essentially active externalism or the thesis of the extended mind. David Brooks (yes, THAT David Brooks) implicitly refers to notions of collaborative filtering, swarming, stigmergy, and even memetics. Of course, one suspects that Brooks has only the slighest conceptual inkling of what’s going on. Notions of the extended mind enjoy currency both in academic and popular literature: the ‘‘global…
This article from Canadian Press struck a nerve. Not being au fait with the recent clinical literature on the subject of Alzheimer’s I was interested to read that there is a correlation between the formally educated mind and the onset of dementia. As a child of a dementia sufferer (a mother – cultured and refined but not…
Cognitive Science and FactCheck.org, or Why We (Still) Do What We Do The following article is culled from Annenberg Fact Check (if this is the sort of discussion you find interesting, why not check out the journal EPISTEME. Articles such as Alvin Goldman on the epistemic failure of the FBI regarding 9/11 and Roger Koppl on why…
manwithoutqualities 