Semantic search
| AnnotationComment | |
|---|---|
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Or476gfo78 | In order to become a reference item, the object has to be cut loose from its original context where it was a more or less relevant sensory adjunct to an activity cluster, and it must become something very like a “representation”. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/V00v2qclrd | To sum up this discussion of linguistic communication, I would suggest three criteria to distinguish ‘‘language’’, all of which are necessary but individually insufficient: There must be a set (lexicon) of communicatory signs, i.e., perceptual items whose meaningfulness (SEMANTICITY) is constituted by a conventional tie (semantic nexus) and not by an inferential one. These signs must be symbols, i.e., linked to representations (SYMBOLICITY) therefore they can be sent without reference to perceptual instances of the items they designate, and received without “triggering” a behavioral response in the receiver. As symbols they merely activate the connected representation. There must be a set of rules (GRAMMAR) governing the combination of signs into strings such that certain combinations produce a new semantic content in addition to the individual content of the component signs. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Xixfrqskqo | To begin, we may say that there could hardly have been an evolution of speech, or language, if there had not been an origin. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Zjiavvwbig | An activity, thus, will be called “purposive” if it serves to reduce or eliminate the discrepancy (negative feedback) between the value of a sensory signal and the reference value in such a “teleological” unit. |
| Annotationen:The Logic of Scientific Fallibility/Ai4yfkwcy4 | I would like to submit that it is, indeed, the logic of science and the scientific method that frequently stops scientists from looking outside a specific domain of possibilities. |
| Annotationen:The Logic of Scientific Fallibility/M5nkqqbbg1 | Seen in this way, the scientific method does not refer to, nor does it need, the assumption of an “objective” ontological reality—it concerns exclusively the experiential world of observers. |
| Annotationen:The Logic of Scientific Fallibility/Ua9u5cntbi | That is to say, one must define certain experiences so that one can recognize them when one experiences them again. There can hardly be regularity before one has noticed repetition. |
| Annotationen:The Logic of Scientific Fallibility/Zk2z3wzcac | Hence, the seemingly paradoxical assertion that an observer sees only what he or she already knows. This, in fact, is called “assimilation.” |
| Annotationen:The Radical Constructivist View of Science/Cwsb2v1uyv | As Heinz von Foerster put it in conversation, ‘objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer’ |
| Annotationen:The Radical Constructivist View of Science/M2oici6nzn | In both cases it clearly is an active experiencer who creates the units. What is not so obvious, is that the discrete entities that are counted, as well as the continuous ones to which units of measurement are applied, are also an experiencer’s creation. |
| Annotationen:The Radical Constructivist View of Science/U2y731stlo | To know, thus, is to have viable procedures or, as Maturana said “to operate adequately in an individual or cooperative situation” (1988, p.53). |
| Annotationen:The Radical Constructivist View of Science/W408y8cj5k | Thus, what we ordinarily call ‘experience’ has already been ordered and structured into discrete ‘things’ by perceptual and conceptual operations which endless repetition has rendered unconscious, and by assimilation to more complex conceptual configurations that have been formed in past experience. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Ef3tssha25 | What we call “knowledge”, then, is the map of paths of action and thought which, at that moment in the course of our experience, have turned out to be viable for us. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Er0iabn9hc | Without going into the details of the process that links the experience of a thing with the experience of a word, it should be clear that both these items are composed of elements that are part of the acting subject’s experiential world and are, therefore, determined by what the subject attends to and how the subject perceives and conceives it. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Fy4315bj08 | That is to say, the proponents of a theory will assimilate new experiences as long as they possibly can, even in the face of considerable perturbations. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Ggfynwin3d | To be adapted, therefore, means no more and no less than to be viable. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Mdk3s7g2eq | In fact, the process of accommodation and adaptation of the meaning of words and linguistic expressions continues for each of us throughout our lives, and no matter how long we have spoken the language, there will still be occasions when we experience a perturbation and realize that we have been using a word in a way that turns out to be idiosyncratic in some particular respect. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Mkwgldjnzq | Finally, it must be made clear that, while biologists may tend to think of viability and adaptedness in terms of differential reproduction, in the cognitive domain the two terms refer to the achievement and maintenance of internal equilibrium. For the constructivist, therefore, Knowledge has the function of eliminating perturbations; and the higher we move in the hierarchy of conceptual abstractions, the more the perturbations tend to be conceptual rather than material. This, obviously, is one of the features that make the constructivist approach interesting for therapists. |
| Annotationen:The Reluctance to Change a Way of Thinking/Onvo8k214n | Solutions, from the constructivist perspective, are always relative — and this, in turn, makes clear that problems are not entities that lie about in the universe, independent of any experiencer. Instead, problems arise when obstacles block the way to a subject’s goal. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Hnm7nbi88j | What one makes oneself can hardly be expected to have that perennial reliability one would like to attribute to the real world. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Ic5wyhdv2n | Thus, there is no basis for the assumption that re-presentations arise as internal images of an outside world; instead, it seems quite plausible that they constitute the material which the cognizing subject externalizes in the construction of reality. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/M2albwakrd | the fiction of individual identity is the key element in the conceptual construction of the basic notions of space and time. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/S11y3eyx2r | Space is the medium in which things maintain or, as the case may be, change their location; time is the medium in which they must conserve their identity lest they disappear qua “things” and be reduced to momentary apparitions. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Ugqn3gwl39 | “Sameness” and “difference”, then, refer to relations, and relations are instituted or constructed by the experiencing subject. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Uqsfc6c3s2 | It concerns experience alone, experience segmented into chunks, if you will, but not items that exist in their own right, independently of the experiencer. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Vc8cvn18ir | More often than not, this will do the trick, because the possession of specific memories is accepted as unquestionable proof of individual continuity. |
| Annotationen:Thoughts about Space, Time, and the Concept of Identity/Wsnqs105li | Relations, therefore, are not “perceived” but fictitious |
| Annotationen:Why Constructivism Must be Radical/Gutpr341qe | The meanings of words – and this also applies to every sign and every symbol – must be constructed by each user of the language individually, and this construction is based solely on the subjective experience of the particular parson. Hence it stands to reason that the interpretation of a word or a text will always remain an essentially subjective operation. |
| Annotationen:Why Constructivism Must be Radical/I8famzt2en | Instead of “truth.” constructivism speaks of viability and compatibility with previously constructed models. In other words, scientific models are tools. |
| Annotationen:Why Constructivism Must be Radical/Itbb43cpjy | Yet, analysis of the process which led a student to answer in a particular way is one of the best means available towards an understanding of his or her concepts and mental operations. |
| Annotationen:Why Constructivism Must be Radical/Py465bmka3 | Thus, instead of claiming that knowledge is capable of representing a world outside of our experience, we would say, as did the pragmatists, that knowledge is a tool within the realm of experience. |
| Annotationen:Why Constructivism Must be Radical/Tjgxbupvzd | If knowledge cannot be transmitted, but must instead be constructed by each student individually, this does not imply that teaching must dispense with language. It implies only that the role of language must be conceived of differently. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Bpv4m0w0ac | For me, therefore, the world in which we find ourselves living, is the world that we have been able to build and maintain within the constraints we have so far experienced. – What could be more cybernetic than this? |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Dbxypqgmvg | each user of a language must build up meanings for him- or herself. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Iftsmuex46 | On the strength of all this, I came to believe that the meanings we attribute to words and phrases, and to whole speeches and texts, are meanings, or built up of meanings, that we ourselves have generated in our own experience. They are the result of “self-regulation” – and the study of self-regulation is an integral part of cybernetics. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Poboue4lcr | concepts associated with words are not the same from person to person in one and the same language. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/R51gk0jcsu | Knowledge was no longer expected to provide a “true” picture of an absolute reality – something the sceptics of all ages had shown to be impossible. Instead, it was to be seen as a means towards the organism’s equilibration. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Z949z5u0ur | Compatibility does not imply identity, it merely implies viability in the given circumstances. That is why, after having used a word in a particular way for fifty or more years, we may discover that it is not quite the way others are using it – it is just that the circumstances in which we have so far used the word happened to be such that they did not bring out any differences. |
| Annotationen:Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician/Zfykmweggk | In general terms, the reduction of an error signal is always a move towards equilibrium. |
