Annotationen:Piaget’s Legacy: Cognition as Adaptive Activity
The main argument of the sceptics is simple and irrefutable. To know whether anything we derive from experience corresponds to, or “represents” an aspect of an external world, we should have to be able to compare it to the real thing. But this we cannot do, because we can compare experiences only to more experiences.
Some early theologians of the Christian era added another solid argument: Reason, they said, operates with concepts that we have derived from experience; in our experiential field we never meet anything that is omniscient, omnipotent, and ever-present; consequently, we cannot rationally conceive of God, because the knowledge, the power, and the eternity we should ascribe to Him go beyond what is conceivable to us (cf. Meyendorff, 1974). Unlike the church that persecuted them, they did not see this as a calamity, because they understood that faith does not require a rational grounding.
The argument that our concepts, which we abstract from experience, cannot grasp anything that lies beyond our experiential interface, applies not only to the divine but also to any ontological reality posited as independent of the human experiencer.About a hundred and fifty years ago, Johannes Müller observed that all the neural impulses or signals that the so-called sense organs send to the cortex of the brain are qualitatively the same. As Heinz von Foerster, who three decades stressed the epistemological importance of this fact, puts it: these neural signals vary in frequency and intensity and tell us “how much”, but they never tell us “what” (Foerster, 1973). In other words, they are quantitative. They contain no information whatever about the character of the event that is supposed to have caused them. According to the neurophysiologist’s model of the nervous system, it therefore appears that the discrimination of sensory modalities—seeing, hearing, touching, etc.—must be the result of the system’s own computation. From this perspective, then, whatever sensory structures, patterns, or images a living system compiles are its own construction, and the notion that they represent something that was there beforehand, has no empirical foundation.[2]
I therefore suggest that it would be wiser to scrap the term “representation” in these contexts and to follow Mark Baldwin’s example and speak of “presentations”. This would be much closer to the Kantian term “Vorstellung”.
These “presentations” are pieces of experience that we have combined in order to form more and less complex structures, in our attempt to order and systematize the world in which we find ourselves living. It is the only world we know—and it’s a world that only we ourselves perceive and conceive.
Insofar as we remember these structures, we can recall them—and then they are Re-Presentations. I write this with a hyphen, to indicate that they are pieces of experience we have had and are now reviewing. They are not pieces of an external reality.Almost fifty years ago, my friend and teacher Silvio Ceccato made a remark which, I think, is germane to today’s topic because it throws light on the distinction between perception and re-presentation.
The most obvious instances of re-presentations happen in our dreams, when there is no perceptual activity at all. These re-presentations, Ceccato said, start from a concept and manifest only such sensory characteristics as are needed in the particular story of the dream. You may, for example, dream that you are in a room, but all you see of the room is a door (perhaps because you expect someone to come in through it). You have no idea of the size of the room, and there are no windows, curtains, pictures, no ceiling or furniture, or anything else that usually characterizes a room. These items may come in later—as the plot of the dream develops— but at this point, they are irrelevant in your dream-presentation of a room. In contrast, your perception of a room starts from sensory impressions that you proceed to coordinate, and they then allow you to consider them compatible with your concept of “room”.
One can therefore say: in perception, sensory signals call up a concept, in re-presentation, on the other hand, a concept calls up sensory impressions. In neither case is the experience caused by what philosophers want to call “reality”.Piaget’s primary principle is that knowing is an adaptive function. To appreciate this statement, one has to be quite clear about the biological notion of adaptation. It is not—as one is often led to believe—an activity of organisms or species. It is the result of natural selection and refers to the ability to live and reproduce in the present environment. We can visualize it with the help of a metaphor: the environment “selects” in the manner of a screen used to grade gravel: the screen admits what falls through and discards what does not. Similarly anything that passes through the constraints set by the present environment is adapted, or, as evolutionary biologists sometimes say, everything that survives is viable in the given environment. But just as having slipped through, does not tell the pebbles anything about the screen, so, to have survived does not tell the biological organisms anything about the constraints they have not met, i.e., the constraints that eliminated those that could not survive.
As I have tried to show with the metaphor of the screen, viability entails neither “information” about the environment nor correspondence with it. The fact that certain concepts and certain theories “work” for us, in that they do what we expect them to do, means no more than that they are compatible with the constraints we experience. In other words, reality leaves sufficient room for them to work in our experiential world.
The experiential environment in which the human organism normally grows up is composed of things and people. The differentiation of these two categories is gradual, and only gradually are different schemes developed for coping with “inanimate” things and coping with people. Eventually the second kind provides far more opportunities for accommodation and learning than the first. Piaget has reiterated this innumerable times, but his critics nevertheless contend that he did not consider social interaction.
In fact, the experiential reality we construct for ourselves is to a large extent the result of our social interactions. Insofar as we are able to construct a viable modus vivendi, it is preponderantly due to accommodations in the course of social adaptation. In order to live in a society, a sufficient number of our ideas — our concepts and schemes of action — have to be compatible with those of others. And this compatibility confers on them a viability that goes beyond the merely individual. The same goes for the acquisition and use of language. Communication with others requires that the meanings we attribute to words prove compatible with those of other speakers.
Compatibility, however, does not entail the kind of “match” that is implied when people speak of “shared ideas” or “shared knowledge”. Compatibility, to repeat it once more, means no more and no less than to fit within constraints. Consequently, it seems to me that one of the most demanding tasks of A.I. would be the plausible simulation of an organism’s experience of social constraintsThe same goes for neurophysiologists who speak of observable phenomena in the brain as “representing” certain activities and results of the mind. Occasionally, however, they too, slip into the misleading use of the term exemplified by the quotations from Fodor and McClelland. That is to say, they falsely suggest that states of the brain reflect states of an external “real” world.
This use of representation is misguided, because it entails the belief that certain ideas we abstract from our experience correspond to a reality that lies beyond experience. It would be interesting to study the reasons why this belief manages to survive in the face of a long history of incontrovertible refutation. It has survived in spite of the fact that it was shown to be illusory by Xenophanes at the time of the Pre-Socratics; and it survived in spite of all the sceptics since, who have amply demonstrated the logical impasse that makes it illicit to claim a representational relation between mental images or structures and any independent external reality.
The concept of adaptation was first applied to cognition, by William James, Georg Simmel, Hans Vaihinger, and others, around the turn of the century. It then became the main stay in Piaget’s “Genetic Epistemology”. Today it is also a key concept in Evolutionary Epistemology. However, as far as I have understood the proponents of this school, they share the traditional illusion that adaptation brings our knowledge closer to a postulated ontological reality.
But all these are not the kind of representation that concerns us here. The British philosopher John Locke used the term to indicate that words stand for (or “represent”) ideas (Locke, 1690, Bk. iii, Chpt. ii, §2); occasionally he used it also for the mental image of an idea, either fictitious (e.g. “the unspeakable joys of heaven”, Bk. ii, Chpt. xxi, §37) or “made up of ever so many particulars” (Bk. ii, Chpt. xxvi, §1). It was presumably this second meaning that led translators of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to use “representation” for the German word “Vorstellung”. This was unfortunate because the ordinary-language meaning had practically superseded the Locke’s more abstract second meaning.
Jerry Fodor, for instance, explained in his interview with Baumgartner and Payr (1995, p.88): “mental states that represent states of the world” constitute a representational capacity.
In another interview in the same collection, James McClelland says: “I agree with Newell: the mind is a physical device that performs operations on physical objects, which are not the things themselves but representations of those things” (Baumgartner & Payr, 1995, p.134).
Some early theologians of the Christian era added another solid argument: Reason, they said, operates with concepts that we have derived from experience; in our experiential field we never meet anything that is omniscient, omnipotent, and ever-present; consequently, we cannot rationally conceive of God, because the knowledge, the power, and the eternity we should ascribe to Him go beyond what is conceivable to us (cf. Meyendorff, 1974).
As Heinz von Foerster, who three decades stressed the epistemological importance of this fact, puts it: these neural signals vary in frequency and intensity and tell us “how much”, but they never tell us “what” (Foerster, 1973).
Konrad Lorenz, for instance, maintained that the great success of our concepts of space and time warrants the belief that they reflect something of the structure of an observer-independent world. He wrote: Adaptation to a given condition of the environment is equivalent to the acquisition of information about that given condition. (Lorenz, 1979, p.167)
