Semantic search
| AnnotationComment | |
|---|---|
| Annotationen:Piaget’s Legacy: Cognition as Adaptive Activity/Osb51lk0i4 | 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. |
| Annotationen:Piaget’s Legacy: Cognition as Adaptive Activity/U69ct8sl0q | 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. |
| Annotationen:Piaget’s Legacy: Cognition as Adaptive Activity/W0er5ff75u | 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. |
| Annotationen:Piaget’s Legacy: Cognition as Adaptive Activity/W6kg6avstq | 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 constraints |
| Annotationen:Reflections on Cybernetics/Allfaemdcq | This principle is, indeed, universal. If there is something we would like to create or have, we look for some specific event or action to which experience has tied the desired item as ‘effect’. If we find it, we try to implement its causal function, hoping that it will produce what we wanted. |
| Annotationen:Reflections on Cybernetics/Hwbrfwl7ct | To my mind, this illustrates what is perhaps the most valuable feature of the cybernetical analysis of phenomena in general, and of 2nd-order Cybernetics in particular. It leads us to think in terms, not of single causes and effects, but rather of equilibria between constraints. This helps to avoid the widespread illusion that we could gather “information” concerning a reality supposed to be causing our experience; and it therefore focuses attention on managing in the experiential world we do get to know. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Bfxz6nkolt | Consequently there is no past experience of steps that led towards it or actions that brought it about. There are no abstracted cause-effect relations that one could try to implement to reach an unfathomable end. In short, even for those who believe that knowledge does not pertain to anything beyond the realm of experience, a cause that lies outside has no explanatory power. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Bxxwxcth41 | Definitions set conditions which the abstract form we call concept must satisfy, and it is the same conditions that some experiential material must fit in order to be accepted as a proper instantiation of the concept. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Csbic9bgys | Prediction, in one form or another, permeates our living, and the expectation that the efficient causes we have isolated in the past will have their effects also in the future, is the key to whatever success we have in managing our experience. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Feuye9k6by | Prescriptive purposes, therefore, are there prior to their embodiment, which then has the particular purpose in it. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Nbtl2adohh | Though the sequential frames that compose the concept of efficient cause are obviously abstracted from prior experience and therefore lie in the past, they can, and often are, projected as predictions into areas that have not yet been actually experienced. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Odh64ljwcj | Hence, it was unfortunate, to say the least, that the term teleological was indiscriminately applied to the explanation of actions that are in no way determined by something that lies in the future, something that still awaits to be experienced. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Oh7ux4a16x | Hence it is quite legitimate to call the attainment and maintainment of the projected state the purpose in the mechanism. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/P45fqlsyeq | That is to say, neither of these two basic elements in the construction of our experiential world is conceivable unless we segment experience into separate discrete frames and then focus attention on similarities or differences between the segments. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Ptohla9ckc | Where evolution is concerned, then, there is no harm in using ‘purpose of’ as a descriptive tool, provided one does not mistake it for the purpose for, which would imply a guiding outside force that intentionally designed the thing one is describing. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Pycvf4uyiy | Hence, an external agent with powers that override the constraints we run into in our experiential world, would have to be supernatural and therefore out of bounds for science. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Qomofcfayh | According to this break-down, change is a relational concept and, as such, requires more than one segment of experience, as well as a comparison. It also manifests what I consider a basic presupposition of all conceptual analysis: Segments of experience, insofar as they reach the level of conceptualization and rational description, always appear sequential. This sequence is usually interpreted as a temporal one. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Sm4e3gn8n1 | Thus it is, indeed, an inductive procedure, because ‘what works’ is seen from the organism’s point of view and selected within the organism’s own experience. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Szvmnrm7i9 | Thus there was no proper causal connection between reinforcement and subsequent behavior, because it was to some extent the rat who decided what it considered reinforcing and what not. Taylor wants to turn the effects of a feedback mechanism’s behavior into a ‘causal factor’, but he overlooks that one and the same effect does not always generate the same subsequent behavior. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Tx7yla5vz9 | An organism’s actions, thus, are selected and shaped according to what worked in the past. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Xazuanz5mw | From this, one is led to conclude that the scientific search of efficient causes is fueled largely, if not entirely, by our intention to use them for the attainment of goals. |
| Annotationen:Teleology and the Concepts of Causation/Zyymiew3sa | The analogy, of course, does not stretch to include the sculptor. The natural environment that carries out the selective process has no more a vision of the forms that are left than the sculptor’s chisel has a vision of the statue it helps to peel out of the marble. Such a vision may be attributed to the sculptor. It would constitute a telos or goal, which will be discussed when we come to final causes. |
| Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Gvn1s8aexn | In order to remain among the survivors, an organism has to "get by" the constraints which the environment poses. |
| Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Mv3evgsza0 | Any construction, be it physical or mental, is subject to certain constraints that spring from the material that the constructor employs. |
| Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Neaky5p1rt | A rather convincing case can be made for the notion that all practical learning may be considered the result of a process of induction. |
| Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/O8h5mfjw3o | It seems, then, that there is simply no way around the assumption that organisms construct their representations of their world, their environment, or whatever one chooses to call what is outside them. In other words, an activity of construction has to be assumed regardless of whether one wants to be a constructivist or not. |
| Annotationen:The Concepts of Adaptation and Viability in a Radical Constructivist Theory of Knowledge/Qcgycyjn3c | Thus we can say that the only indication we may get of the "real" structure of the environment is through the organisms and the species that have been extinguished; the viable ones that survive merely constitute a selection of solutions among an infinity of potential solutions that might be equally viable. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Hkoswpb9l6 | “Knowledge is construction.” |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Kceifrus1i | To me, therefore, time is not, as Prigogine said, an illusion. If I called the construct of time an illusion, the entire world that I know, the world that I live in, would also have to be called an illusion. And that is not the way I would characterize it. Although my entire world is a construction, I can still make a useful distinction in it between illusion and reality. But remember that for me “reality” always refers to experiential reality, not to the ontological reality of traditional philosophy. If we want to construct a rational reality for ourselves, time and space are indispensable building blocks, and I would rather call “illusion” any claim to knowledge beyond the field of our experience. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Mgjvl83yka | After a while you conclude that each group may be right for itself and that there is no rightness outside the groups. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Osa2a5qoli | In this changed perspective, then, knowledge does not provide a representation of an independent world but rather a map of what can be done in the experienced environment. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Rokbai5kv3 | To be viable, a new thought should fit into the existing scheme of conceptual structures in a way that does not cause contradictions. If there are contradictions, either the new thought or the old structures are deemed to require changing. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/T32kgxwkn8 | So we are trapped in a paradox. We want to believe that we can know something of the outside world, but we can never tell whether this knowledge is true. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Wm8c66fbki | It is therefore unwarranted to maintain that we distinguish things because we receive “information” from what we usually call the outside world. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Xy8dgydyu4 | There is no constructing unless you have some form of reflection. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Yehw74dp6p | Therefore there must be some place beyond my field of experience where the glass could be while I was busy experiencing other things or asleep. |
| Annotationen:The Construction of Knowledge/Yuucuatq22 | Communication, therefore, works when two people send each other a telegram and they have previously established a code outside that communication system. |
| Annotationen:The Constructivist View of Communication/Lqt3uy4hk3 | We all develop a repertoire of conceptual items and connections, and learn to fit them to the syntactic structures that have become customary among the users of a given language. |
| Annotationen:The Constructivist View of Communication/Pea2tu7jgh | As Tomasello and a few before him noticed, Children do not produce their utterances with the help of grammatical rules. Even adults rarely rely on abstract syntactic rules to guide their speech. They know how they have segmented their experience and the praxis of living has shown them useful ways of linking the segments. |
| Annotationen:The Constructivist View of Communication/Z5i8w1rev8 | From the constructivist point of view, it is important to stress that it does not matter if the thing I perceive when I follow the direction in which the other is looking is not quite the same as the thing he or she perceives. What DOES matter, in order to link a word to a percept, is that, whenever he or she utters a specific word, I see something that I can consider the repetition of what I saw on similar previous occasions. The crucial feature is the coordination of attention. |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/K0ahsljmye | The key point is that we may be able to analyze the structure of our experience without making the unwarranted assumption that to perceive must be a process of passive reception rather than a process of construction |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Pkmy35hasn | There is no good reason to believe that our senses somehow provide a one-to- one correspondence with something which we do not perceive. |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/S72d8v4u89 | And, if we apply the model to ourselves as organisms, we too cannot have access to our own environment because our experience, whatever it may be, lies on this side of the dashed line and can be composed only of the signals within our neural network. |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Ubbllti36g | there can be a “response” (i.e. activity) without a stimulus. Activity is triggered by an error signal, and an error signal is generated not only when there is a change in the sensory signal but also when there is a change in the reference value. |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Uf9f16stpl | Human knowledge in general, and science in particular, is not engaged in uncovering certainty, truth, or reality, or any of the bugbears of dogmatic science. |
| Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Y1fflsoldg | This part of the loop, however, is not accessible to the organism itself, because, as Powers has said, the organism can perceive nothing but its own sensory signals |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Cd6ty5fmwl | In other words, what the observer calls an “object”, is for the organism an inseparable component of an activity cluster. Nevertheless, at this point the stage is set for a momentous step that opens the way to a new kind of operation. No doubt, this step, like every other in the process of evolution, is fostered by the selective pressure of the environment; but for the functioning of the organism, it constitutes a discrete novelty like the opening of a new pathway in its processor. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Cl29d1aelt | According to the view I am proposing, communicatory behavior is a mode of action, its function is to link concerted activity, and it is indispensable because without these links there could be no unified social action. Thus it is an instrument which is to say, a tool. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Jnn3h8oxj3 | For induction, whether it is conscious in the form of a conclusion we draw, or unconscious in the form of a behavior that becomes established because of its success, springs always from the same root: a more or less regular recurrence in past experience. |
| Annotationen:The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior/Joziuyyrdi | It is in this sense that communication must be considered “instrumental”, “goal-directed”, and therefore “purposive”. |
| 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. |
