Property:AnnotationComment
A
“Knowledge is construction.” +
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. +
After a while you conclude that each group may be right for itself and that there is no
rightness outside the groups. +
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. +
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. +
Let us
assume that I was here yesterday and, just as now, had a glass of water in front of me. I come in today and say: “Oh, this is the same glass, the identical glass that stood here yesterday.” If someone asked me, how I can tell that it is the identical glass, I should have to look for a particular that distinguishes this glass from all others. This may turn out to be impossible. +
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. +
It is therefore unwarranted to maintain that we distinguish things
because we receive “information” from what we usually call the outside world. +
There is no constructing unless you have some form of reflection. +
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. +
Communication, therefore, works when two people send each other a telegram
and they have previously established a code outside that communication system. +
Let us assume that your attention is caught by the color red. As such the redness is not confined, has not yet a specific shape in your visual field, and is not a discrete thing. But as you focus on it, you are able to fit the color into the pattern you have learned to call “house”. If you were asked to describe what you see, you would most likely say: “there is a red house”. You choose the adjectival connection because the color and the thing were produced in a continuous application of attention. If, on the other hand, you recognize in your visual field a pattern that fits your concept of “house” and only then, scanning it more closely, you focus attention on its color, you would most likely say: “the house is red”. This syntactic structure clearly expresses that the concept of “house” was brought forth independently of the color that was subsequently attributed to it. +
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. +
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. +
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/Mgmrugxl8t +
With a rat in a Skinner box, for instance, it will no longer be sufficient to ask why the rat’s bar-presses become more or less frequent; we also have to ask how the rat succeeds in pressing the bar when it may have to start toward it from different places in the box. In other words, how is it that the rat – or ourselves, for that matter – ever manage to hit a target or attain a goal? +
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. +
