Property:AnnotationComment
A
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/D3z4577hkq +
By this I mean that, as particular users of the word become more proficient, they no longer need to actually produce the associated conceptual structures as a completely implemented re-presentation, but can simply register the occurrence of the word as a kind of “pointer” to be followed if needed at a later moment. I see this as analogous to the capability of recognizing objects on the basis of a partial perceptual construction. In the context of symbolic activities, this capability is both subtle and important. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Ndkqy9lz7e +
Reflecting upon experiences is clearly not the same as having an experience. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/P55yeeak0x +
No act of mental re-presentation, which in this context of conceptual analysis means neither less nor more than the re-generation of a prior experience, would be possible if the original generation of the experience had not left some mark to guide its reconstruction. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Sktb6xjmvl +
Hence I suggest that, pace Berkeley, we are quite able to abstract general ideas from experience and that we do this by substituting a kind of place-holder or variable for some of the properties in the sensory complex we have abstracted from our experiences of particular things. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Tb4vyjiobf +
With regard to the need for an acting agent, a program is similar to a map. If someone draws a simple map to show you how to get to his house, he essentially indicates a potential path from a place you are presumed to know to the unknown location. The drawing of the path is a graphic representation of the turns that have to be made to accomplish that itinerary, but it does not and could not show what it is to move and what it is to turn right or left. Any user of the map, must supply the motion and the changes of direction with the focus of visual attention while reading the map. Only if one manages to abstract this sequence of motions from the reading activity, can one transform it into physical movement through the mapped region. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Tm9j7422k1 +
If someone, having just eaten an apple, takes a bite out of a second one, and is asked which of the two tasted sweeter, we should not be surprised that the person could give an answer. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Vop5onvlls +
Hence I suggest that, pace Berkeley, we are quite able to abstract general ideas from experience and that we do this by substituting a kind of place-holder or variable for some of the properties in the sensory complex we have abstracted from our experiences of particular things. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Wpt5k6ohg9 +
I hope to make this clear with the help of an example. A child growing up in a region where apples are red would neessarily and quite correctly associate the idea of redness with the name “apple”. A distant relative arriving from another part of the country, bringing a basket of yellow apples, would cause a major perturbation for the child, who might want to insist that yellow things should not be called “apples”. However, the social pressure of the family’s usage of the word will soon force the child to accept the fact that the things people call “apple” come in different colors. The child might then be told that apples can also be green, which would enable the child to recognize such a particular green thing as an apple the first time it is brought to the house. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Y3m0svglur +
In my terms this means, symbols can be associated with operations and, once the operations have become quite familiar, the symbols can be used to point to them without the need to produce an actual re-presentation of carrying them out. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Zibsapwn7j +
In other words, one can be quite aware of what one is cognitively operating on, without being aware of the operations one is carrying out. +
Annotationen:Abstraction, Re-Presentation, and Reflection: An Interpretation of Experience and of Piaget’s Approach/Zvvv0kffkv +
Hence, from his perspective, there is no linear progression without end, but simply development of method and concepts in one discipline leading to novel conceptualization and coordination in another. The recent impact of the physics of molecules and particles on the conceptual framework of biology would seem a good example. +
In order to survive a particular situation or change in the environment, an organism must have the required characteristics before the situation or change in the environment occurs that makes these characteristics necessary. In other words, surviving organisms are adapted before the event and it would make no sense whatever to say that they did or could change because of the event. There simply is no causal connection between the selecting event or environmental pressure and the properties the surviving organisms have acquired at a prior time through mutation or some other accident. +
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be far more consistent to say that, like mutations, novel behaviors may arise for no biological reason at all and may be perpetuated from generation to generation, provided they do not diminish the organisms’ biological viability below a critical point. +
Let me cite one example that is particularly well-documented and well-known: the Japanese macaque Imo on Koshima Islet that started washing her sweet potatoes (Kawai, 1965). Within 10 years the entire population, with the exception of a few old males who were too conservative, practiced potato washing. There was no time for a mutation or some other genetic accident to increase or decrease anyone’s viability. Nor, indeed, is there any evidence that potato washing has increased anyone’s genetic fitness. But as the new activity quickly created exceptional familiarity with water, it led to yet another novel behavior: swimming. Since all this has taken place in a country where earthquakes and tectonic disasters are not at all impossible, it might be tempting to conjecture that if Koshima Islet should one day sink into the sea, the swimming skill might yet become the crucial feature that allows these macaques to reach a safe shore while the macaques in other sinking regions perish. Subsequent generations of sociobiologists could then use the swimming macaques as a textbook example for “evolutionary explanation.” But such a scenario in which swimming might become an important asset toward the survival of macaques or macaque genes has not yet happened. Yet the washing of food and swimming have become part of the behavioral repertoire of a macaque population without the benefit of an evolutionary explanation. +
If something has been found to work, it is likely to work again. +
Hence one may also introduce the concept of reinforcement which, in phylogeny, would remain vacuous, since the only thing that could count as reinforcement on that level (i.e., survival) is not contingent upon the organism’s modification of its behavior but upon its past and therefore immutable history of genetic variation. +
In other words, the basic operational elements were there, but their coordination into complex operational systems cannot be ascribed to natural selection, since it is demonstrably the result of learning in a very peculiar and highly sophisticated environment. +
Epistemology thus becomes the study of how the mind operates, of the ways and means it employs to construct a relatively regular world out of the flow of its experience. +
Two eggs may be considered the same because of their shape, size, or color, or because they come from the same hen; but there will be a pungent difference between them if one was laid yesterday and the other six weeks ago. A fieldmouse and an elephant are different in many ways, but they will be considered the same whenever we want to distinguish mammals from other animals. Finally, all eggs, all animals, and indeed all objects that I have ever seen or imagined, are the same in that one respect that I have isolated them as bounded, unitary objects in the total field of my experience. +
A similar, often cited example, is the movie film which, depending on the conditions of perception, we see as a sequence of individually different images or as one continuously moving image. Irrespective of any “real” horse that may or may not have trotted somewhere at some time and been filmed while doing so, when the film is presented to us, we ourselves must construct the motion by constituting a continuous change of one horse from the succession of images. +
