Property:AnnotationComment
A
In other words, if there are several kinds of disturbance and, consequently, several kinds of error signals, the system has to discover which of the activities in its behavioral repertoire is most likely to correct a particular error signal. On the simplest level this can be achieved only through inductive inference. +
It allows us to proceed much as a bricklayer, who can devote all his energy and attention to the creation of a wall or an arch, without ever stopping to ask where the bricks he is using came from or how they were made. And just as the characteristics of the bricks (e.g., shape and size) make it impossible for the bricklayer to build certain structures, so the ready-made conceptual building blocks impose constraints on any future construction. +
To refer once more to the feedback model, one might say that assimilation, insofar as it adjusts sensory signals, reduces the generation of error signals. Accommodation, on the other hand, occurs only when there is a discrepancy or disturbance for which the organism does not yet have an established remedy. +
There seems to be no way around the assumption that, as far as the organism is concerned, an “object” must be a construct, actively abstracted from a number of experiences by holding on to a somewhat flexible constellation of characteristics and allowing each of them to vary within a certain range. +
Hence this use of an invariant scheme is by no means a manifestation of the concept of object permanence, because its invariance arises from and consists in the repetition of an activity and does not yet involve the invariance of an independent object. +
Now, if the invariant can be used on the representational level, without an activity, it becomes like a program or a subroutine that is invariant in that it is stored somewhere in a memory from which it can be retrieved. It is this change of status that gives rise to the concepts of permanence and of identity, a further step in the construction of permanent objects. +
For many five-year-olds, for instance, the sun today and the sun yesterday are not yet one and the same individual (Piaget, 1971, p. 87). +
Suppose a very young child applies the word dog to every four-legged creature he sees. He may have abstracted a limited set of attributes and created a large category, but his abstraction will now show up in his vocabulary. Parents will not provide him with a conventional name for his category, e.g., quadruped, but instead will require him to narrow his use of dog to its proper range...
The child who spontaneously hits on the category four-legged animals will be required to give it up in favor of dogs, cats, horses, cows, and the like ... The schoolboy who learns the word quadruped has abstracted from differentiated and named subor- dinates. The child he was abstracted through a failure to differentiate. Abstraction after differentiation may be the mature process, and abstraction from a failure to differentiate the primitive. +
Here I shall confine myself to pointing out that the kind of knowledge our simple organism acquires by installing connections between error signals and activities is, indeed, a form of construction, and since it deals exclusively with the proximal data of the organism’s own subjective experience, one would be justified in calling it wholly subjective. +
In other words, we can come to know only what we consider to be in some sense separate from our knowing selves. By questioning something, by the very act of asking what it is, we have already set our self, the questioner, apart. +
This central item, the experiencer himself, remains mysterious. +
Hence, mention of “steps” in subsequent paragraphs does not imply a chronological but a logical sequence. There are certain steps that are logically indispensable prerequisites for others. But the logic is our logic, an observer’s logic, and as such it applies to a model the observer is building. +
Hence we may safely assume that attention can also shift between items when some or all of them are representational. +
For example, the visual experience that we consider an instance of a specific object is different every time. The object’s shape changes according to the angle, and its size according to the distance from which it is seen. Its color changes according to the illumination, and other parameters are no less variable according to changes in the context. What, then, constitutes the invariant object which the organism recognizes? +
The second development made possible by the introduction of the representational use of invariants is that they can now be used as building blocks for conceptual constructions that move further and further away from the raw material of sensory or motor signals. This shift constitutes one of the salient characteristics of all the “higher,” more sophisticated mental operations and it has consequences for epistemology far beyond the scope of this chapter. +
The rep- resentation, therefore, will have to be no more and no less than a hypothetical model of functions, entities, and events that could “explain” regularities in the organism’s experience. And as a cyberneticist would expect, there is no way to match the model against the “real” structure of the black box. +
When an infant, for instance, assimilates some visual elements to the invariant pattern that, for him, constitutes a rattle, and grasps and shakes a piece of wood that happens to be within reach, then the absence of the auditory element expected to ensue may cause a discrepancy that cannot be eliminated by assimilation. In that case, attention is likely to be focused on any of the formerly disregarded visual or tactual elements by means of which the piece of wood could be discriminated from the rattle. Once the discrimination has occurred, the new elements, with or without some of the old ones, can be associated in an act of accommodation to form a novel scheme. This novel scheme, from then on, will serve as a relatively independent invariant for the assimilation of future experiences. +
The indispensable limitation of this hypothesizing is that the organism can operate only with its own proximal data, i.e., with signals that can be supposed to originate within it rather than with “information” originating in what from the observer’s point of view is the organism’s environment. I would also like to emphasize that this analysis is provisional and lays no claim to being definitive, let alone exhaustive. +
The child who stands in front of a looking glass, sticks out his tongue, and contorts his face into all sorts of grimaces gets a constant confirmation of this causal link. The mirror image is as obedient as his own limbs and can, thus, be integrated with the body percept, expanding it by providing visual access to otherwise invisible aspects. And like the body image, it is a visual percept, an item that is experienced not the item that does the experiencing. +
A well-fed brother whom one has not seen for 20 years may be bald and scrawny when he returns; he may have a different accent, his likes and dislikes may have changed, and what he now says about politics, art, and women may be incompatible with what one remembers of him. Yet one could still accept him as the self-same individual. +
