2/1/00 abstract
Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Representation. In Cognitive Psychology: an
overview for cognitive scientists (p. 52-56 only). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Discusses the definition of representation. For representation to occur, there must be a model and a target domain. Salient features of the model domain must correspond to relevant features of the target domain. Two different models may represent the same features of the target domain, as two models that look alike may represent different features of the target domain. Representations are not accurate reproductions of the target domain; they only reproduce the features of interest.
2/2/00 abstract and discussion
Zerubavel, E. (1991). Islands of meaning (p. 5-20). The fine line:
making distinctions in everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Examines ways people subdivide the world. They do it with places, things, ideas, time spans, and situations. Often, spatial metaphors are used to describe these divisions. When communicating, people give a perceptible signal of transition between concept boundaries.
This examination seems a bit silly. In nearly all of the examples given, there is a natural break. States and countries, though contiguous, have differing laws which make the physical boundaries necessary. People mentally model the features that they consider important. (Of course.) The signals given when transitioning between frames are to aid the listener by giving clues to the speakers mental organization. Is there anything surprising here? Other than the constant references to sex, that is...
2/2/00 abstract and discussion
Zerubavel, E. (1991). The great divide (p. 21-32). The fine line:
making distinctions in everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press
Examines the reasons people subdivide the world. Mental boundaries can bend perception of the physical world. Divisions may be arbitrary, simply for convenience, or they may be based on external factors which would be difficult to perceive without a boundary.
Now Zerubavel mentally backtracks and says that these mental divisions are easily explained. Why hammer on the boundaries for a chapter and then use another chapter to say ``they're obvious''? These 27 pages simply amount to: People mentally divide the world based on features important to them.
2/2/00 abstract
Brown, R. (1958). How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review
65, 14-21.
Discusses the process of assigning names to objects in the context of teaching the names to children. Selection of a name is influenced by the name's length and the functional usage of the object. Children can learn the common name of an object, and then grow their conceptual hierarchy to include more abstract and more specific names.
2/2/00 abstract
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: the
embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought (p. 3-36 only). New
York: Basic Books.
People's reasoning and representations are affected by biological factors. Most of cognition is unconscious, as brains automatically perform some processing on the information given to the senses. This automatic categorization is necessary to deal with the amount of data in the world. Colors don't naturally exist in the world; they are the product of the world and our brains acting together. Basic-level categories (names most commonly given to objects) are created at the most abstract level that implies a single basic shape and function.
2/2/00 abstract
Peat, F. D. (1993). Science as story. In C. Simpkinson and A.
Simpkinson (Eds.), Sacred stories (p. 53-62). San Francisco: Harper.
Science, like myth, is a story that interprets the interconnectedness of the universe. Simply being backed by scientific method doesn't make scientific theory more ``correct'' or ``valuable'' than other explanations. Chaos theory was formed by creating a new type of story, representing phenomena with a non-traditional type of model.
2/2/00 assignment
A story is a convenient way to record a concrete instance of an object or event. Lakoff and Johnson make the point that human memory is largely episodic, based on the ``stories'' that a person has experienced. Each story is an expression of a real or imagined occurrence from a particular viewpoint. Many differing stories can be written about one occurrence. This is very similar to the relationship of documents and abstracts. Each story records information (data?) in a particular language. As people gain experience with similar situations, their mental ``stories'' undergo a process of splitting to record differences between situations and combining to record similarities between situations.
Linguistic labels guide our interactions with objects. Each label creates a ``frame'' around a class of objects, and thinking in terms of those labels causes us to treat all items of the class in a similar way. Sometimes this is detrimental. For example, a dog trainer who does not recognize the differences between breeds would have trouble training some dogs. But lumping objects in a class is often helpful. Stereotypes give us some information to apply to an object, even if we have never seen an object of that type before. For example, a growling dog should be avoided, regardless of the breed.
Language can maintain boundaries between cultures by reinforcing the different viewpoints of the cultures. In class, Dr. Jacob brought up the different definitions she and her husband had for the term ``tree''. People who have never seen redwoods tend to think of them as ``just another tree'', and do not understand why someone would go out of their way to save one. Native American stories sometimes portray trees as animate beings, while the stories of other cultures portray trees as objects that must be cut down to build houses and make room for highways.
2/2/00 thoughts
Well, here we are. The first journal checkup. I'm starting to think about the organization of my journal. Simply keeping everything in chronological order will get unwieldy after a few more weeks. Breaking things down by weeks may be a useful way to go. But it would also be nice to have all of the abstracts together, or all of the class notes together. In the best of all worlds, I could access things according to how I felt at the time. Is this what ``faceted classification'' means? I'll have to take a look at some of those articles...I wanted to include the full class notes, but putting them in now would make the journal even longer and more confusing, The formatting also leaves a bit to be desired. I'll have to spruce things up for the next checkup.
2/7/00 discussion
Zerubavel, E. (1991) The rigid mind (p. 33-60). The fine line: making distinctions in everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
I wasn't impressed with Zerubavel's chapters in the required reading, but this chapter fits squarely in the island of meaning I call ``crackpot''. The basic assertion is that humans don't like things that sit on the boundaries between categories. This seems reasonable at first, but he stretches it just a bit too far.
Here are a few of the gems:
Like feces and urine, the food we eat is ambiguously experienced as both me and not me. To maximize their separateness, the rigid mind minimizes the number of occasions on which we incorporate the environment into the self, as evident from various taboos on snacking between meals. (p. 38)
It may well be the fear of ``dissolving'' into their surroundings that makes some people exceptionally good at playing Boggle... (p. 50) ...bulimia is the feminine equivalent of Don Juan-style bed-hopping, as both entail a promiscuous fusion with one's environment... (p. 51)
There are numerous endnote marks, indicating that Zerubavel read some of the relevant psychological research, but the items bearing the marks have only marginal relevance to his conclusions. I get the feeling that he read some books and didn't understand them, but used them to ``support'' his views anyway.
How did this stuff get past an editor? And how did it find its way into our readings packets?
Are there any redeeming features? His thoughts on boundaries between groups of people seem to make sense. It's certainly an interesting viewpoint for examining behavior. Of course, this viewpoint could help us to make the ``non-linear jump'' that Peat encourages.
Has anyone else read this chapter? Am I overreacting?
2/8/00 summary and discussion
Zerubavel, E. (1991) The social lens (p. 61-81). The fuzzy mind (p. 81-114). The fine line: making distinctions in everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Social groups classify the world in different ways. These classifications change over time. The ways in which classification lines are drawn can be very divisive. Sometimes the dividing line is blurry. Dividing lines are often arbitrary.
A fuzzy mind is the opposite of a rigid mind, and makes less distinction between categories. Children are born with little or no conception of islands of meaning, and must grow into an understanding of the classifications that their culture makes. Adults may keep some ``lakes'' of fluidity in their mental landscape. Humor and art frequently make class boundaries fuzzy, sometimes to the point of merging distinct classes, for effect. Cultures as a whole can be fluid or rigid.
These chapters bring Zerubavel's world view into better focus. Chapter 3, the rigid mind, left the impression that everyone has a rigid mind. In these chapters, he has softened that viewpoint, explaining that some people/cultures are rigid, while others are fuzzy. Someone may be rigid in one area of the mental landscape, and fuzzy in another. While his ideas on rigid minds are taken too far, the general concept of people and societies differing due to the structure of their islands of meaning is reasonable and useful.
This seems to boil down to one approach to making mental models more concrete. This is a good start, but needs to be fleshed out a bit. In particular, a mental model needs to capture ideas about cause and effect. The islands of meaning approach only captures ideas about how things are structured. We could extend these ideas by stating ``items in the same island of meaning behave in the same way'', but this seems to be stretching things too far, since an island of meaning may be based on a feature that has no effect on function. On the other hand, if a person treats things in the same island is similar ways, this may be an accurate way of modeling mental models. It's worth investigating....
2/8/00 class thoughts
In class, we talked about representation. There weren't any startling thoughts. Since I've studied some of this before, everything just fell into place in my existing knowledge.
Jacob Says:
``We haven't given people utilities that will make up for what we've taken away from them [by discontinuing card catalogs].''
2/8/00 group work
This week, Group 2 was given the task of coming up with classifications for a set of colored wooden blocks. We came up with the following classifications: