Like Arne, I found the authors' embedded assumptions _vis a vis_ task
decomposition and school learning rather depressing. Indeed, this was very
much what I was referring to in my previous post concerning researcher
"naivete" and our general inability to anticipate what happens to a
model/method when it is released into the wild. Jay provides a detailed
analysis of the characteristic technical discourse style in Chapter 3 of
_Textual Politics_ and Jerome Bruner comments on some of the broader
consequences of this style for cognitive psychology in the first chapter of
_Acts of Meaning_. Bruner also discusses how the cognitive revolution itself
has been diverted by the computational metaphor (with its false analogy of
the brain as Turing machine) from its progenitors' intent to integrate
psychology with the other social sciences. The resulting technicalization
and fragmentation has allowed even the most hardened S-R researchers to
migrate to cognitive psychology by the simple expedient of altering their
vocabulary while leaving their metaphysical-ontological-epistemological
commitments essentially unaltered. As George Steiner avers, we must err when
we think language's primary function is communication--as with our bodily
hexus (cf. Sheets-Johnstone), it must primarily be mimetic.
One question occurs to me however. After reading Hutchins _Cognition in the
Wild_ (as well as the excellent discussion of same in MCA and on xmca), it
seems that moving cognition "outward" _might_ not be as difficult a
_conceptual_ move for cognitive psychology as I had previously imagined.
That is, aside from the tacit (and troubling) technocratic assumptions of
such as the CMU "Gang of 3," what design issues might be involved in
considering the computer as a simulacra of the distributed socio-cultural
(symbol processing, meaning) system itself? As Arne comments, the way the
CMU article offers an apparently softened epistemological commitment to
correspondence (in response to Cobb et al's alleged neglect of symbols) may
be cheating _but_ it also represents a door the strong form of objectivism
would not have previously admitted exists. Of course, it is also possible
that the CMU folks aren't making a distinction between epistemology and
ontology or are not even aware of what their commitments are but ...
Comments anyone?
Rolfe
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Rolfe Windward (UCLA GSE&IS, Curriculum & Teaching)
rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (text/BinHex/MIME/Uuencode)
CompuServe: 70014,0646 (text/binary/GIF/JPEG)
"To perceive means to immobilize ...we seize, in the act of perception,
something that outruns the act of perception itself." -Henri Bergson