En: Peterīs paper

From: Elisa Sayeg (cyborg@uol.com.br)
Date: Wed Jun 07 2000 - 07:43:30 PDT


[from the paper]
"So two contrasting logics are evident here: the logic of reasoning from "typical examples" which must lead to error, and the logic of attacking the problem armed with specialist knowledge which (at least in principle) may lead to truth. (...) from a Materialist point of view, it would be a mistake to consider both logics indifferently to be instances of cognition since in this particular case at least new knowledge begins to take shape only from the point at which typical example reasoning is left behind and we lead towards, and build on, the "stable scientific knowledge" (...) worked out by the scientific community. (...) Only the logic of that process in which knowledge actually develops would be called "cognition" otherwise the term loses its specifically philosophical content and simply means any and all psychological and linguistic processes (...). For Materialism, only "an analysis of the abstraction in terms of its real objective content" (...) can show whether we are dealing with cognition and concepts rather than semantic processes" (...) .
 
 
        But it seems that what Lakoff is trying to do is to deal with semantic processes, not scientific thinking. So it is unjust to blame him for not doing what he didn't say he would be doing in the first place. I'm not sure Lakoff would deny that scientific thinking should be developed with a non-prototypical reasoning. But when we observe the "mental activity" of adults, specially when adults use language in daily, ordinary circunstances, we can observe "prototypical effects". But those prototypical effects are not the way "concepts" are structured, they are peripheral language effects, not core classical concepts.
 
        Now, if you want to reserve the word "cognition" to scientific thinking, and avoid it when talking about other forms of mental activities, such as semantics ... this is only a matter of semantics !!!
 

    Elisa
 

 



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