Gardiner on The Mind's New Science |
ABSTRACT Gardner's view of cognitive science research issues is historical. The disciplines Gardner includes are philosophy, psychology, AI, Linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience. He excludes Communication. Gardner is not a staunch advocate of the computational model of the mind. (His work comes prior to the computational / connectionist controversy.) The future research directions he emphasizes call for "integrated" discplinary perspectives. . |
cognitive science research areas related to communication
In "Key Features of Cognitive Science," Howard Gardner lists the following:
- representations;
- computers;
- de-emphasis on affect, context, culture, and history;
- belief in interdisciplinary studies; and
- rootedness in classical philosphical probems.
Gardner's perspective is historical: "For the most part, I have simply ... allowed the field to speak for itself through its history and its work" (294). In his view, the research problems undertaken in CS are rooted in classical philosophical problems. (He notes that cognitive scientists find this assertion "contentious," 43). Leaving aside his discussions of Descarte, Kant, and other pre-twentieth century thinkers, in his view account the group of philosophers who meet regularly at Harvard in the late 1930s and early 1940s set the stage for CS. They were Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine, Rudolf Carnap, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred Tarski. They discussed—critically—issues involving logical empiricism. The upshot of the criticism of logical empiricism continued in the works of Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty, according to Gardner, was the demise of epistemology. Since computers are logical machines and their outputs are the products of logical "reasoning," concerns with the logic of representations displaced epistemologically oriented accounts of how the mind works. This turn of events set the stage for CS.
Gardner's persistent caution in his history is the extent to which CS—at least up to 1984—bracketed out of their research issues "affect, context, culture, and history." The accounts of CS that followed Gardner's history reveal the merit of his reservations about CS.
In this context, questions of representation, affect, context, and culture are raised in communication studies as well as cognitive science.
disciplines included and excluded
Gardner history includes chapters on the philosophical, psychological, AI, Linguistic, anthropological, and neuroscience "perspectives" that informed the history of CS. Part III of The Mind's New Science is entitled "Toward an Integrated Cognitive Science: Present Efforts, Future Prospects. In it, he reviews the work of David Marr, J. J. Gibson, Stephen Kosslyn, Zenon Pylyshyn, Eleanor Rosch, Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, Amos Tversky, and Philip Johnson-Laird. According to Gardner, what characterizes these researchers is cross-disciplinarity. The crossing of disciplinary boundaries is limited but significant:
| researchers | philosophy | psychology | _AI*** |
linguistics | anthropology | neuroscience |
| David Marr | psychology | AI |
neuroscience | |||
| J.J. Gibson* | psychology | |||||
| Stephen Kosslyn | psychology | AI |
||||
| Zenon Pulyshyn** | psychology | AI |
||||
| Eleanor Rosch Brent Berlin Paul Kay |
psychology | linguistics | anthropology | |||
| Amos Tversky Daniel Kahneman |
logic | psychology | ||||
| P Johnson-Laird |
logic | psychology | AI |
*critic of Marr; **critic of Kosslyn, ***AI stands for "computation"
For Gardner, the work of Marr, Kosslyn, Rosch/Berlin/Kay, Tversky/Kahneman, and Johnson-Laird shows the limits of the computational model of the mind and bears out his cautionary warning about CS.
Among the disciplines excluded in Gardner's history is communication studies. Also, his account of linguistics is entirely Chomskian and he does not mention the work of Langacker or Lakoff. This is quite understandable since their major publications came after 1985, the copyright date of his history.
methods included and excluded
Gardner is quite sympathetic to con-computational studies—"clinicians like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung or by anthropolgists like Clifford Geertz and Dan Sperber." So, it is very likely that he would admit communication studies in CS.
adherence to the computational model of the mind
As is clear from the forgoing, Gardner is not a staunch supporter of the computational model of mind, at least not the precursor to the "massive parallel processing systems" approach (319ff.) Even so, he is very much concerned with "the illogic of human reasoning" (361ff.). He clarifies his position at the end of the chapter "How Rational a Being?":
I do not mean, of course, that human behavior is no longer subject to study by computational or other cognitive-scientific techniques—indeed, Johnson-Laird has shown us just how some such behavior can be accurately simulated... The broader question remains whether various forms of human irrationality—those documented by clinicians like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung or by anthropolgists like Clifford Geertz and Dan Sperber—can e elucidated by the methods of cognitive science. (380)
This particular controversy was just emerging when Gardner wrote his history and he does not speak about it as a clash between advocates of computational models and connectionist models of cognition.
From his commentary on the researchers in Part III, "Toward an Integrated Cognitive Science," one might infer that Gardner's view of future research directions is to bring various perspectives to bear on a problem. His favorable views of the research he mentions in this part suggests that earlier researchers maintained too much of a disciplinary orientation. Researchers like Rosch or Johnson-Laird have been widely acclaimed even though their work has displaced earlier assumptions. Gardner seems to suggest that their success is attributable to the ways in which they have "integrated" several discplinary perspectives (379).
In the main, Gardner's historical account of cognitive science matches the other accounts surveyed here. His tendency to relate the central issues in cognitive science to "classic" philosophic problems, in his own view, was not recognized by the cognitive scientists to whom he expressed it (43) and it is not a claim that is confirmed in the other accounts.
jjs
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September 13, 2007
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