Brain: Constructs rather than mirrors reality

Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, explains the difficult we have with recognizing and accepting experiences that contradict our anticipations.

Kuhn details some of the problems that arose while scientists discovered such scientific anomalies as X-ray and oxygen.

As Kuhn observed:
“Novelty emerges with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a back drop provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be discovered…Further acquaintance, however, does result of awareness of something wrong…[which] opens a period in which perceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated.”

He concludes: “What a man sees depends upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.”

Kuhn provides us with an experiment performed by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman undertaken to illuminate this human characteristic of seeing only what we are prepared to see.

Subjects were shown standard playing cards mixed with the anomalous card a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Subjects repeatedly and erroneously identified the anomalous cards as a six of hearts or a four of spades. Some, even after the experiment was over, displayed confusion and even anger at the experiment. Only after repeated exposures to the cards did the subjects slowly feel something was askew here. Only after forty exposures did the subjects correctly identify the cards.

Where can I read more about this?

Where can I read more about this?

You can read Kuhn's book or you can read the following about the guys who did the experiment. I suggest that you read Kuhn's book because it is a claasic and everyone should read it if they wish to comprehend the world we live in.

Jerome S. Bruner was born in New York City and educated at Duke University. During World War II, Bruner worked on the subject of propaganda and popular attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in France. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947, after which he became a member of the faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. In 1972 Bruner left Harvard to teach for several years at Oxford University. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1979 and two years later joined the faculty of the new School for Social Research in New York City. Bruner's early work in cognitive psychology focused on the sequences of decisions made by subjects as part of their problem-solving strategies in experimental situations.

Beginning in the 1940s, Bruner, together with his colleague Leo Postman, did important work on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or "mental sets") affect perception. Their approach, sometimes referred to as the "New Look," contrasted a functional perspective with the prevailing "formal" one that treated perception as a self-sufficient process to be considered separately from the world around it. When Bruner and Postman showed young children toys and plain blocks of equal height, the children, expecting toys to be larger than blocks, thought the toys were taller. The toys also seemed to increase in size when the researchers made them unavailable. In further experiments involving mental sets, the two scientists used an instrument called a tachistoscope to show their subjects brief views of playing cards, including some nonstandard cards, such as a red ace of spades. As long as the subjects were not alerted to the presence of the abnormal cards, almost none saw them.

Bruner's work in cognitive psychology led to an interest in the cognitive development of children and related issues of education, and in the 1960s he developed a theory of cognitive growth. Bruner's theories, which approach development from a different angle than those of Jean Piaget, focus on the environmental and experiential factors influencing each individual's specific development pattern. His argument that human intellectual ability develops in stages from infancy to adulthood through step-by-step progress in how the mind is used has influenced experimental psychologists and educators throughout the world. Bruner is particularly interested in language and other representations of human thought. In one of his best-known papers, Bruner defines three modes of representing, or "symbolizing," human thought. The enactive mode involves human motor capacities and includes activities such as using tools. The iconic mode pertains to sensory capacities. Finally, the symbolic mode involves reasoning, and is exemplified by language, which plays a central role in Bruner's theories of cognition and development. He has called it "a means, not only for representing experience, but also for transforming it."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2699/is_0000/ai_2699000048

Where can I read more about this? Try his book!

Try his book!

I meant for free!!:D :D :D :D :D :D

I meant for free!!:D :D :D :D :D :D
Try a library.

Try a library.

oooh yeah, i forgot about those. does anyone go to a library anymore? I find it funny when people whisper in a Borders. I talk in my normal volume and some people look up from their reading with a dirty look. I say, "hey its not a fucking library!!"

oooh yeah, i forgot about those. does anyone go to a library anymore? I find it funny when people whisper in a Borders. I talk in my normal volume and some people look up from their reading with a dirty look. I say, "hey its not a fucking library!!"


I have a "Friends of the Library" card from a local college library. For a small yearly fee I have access to a great lending library. Every adult who wishes to become a self-actualizing self-learner should do the same.

Brain: Constructs rather than mirrors realityI can buy that we construct knowledge, and that experience can be modelled in terms of "signs", but nonetheless it seems to me the result is "constructs that mirror reality" - otherwise, how do we interact?

Kuhn provides us with an experiment performed by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman undertaken to illuminate this human characteristic of seeing only what we are prepared to see.

Subjects were shown standard playing cards mixed with the anomalous card a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Subjects repeatedly and erroneously identified the anomalous cards as a six of hearts or a four of spades. Some, even after the experiment was over, displayed confusion and even anger at the experiment. Only after repeated exposures to the cards did the subjects slowly feel something was askew here. Only after forty exposures did the subjects correctly identify the cards.One problem with arguments for the "relativistic" view that come out of social science is they are based on human fallibility. In this case cultural familiarity with playing cards kicks in, over-riding immediate perceptual factors. That's quite a standard result (consider the famous experiements that asks people to read the word "GREEN" written in red ink, amongst others). The mind may reflect reality in its ever-so human, quirky, easily decieved way, but it does reflect reality all the same.

oooh yeah, i forgot about those. does anyone go to a library anymore? I find it funny when people whisper in a Borders. I talk in my normal volume and some people look up from their reading with a dirty look. I say, "hey its not a fucking library!!" You can get a library card for the public library for free. If they don't have the book they will try and get it from another library or possibly even order the book. You can always make a request for a book and the library will probably get it.

You can get a library card for the public library for free. If they don't have the book they will try and get it from another library or possibly even order the book. You can always make a request for a book and the library will probably get it.

I can tell that you have not had much contact with libraries.

This really isn't what the book is about. Kuhn's main thesis is that science undergoes paradigm shifts in which the reigning methodologies or practices of the scientific community are overthrown in favor of rival methodologies or practices that are better equipped to explain or utilize anomalies that the reigning methodologies/practices could not accommodate. This thesis was pretty revolutionary because it brought into question the very idea that scientific knowledge was in fact objective knowledge because it would appear that the most that scientists could accomplish was to come up with the best set of theories and research programmes that the scientific community could accept. Kuhn's theory of science is directly at odds with Karl Popper's notion that scientific progress is guided by falsification: the idea that the scientist seeks to falsify a hypothesis as a means of demonstrating its truth. If there are any logicians out there, I'm sure you are all aware of reductio ad absurdum proofs. Popper thought that what marked the sciences off from religion, psychoanalysis, Marxism or the humanistic disciplines was the fact that each of the humanistic disciplines only seem to look for confirmation of their assumptions. The scientist, on the other hand, wants to test his/her assumptions--to falsify them--in order to determine their validity.

Kuhn doesn't think truth/falsity is really what the scientist is concerned about: at least it is not THE concern. In his view, science is about coming up with the best theory or explanation to explain the facts and scientists may have criteria other than truth/falsity that determine whether a theory or explanation is acceptable: some of these might be for example the simplicity of a theory or lack thereof depending upon the community in question. Personal idiosyncracies may also play a role. The point is that science isn't this hyper rational process in which ideas of truth/falsity play a decisive role in the choice of a theory but most importantly by seeking the best theory, the scientist is not bound by the sort of rigid philosophical logic of truth/falsity which does not always hold in the empirical realm that the scientist studies.

‘Paradigm’ is a word that was given great meaning and clarity by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. The paradigm is the ‘bubble’ and this short essay is about how Kuhn informs us as to how and why bubbles are busted.

I allude to the paradigm as being a bubble because “one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions…A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies.”

The author notes that all “real science is normally a habit-governed, puzzle-solving activity” and not a philosophical activity. Paradigm and not hypothesis is the active meaning for the ‘new image of science’. Paradigm is neither a theory nor a metaphysical viewpoint.

Kuhn’s new image of science—the paradigm—is an artifact (a human achievement), a way of seeing, and is a set of scientific problem solving habits. Normal science means research based upon one or more past achievements ‘that some particular community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice…and these achievements are sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group pf adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ furthermore they are sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to solve’. Such achievements Kuhn defines as paradigm.

“A puzzle-solving paradigm, unlike a puzzle-solving hypothetico-deductive system, has also got to be a concrete ‘way of seeing’.”

Kuhn constantly refers to the ‘gestalt switch’ when discussing the switch in reference from one paradigm to another as ‘re-seeing’ action. Each paradigm has been constructed to be a ‘way-of-seeing’. Here Kuhn is speaking not about what the paradigm is but how the paradigm is used. He is defining a paradigm as a newly developed puzzle-solving artifact that is used analogically to understand another artifact; for example, using wire and beads strung together to facilitate understanding the protein molecule.

To understand Kuhn I must understand what is “an organized puzzle-solving gestalt, which is itself a ‘picture’ of something, A, if it is then to be applied, non-obviously, to provide a new way of seeing something else, B.”

“What a man sees depends upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.”

This describes a gestalt shift rather than a paradigm shift. when looking at a red ace of spades or a black nine of diamonds you are depending on a gestalt that says spades and clubs are black and hearts and diamonds are red. It is simply a way of looking at things based on past experience. You can still play a game of solitaire using the deck.

A paragidm shift demands more than a simple change in perception. It demands a change so profound that previous conceptions are proven wrong and that if these previous conceptions are continued to be believed correct observation can not take place.

When the view of the Solar System changed from Geocentric to Heliocentric it was a paradigm shift. The movements of the various components of the Solar System could no longer be explained under the Geocentric theory. All thought about the Solar System, not only observation of it had to be changed, a true paradigm shift.

I can tell that you have not had much contact with libraries. What are you talking about?