Love it. Since AI and cognitive science were created, it seems as though half the work was enforcing the borders of the discipline to make sure the right people get jobs and grants. It was an exercise in creating exclusivity, even if there was never agreement on how, exactly, to define the project.
In my anarchist moments, I wondered what tearing those structures down might look like. Now that we're living in a collective anarchist moment driven by a kleptocratic power grab, I rather dread finding out. I hope whatever emerges out the other side looks more like the three you nominated here.
Ok, probably shouldn't share this in public, but recently I got into an exchange with an academic who is literally one of my favorites, brilliant and edgy. He was posting something about the latest horror being vomited out of Washington and said, "I wonder if there will be a backlash." To which I said, well, what are you doing to create the backlash? And his response was, college professors protesting won't change anything.
If that remains the prevailing attitude, our entire university ecosytem is going to suffer massive if not catastrophic damage. The anarchist question you pose is one I ponder too--maybe that's not such a bad thing, if we burst the little bubbles of cognitive privilege that we've scattered about the land and refocus our efforts on education that better engages the communities they are situated within.
The legal scholar Bruce Ackerman talks about the US having distinct "constitutional moments" when the socio-political context reaches a boiling point and there are major changes to our constitutional foundation. Some scholars think he's full of it, but certainly the Civil War and the New Deal Era reshaped what we considered constitutional in major ways. One wonders if the second Trump Administration will prove to be a "consitutional moment" for education in this country, akin to creation of the land grant system. One also wonders whether the country will survive to find out.
"the contributions of anthropology to the field had been rather minimal to have granted, in the authors’ mind, an angular dimension for it in the chart"
Fair enough if the field is understood as revolving round the computational metaphor, you discount the situated cognition and related work and you ignore the influence of anthropology on Bruner.
Lutkehaus, Nancy C. “Putting ‘Culture’ into Cultural Psychology: Anthropology’s Role in the Development of Bruner’s Cultural Psychology.” Ethos 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 46–59.
The kinship was mutual. See Geertz, Clifford. Learning With Bruner. The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997.
Alan, I'd ask you to treat the comment section to this Substack as you would a cocktail party -- meaning, lead with politeness. I value your historical perspective, and the links you share, but statements such as "you discount the work of..." and "you ignore the influence of..." are off-putting. And if they continue, they'll get you banned.
That a cohesive science did not materialize is hardly news.
If you go back to the late 1950s and early 1960s the AI people, the linguists, the psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists were all mixing it up in and around Harvard and MIT. See Miller, George A. “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (March 2003): 141–44. It is not clear they were ever in agreement such that there was a coherent field. They were maybe agreed on not being behaviorists, although as someone joked somewhere, many behaviorists just traded in stimulus-response for input-output.
It is worth looking at Bruner's perspective looking back from 1990 and the collection of essays that followed in 1997:
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Johnson, David Martel, and Christina Erneling, eds. The Future of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bruner's take in 1990 is that that fairly early on there was a shift from the "construction of meaning" to "the processing of information" and that computation became the ruling metaphor. There were many psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists who were never onboard with the computational metaphor because they were deeply at odds with its neo-Cartesianism. Resurrecting an discredited 17th C. philosophy hardly amounts to a revolution.
Love it. Since AI and cognitive science were created, it seems as though half the work was enforcing the borders of the discipline to make sure the right people get jobs and grants. It was an exercise in creating exclusivity, even if there was never agreement on how, exactly, to define the project.
In my anarchist moments, I wondered what tearing those structures down might look like. Now that we're living in a collective anarchist moment driven by a kleptocratic power grab, I rather dread finding out. I hope whatever emerges out the other side looks more like the three you nominated here.
Ok, probably shouldn't share this in public, but recently I got into an exchange with an academic who is literally one of my favorites, brilliant and edgy. He was posting something about the latest horror being vomited out of Washington and said, "I wonder if there will be a backlash." To which I said, well, what are you doing to create the backlash? And his response was, college professors protesting won't change anything.
If that remains the prevailing attitude, our entire university ecosytem is going to suffer massive if not catastrophic damage. The anarchist question you pose is one I ponder too--maybe that's not such a bad thing, if we burst the little bubbles of cognitive privilege that we've scattered about the land and refocus our efforts on education that better engages the communities they are situated within.
The legal scholar Bruce Ackerman talks about the US having distinct "constitutional moments" when the socio-political context reaches a boiling point and there are major changes to our constitutional foundation. Some scholars think he's full of it, but certainly the Civil War and the New Deal Era reshaped what we considered constitutional in major ways. One wonders if the second Trump Administration will prove to be a "consitutional moment" for education in this country, akin to creation of the land grant system. One also wonders whether the country will survive to find out.
"The backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun" -- Bo Burnham, "That funny feeling"
"the contributions of anthropology to the field had been rather minimal to have granted, in the authors’ mind, an angular dimension for it in the chart"
Fair enough if the field is understood as revolving round the computational metaphor, you discount the situated cognition and related work and you ignore the influence of anthropology on Bruner.
Lutkehaus, Nancy C. “Putting ‘Culture’ into Cultural Psychology: Anthropology’s Role in the Development of Bruner’s Cultural Psychology.” Ethos 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 46–59.
The kinship was mutual. See Geertz, Clifford. Learning With Bruner. The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997.
Alan, I'd ask you to treat the comment section to this Substack as you would a cocktail party -- meaning, lead with politeness. I value your historical perspective, and the links you share, but statements such as "you discount the work of..." and "you ignore the influence of..." are off-putting. And if they continue, they'll get you banned.
That a cohesive science did not materialize is hardly news.
If you go back to the late 1950s and early 1960s the AI people, the linguists, the psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists were all mixing it up in and around Harvard and MIT. See Miller, George A. “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (March 2003): 141–44. It is not clear they were ever in agreement such that there was a coherent field. They were maybe agreed on not being behaviorists, although as someone joked somewhere, many behaviorists just traded in stimulus-response for input-output.
It is worth looking at Bruner's perspective looking back from 1990 and the collection of essays that followed in 1997:
Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Johnson, David Martel, and Christina Erneling, eds. The Future of the Cognitive Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bruner's take in 1990 is that that fairly early on there was a shift from the "construction of meaning" to "the processing of information" and that computation became the ruling metaphor. There were many psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists who were never onboard with the computational metaphor because they were deeply at odds with its neo-Cartesianism. Resurrecting an discredited 17th C. philosophy hardly amounts to a revolution.