Reconsidering conceptual change: Issues in theory and practice

2011

Cognitive Science, 1993

This issue of Cognitive Science contains a debate among proponents of two distinct approaches to the study of human cognition. One approach, the tradition upon which cognitive science was founded, is that of symbolic processing, represented in the article by Alonso Vera and Herbert Simon. The other more recent approach, emphasizing the role of the environment, the context, the social and cultural setting, and the situations in which actors find themselves, is variously called situated action or situation cognition. It is represented by four articles written in response to Vera and Simon: James Greeno and Joyce Moore; Philip Agre; Lucy Suchman; and WilIiam Clancey. The debate was triggered by Vera and Simon's article, which takes note of the work in situated action and its attacks on the role of symbolic processing, and argues that the new approach could easily be incorporated within the old. The respondents take issue with this characterization.

European Scientific Journal, 2014

There is nothing unchangeable in the world, Only variability is unchangeable." Albert Einstein According to ancient Greek philosophers, philosophy is the loveofwisdom that hoists human consciousness, where, through reason, meanings of unknowns are distinguished and attested. The science of philosophy realizes the general recognition of the world's existence. As an early science in critical thinking, itdeveloped the progressive performance of intellectual knowledge in man, by summarizing a set of unified principles about recognition, where through the reason dictates the concepts on society and nature as a change and overall knowledge of the world and nature laws. Philosophers consider the opinion as an intellectual property that helps us find answers and solutions to the important questions ad problemssuch as: "If you are not a man who thinks, then what kind of man are you?", or "Are we what we think?". Thinking is characterized not only by the study of visible objects as symbols, but also by the treatment of hypotheses for the acquisition of more accurate knowledge of various scientific disciplines. It was Plato, who unveiled the thought as a special feature of the thinkers who brought the necessary changes in society. While Descartes declared that he doubted everything, butonly for one thing,-he said,-I do not doubt: That I think! The thought that arises and emanates from the self is the origin of the goals and the vision about the surroundinguniverse. It is a reference to the mind, which is based on experience, on the meaning of things and on the manner how we perceive phenomena and occurrences of society and nature. Thus, human activity is directly associated with his thoughts embedded in the psyche and experienced until the transformation of them intomentalities and habits, under which it operates. The path described up to present days, but also the one expected to be described tomorrow is the product of the ideas of human society.

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists' emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today's emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey's quality of situations and Gendlin's felt sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process. en 09/07/2018 We begin with brief remarks on the debate on non-conceptuality. We show that certain aspects of a pragmatist approach have found its ways into today's discussions. However, the underlying understanding of knowledge based on the justification of beliefs has stayed untouched in this discussion, and the classical pragmatist approach has not been considered. Dealing with the question whether a qualitative dimension in cognition is a relapse in givenism, we argue that this is not the case when taking the implications of knowledge as transformational process seriously. Reintroducing the perspectives of Peirce, Dewey and Gendlin we show how an interactive fine-grained description of knowledge as a transformative process explicates the pragmatist concern of cognition as a fundamental prerequisite to meet the challenges of human life. By conceiving knowledge as a transformative and interactional process, one acknowledges at the same time the dimension of "firstness" in experience. Our paper aims to show that this acknowledgment does not imply falling back into the Myth of the Given.

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2018

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process.

OUf conception of the world is based on sensory perception and cognition in the sense that oUf sensory system determines the kinds of stimuli we are capable of perceiving. It thus affects om understanding of (i) the entities we perceive, (ii) the point(s) of view on the perceived situation we are able to select, and (iii) oUf decisions concerning what attracts om attention (the jigure in the terminology of Talmy 2000) as against what remains backgrounded (the ground). We also hold conceptions about oUf mental activities as such; these conceptions are refiected in the linguistic expressions that designate mental activities. By studying linguistic expressions of perception and cognition we can find out how language conceptualizes events that take place in OUfment al world, how we construe the participants of these events and the relationships that exist between the participants. In other words, such a study scrutinizes our LINGUISTIC FOLK MODEL of the interaction between the mind and the world. In this article 1 study this fo lk model in the way it is represented in one Finno-Ugric language, Finnish, with special attention to three areas: (1) Perception verbs: 1 compare the Finnish system ofperception verbs with the few existing typological models (Viberg 2001). (2) Perception as fictive motion of a signal between the EXPERIENCER and the STIMULUS (for a more detailed analysis see Huumo 2010). (3) The use of directional locatives in the coding of cognitive relationships where no actual motion takes place-these include verbs with meanings such as 'find' (+ a separative case), 'forget' or 'leave' (+ a lative case). In particular, (3) has been under lively discussion both within Finnish studi es and international general linguistics. Earlier explanations for the phenomenon (in particular,

AVANT. The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Vanguard

Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education, 2018