mixingmemory | June 18, 2007In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes:
The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in progress book. My own opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, and other related ideas from cognitive linguistics are threatening to traditional scholars because it is contrary to prevailing, enduring beliefs that the mind is literal and disembodied. Put simply, many cognitive scientists could not continue to work in the ways they do if they embraced some of these…
mixingmemory | June 18, 2007In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously addresses the evidence and theoretical arguments against CMT from outside cognitive linguistics. As he's done before, Dr. Gibbs dropped by and left a lengthy response in the comments, which I'm reposting here in its entirety (edited to remove some HTML problems, but not for content). At the end there is a long list of citations. I…
mixingmemory | June 17, 2007In case you haven't heard about it, there's a relatively new blog in the cognitive science section of the blog world called Cognitive Approaches to Literature. They don't post very often over there, but if they ever start doing so, it promises to be an interesting read with lively discussions. The latest addition to the blog's stable of contributors is Michael Kimmel, a "cognitive social scientist" in Vienna whose main interests are "metaphor, imagery and embodiment." Now, if you speak the language of cognitive science, you can probably guess a few of Kimmel's major inspirations from the…
mixingmemory | June 16, 2007First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him:
After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
In the next paragraph, he writes:
Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too…
mixingmemory | June 11, 2007Those of you who are interested in Michael Tomasello's work as a follow up to his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition may be interested in his new paper with Malinda Carpenter and Ulf Liszkowski, "A New Look at Infant Pointing". The abstract:
We propose a new theory of infant pointing involving multiple layers of intentionality and shared intentionality. In the context of this theory, we argue and present evidence for a rich interpretation of prelinguistic communication, that is, one which posits that when 12-month-old infants point for an adult they are in some sense trying to…
mixingmemory | June 9, 2007
I just learned that Richard Rorty died Friday. I was a big fan of his work as an undergrad, and at that time both Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had a big influence on my thinking. I suppose they still do indirectly, though I'm less impressed with them now than I was then. He was one of the (very) few contemporary philosophers whom I found really inspiring, even when he was downright frustrating. So I'm sad to hear he's no longer around. Love him or hate him, English-language philosophy needs many more people writing interesting, far-reaching, and far-…
mixingmemory | June 8, 2007About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science, even when it doesn't. At the end of the article, Bloom mentioned a then unpublished study in which participants were more impressed with bad scientific explanations if they contained a bit of irrelevant neuroscience. Well, now the study, which is by Weisberg and a bunch of other people (apparently to write a paper about neuroscience, you have to have as many…
mixingmemory | June 6, 2007Originally posted on the old blog on 4/5/06, and reposted here and now out of laziness.
It's easy to see why research on motivated political reasoning/cognition has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosophere lately. It fits nicely with our intuitions about how people interpret political information (and by people, we mean other people, because our political decisions are all perfectly rational), and you don't have to look very far to see instances of motivated political reasoning. This week's news about Tom Delay, for example, has highlighted the fact that liberals are often all too ready…
mixingmemory | June 5, 2007
Over the last couple decades there's been a pretty heated debate about which, if any, nonhuman animals possess a "theory of mind," that is, the ability to think about what others are thinking. Much of the research bearing on this debate has used false belief tasks. There are many variants, but the standard false belief task goes something like this. One experimenter puts something interesting (e.g., food or a toy) in one of two boxes while another experimenter and the subject (a child or a primate, usually) watches. The observing experimenter then leaves the room. While that experimenter is…
mixingmemory | June 3, 2007I've always really liked this song, but I've never understood a single word of it. Fortunately, some guy figured them all out for me:
These are apparently the actual lyrics, but how would you know?
mixingmemory | May 31, 2007The belief that creativity and political conservatism are negatively correlated is widespread not only among the general public (except, maybe, among some conservatives), but among researchers in a variety of fields. And there are some indirect empirical justifications for this belief. Political conservatism is associated with less openness to experience (as measured with Big Five inventories), and highly positively correlated with fear of uncertainty. Both relationships imply less creativity. However, only with a paper by Stephen Dollinger(1) in press in the journal Personality and…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2007Originally posted on the old blog on Memorial Day 2005.
On Memorial Day, I'm always reminded of the poems of war because, perhaps more than any other form of literature, they paint of it a picture that is more real than romantic (except maybe in Tennyson). In particular, I am reminded of the poetry of World War I, because that war seems to have been such a shock to the poet's senses that all of the poems that it inspired express a horror at war. Too often on Memorial Day, and other such days when we are called to remember the sacrafices of veterans, as we should, we glorify not only their…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2007A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors:
Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will…
mixingmemory | May 27, 2007I haven't really updated the blogroll much since, well, I first created it. So if you've got a blog that fits into one of the categories over there on the left, including "seriously good but I don't know what to call it," and you want me to add you, leave a comment or drop me an email so I can check out your blog. If you know of a blog that's not yours that I should be reading, let me know about that too.
mixingmemory | May 26, 2007Last night, I took my son to his favorite diner to celebrate the end of 3rd grade. Just before our dinner arrived, a song came on the radio and he stopped talking, listened for a second, and said, "Hey, it's my favorite song!" This is what was playing:
His revelation was timely, since today is Mile's Davis' birthday. Now, I don't think anyone's done a study on the relationship between music and personality in childhood, but I figure picking one of the best songs on one of the greatest albums of the 20th century as your favorite at 9 years old is a good sign.
mixingmemory | May 19, 2007Everybody's seen Kanizsa's triangle:
It's a simple illusory figure illusion, first reported by Kanizsa(1). The illusion is likely caused by the processes that the visual system uses to separate figures from their ground(2), but to date there doesn't appear to be any consensus about exactly how these processes cause the perception of illusory figures (here's a list of several competing explanations).
Recently, researchers in the Human Technology Laboratories have begun producing 3D versions of the Kanizsa triangle:
These figures are created by starting with the original Kanizsa triangle,…
mixingmemory | May 17, 2007Some of you who are interested in the history of psychology or philosophy of mind might find this paper interesting:
Gentner, D., & Grudin, J. (1985). The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 40(2), 181-192.
Abstract
It seems plausible that the conception of the mind has evolved over the first hundred years of psychology in America. In this research, we studied this evolution by tracing changes in the kinds of metaphors used by psychologists to describe mental phenomena . A corpus of metaphors from 1894 to the present was collected…
mixingmemory | May 15, 2007In honor of the announcement of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year (via Steve), I thought I'd revive the old cool visual illusion series. I may post about this year's winner, the leaning tower illusion, in the future, but I just now read the paper, so I have some work to do first. Instead, I'm going to talk about an illusion discovered by one of the members of the team that came in third place this year, the winking effect. To see the effect, you'll have to head on over to the Journal of Vision website, which I'll link you to in a minute, 'cause I don't know how to put flash animation into…
mixingmemory | May 14, 2007The second Online Philosophy Conference has begun, and the first week's presentations are up. If you didn't participate in last year's OPC, here's how it works: a presentation and one or two responses are posted for you to read, and comments are open to everyone for discussion. This year, they've also included two keynote addresses, one for each week. This week's keynote address is by Ernest Sosa. Stop by and check it all out.
mixingmemory | May 11, 2007File this one in the annals of "huh?" There's been a lot of research over the last decade or so on what only be described as the bizarre implicit priming of social concepts. In a typical experiment, participants are given lists or scrambled sentences that contain words associated with a particular stereotype or attitude and people will subsequently behave in a way that's consistent with that stereotype/attitude. For example, Bargh et al.1 gave participants scrambled sentences with words associated with the elderly (e.g., worried, old, lonely, and Florida... no seriously, Florida), told them…