Sketches Of Thought

Sketches of Thoughtby Vinod Goel

ISBN 0262071630

From the Amazon lead-in paragraph ...

"Much of the cognitive lies beyond articulate, discursive thought, beyond the reach of current computational notions. In Sketches of Thought, Vinod Goel argues that the cognitive computational conception of the world requires our thought processes to be precise, rigid, discrete, and unambiguous; yet there are dense, ambiguous, and amorphous symbol systems, like sketching, painting, and poetry, found in the arts and much of everyday discourse that have an important, non-trivial place in cognition. Goel maintains that while on occasion our thoughts do conform to the current computational theory of mind, they often are - indeed must be - vague, fluid, ambiguous, and amorphous. He argues that if cognitive science takes the classical computational story seriously, it must deny or ignore these processes, or at least relegate them to the realm of the nonmental. Along the way, Goel makes a number of significant and controversial interim points. He shows that there is a principled distinction between design and nondesign problems, that there are standard stages in the solution of design problems, that these stages correlate with the use of different types of external symbol systems, that these symbol systems are usefully individuated in Nelson Goodman's syntactic and semantic terms, and that different cognitive processes are facilitated by different types of symbol systems."

I only had a chance to (as usual) read/skim through this at great speed while visiting RalphHodgson's spectacular library. It resonated very well with my experience, and I especially was drawn to his notion of amorphous symbol systems, which I consider an essential part of the reining-in of the WhorfianHypothesis. You have to go from a non-thought, through an amorphous-thought/symbol period before the thought can get its own word (this strikes me as obvious, after a judicious amount of introspection - he provides some experimental data). And there is much processing done during the amorphous thought stage, in fact, I conjecture that most new theories, metaphors and explanatory systems arrive after gestation in and delivery through an amorphous symbol channel - and that is exactly why they are couched in words and phrases that are different from the preceding. -- AlistairCockburn

A blank CrcCard is a good model for an amorphous symbol. How else can you talk about relations in a system before you know what metaphor you'll use to name the parts?

Not to mention the fact that formal logical thinking is slow.

Trust your gut: I've often found it useful to go for a "gut feeling" or "emotional reaction" to system designs I look at, and then follow with rationalization. I ask "why do I feel that this design just 'looks bad?'" It may or may not really be bad, but I find that subjective filtering, relying on my experience of similar projects, can be very valuable. -- JeffGrigg

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