20 jan 2005 lecture notes

Cognitive scaffolding & stigmergic organization:
"Welcome to the insects"

symbol manipulation model - classical/cartesian model
there is an internal world
vs.
structuralist externalist scaffolded world
(both are of course based on unverifiable and equally unrealistic metaphors)

cartesian/cognitivist model
sensory input to short term memory to long-term meory
do something out of short term memory
store knowledge into long term memory

wittgenstein on man-made classes?
coming up with necessary and sufficient conditions for defining a class
critiquing his own logical positivist agenda for describing language(? is that right?) - language is a tool

unlike artificial categories, things in the real world have degrees of belonging to natural categories
birds fly
birds have feathers
but flightless birds are still birds

Wittgenstein: games are hard to define

cognitive frames: facts are subservient to frames (Lakoff)

there is a world and it is experience, and the difference between internal and external is somewhat, uh, for a lack of a better word, artifical, no, contrived, no, derivative



scaffolding - "broad class of physical, cognitive, and social augmentations - augmentations that allow us to achieve some goal that would otherwise be beyond us" - Jacob from Clark