Frances to Michael... Thanks for the mention. It is reported that Peirce favored pictorial images in thinking, and that such images were necessary for all logical reasoning. His work in making existential diagrams seems to indicate this. He also held that new signs and words are mainly made by way of analogies like metaphors and metonyms and models. His use of typographic letters to show the logic of tones and tokens and types further shows this favoring. It is unlikely however that a computer can be a "model" of the brain or its mind or of cognition, assuming a lofty meaning for the term "model" exists, although a computer might indicate the "process" of mental acts. The making of a visual language may nonetheless be one welcome outcome to all these studies. Here is an academic link on the development of a picture act theory with an embodiment theory that uses the ideas of Peirce on drawing and graphing as its base. http://www2.hu-berlin.de/bildakt-verkoerperung/?lang=en
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Brady [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, 02 January, 2011 12:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive theories, I was searching around for other things earlier today and ran across a reference to Douglas Hofstadter, probably best known for his 1979 book "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." I read it many years ago, found it very interesting (and a bit hard to follow). So I followed the Wikipedia link and read a longish page about Hofstadter. I think some on the list will be interested (William in regard to analogies, Cheerskep and translations, Frances and logic of systems). Hofstadter is very interested in how cognition works and how it can be modeled by computer-type systems (but he says he isn't interested in computers!). Analogies play a large part of his approach. The Wikipedia articles says, "FARG [Fluid Analogies Research Group, a research group at Indiana University which he organized with his graduate students] models also have an overarching philosophy that all cognition is built from the making of analogies." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter Hofstadter is also interested in consciousness, music, visual art, translation, among other things. More from the Widipedia page: At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" Copycat and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert French. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry.
