Mike Tintner wrote:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/taharley/pcgn_harley_review.pdf
Richard's cowriter above reviews the state of cognitive neuropsychology,
[and the Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology] painting a picture of v.
considerable disagreement in the discipline. I'd be interested if anyone
can recommend similar overviews of cognitive science. I'd be
particularlyinterested to have some kind of survey of the acceptance of
embodied cognitive science within the field as a whole. My impression is
it's still limited, although relentlessly growing. But anyway a good
overview would be good to have:
"While a description of any subject will
describe only theories, what is quite remarkable
about those described in the HCN is the extent to
which they conflict. Furthermore, the conflict
between theories is often at a high level: To what
extent does the mind use symbolic rather than
subsymbolic processing? How modular is it? How
closely tied are psychological processes to neural
pathways? How many routes are involved in any
one process? and so on. Here are a couple of
examples from the HCN. Shelton and Caramazza,
in their chapter on the organisation of semantic
memory, argue for a domain-specific knowledge
hypothesis that views knowledge as being organised
into broad domains deriving from specialised
neural mechanisms, against the otherwise prevalent
modality-specific, sensory-functional theory.
Nickels's chapter reflects the dominant view in
studies based on normal and brain participants, and
computational modelling, that there is a stage of
lemma access in speech production; Caramazza
(1997) argues convincingly against the existence of
such a stage. There is even disagreement about
what commonly used terms mean: As Nickels notes
in her chapter on spoken word production, the
words "semantics" and "concepts" are both used to
refer to general preverbal aspects of knowledge and
to lexically specific aspects of meaning. To these
examples one can add: How many routes are
involved in reading? Is there a general phonological
deficit underlying phonological dyslexia? Is speech
production an interactive process? How many
phonological buffers are there? and so on. While
debate and controversy are signs of a healthy, developing
subject, one can have too much of a good
thing. Although any particular description of a
theory sounds sensible, overall the HCN leaves me
in a turmoil of confusion."
Trevor Harley's review, above, was something of a watershed in the
field, causing much controversy and discussion. The paper that he and I
wrote recently was a follow-up that paper.
There are no similar overviews or critiques of cognitive science in
general. I am less familiar with critiques of embodied approaches.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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