Replying to LO29406 --
Dear Organlearners,
John Hanna <j.hanna@snet.net> writes:
>There is another line of research, Ecological Psychology,
>which seeks the same understanding about "How do we
>know the external world?", but which presents an alternative
>(and I think more current) explanation: Perception and
>Action is direct and primary, thought is not representational,
>nor does the brain work like an "information processing"
>system. I believe it would reject the idea that "internal"
>Mental Models exist. Rather, "MM"s (as documented) are
>just another form of "external" communications between
>actors about something.
Greetings dear John,
I think you are right that most ecological psychologists will reject the
idea of Mental Models (MMs). For example, ES Reed do so in his
"Encountering the World: Toward and Ecological Psychology" (1996).
>Interestingly, none of the key people related to this are
>mentioned in your MM references, such as James Gibson,
>George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Michael Turvey, Peter
>Kugler, Esther Thelen, Scott Kelso, Horst Hendriks-Jansen,
>Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, and many others.
I merely gave a very brief history on the development of MMs, not
Ecological Psychology (EP). The problem of perception-cognition-...... is
far more complex that the EP version of it. Most "schools" of psychology
(behavioural, cognitive, comparative, developmental, ecological,
evolutionary, .....) each has its own version of it. This splitting of
psychology into "schools", each with its followers, is as distressing to
me as the splitting of the act of learning into "schools" as I have
recently showed. I myself think only of one complex "world-inside-me", a
term coming from Goethe. None of these "schools" can fully capture what
goes on in this "world-inside-me".
Please, do not think that I think negatively of Ecological Psychology. It
has a certain "tacit wholeness" to it which is matched formally by perhaps
only Jungian Psychology. But this is because of its ecological foundation.
Ecology without wholeness is as impossible as sunshine without a sun.
>I suppose the "information processing model of mind" is
>so engrained and tacitly assumed, that the assumptions or
>basis for things like Mental Models is not often considered
>or questioned.
I agree with you that "the assumptions or basis for things like Mental
Models is not often considered or questioned". I will not suppose, but
actually claim that the "the 'information processing model of mind' is ..
engrained and tacitly assumed". The reason is that we do not make
carefully distinction between individual learning and organisational
learning. Whenever organisational learning happens, information is
involved. When information is involved, so is also its coding and
decoding. This has been happening since the days of ancient Egypt and
Babilonia. Is this not enough reason for this engraining? But there comes
a time for changing this too.
The coding-decoding ("zip-unzip" ;-) of a "parcel" of information is for
me part of knowledge. But that coding-decoding is not the basis for how my
knowing happens. The basis for my knowing is my creativity. Unfortunately,
when we come to a study of creativity, the "schools", each with its own
model ("treasure map" ;-) has proliferated even far more than for the act
of learning.
However, it is the thread which intrigues me. MMs result in certain
changes sought and others changes avoided. What are these MMs? For me they
are nothing else that "parcels" of information drifting around in the
mind, never having joined with the one knowledge.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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