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, nontrivial 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.As a cognitive scientist with a                  design background, Goel is in a unique position to challenge cognitive science on                  its own territory. He introduces design problem solving as a domain of cognition                  that illustrates these inarticulate, nondiscursive thought processes at work through                  the symbol system of sketching. He argues not that such thoughts must remain                  noncomputational but that our current notions of computation and representation are                  not rich enough to capture them.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.A Bradford                  Book

Sketches of thought PDF

The list of books you might like