> Doyle Saylor wrote:
> [SNIP]
>
> > Some kinds of perception such as in vision in the optic nerve track seem
> > to a common "ruled" structure to humans. The structure which is
> > inherented seems to mediate seeing color, and other generalized
> > qualities of vision, and I could accept an inheritence of the these
> > structures.
>
> I am not a neurologist and cannot comment specifically on these points,
> but I should like to note that discussions of perception, memory, etc.
> that do not take into account the research summarized in Israel
> Rosenfield's **The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain* (New
> York, 1988) are again falling into the trap of non-specialists picking
> on bits and pieces of specialized knowledge and building rather aery
> structures with it. The brain, and particularly memory, as described by
> Rosenfield seems to have no room for anything that even vaguely and
> sloppily could be called "structures."
1988 is VERY old in terms of cognitive science, and "anything that even vaguely and sloppily could be called 'structures.'" is VERY vague and sloppy.
Of course, this whole discussion seems vague and sloppy to me. Like a rorsharch test, where we project our various intellectual hangups onto a murky field.
In fact, there most certainly ARE structures in the brain, in the sense of inherint loci of organization, dedicated to more or less specific functions. These are, as Steven Pinker notes in *How The Mind Works*, not so much like mechanical modules, neatly localized with sharp boundaries, but, following Chomsky, more like "mental organs."
While one can debate quite a bit about Chomsky's contribution, one thing is faily clear -- that the brain IS "pre-wired" for language. The production of language VASTLY exceedes the amount of input given. The language input does NOT shape the brain for language, but rather interacts with the inherint capacity which has done the vast majority of shaping as the end-result of tens of millions of years of evolution.
This same insight has been generalized--in a number of competing models--to cover a range of other different cognitive functions. There's an intriguing book, _The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science_ by Steven Mithen, which sketches out a theoritcal framework (encompassing a good deal of evidence) for the evolution of different cognitive functions, alternately differentiating and integrating.
The details are sure to change over time, but Mithen's basic approach seems very solid in the long run.
I'm not sure what this does to who's arguments. But it certainly is the case that "mental modules" or "mental organs" are hear to stay, so much so that Mithen's account uses their evolution to bring considerable order to the prehistoric record. These certainly are "structures" in some sense, but saying this doesn't make me a structuralist or post-structuralist.
Structuralism has always struck me as a kind of reductionism. But the whole point of an evolutionary approach is that the long-term process of the real world in which we're embedded is what's really fundamental. Structures arising out of that process are rather like theses arising in a very-long slo-mo dialectic.
Thus endeth *MY* projection onto a murky field.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"