``But linguistics and cognitive science is hardly alone in their dismissals. Most of the controversial and difficult to justify constructs in many of the biological sciences suffer the same blindness. These organic systems evolved from and are completely co-mingled with the physical systems of their own foundation and origin. To not take this into account is a kind of narrow minded view that functions to inhibit a more complete understanding of what is going on. Genetics and evolution are obvious examples.'' (CG)
Agreed. But surely the effects of ongoing processes like genetics and evolution don't need to be taken into account for every sort of question about human meaning. Which isn't to say they aren't playing an actively role, allowing the possibility of our particular meanings, at any moment, but their role can certainly be held constant hence fenced off for many purposes.
Like for the purpose of wondering if I've correctly understood where your critique is coming from.
Maureen
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God Maureen, this was eons ago. But no, I think I either was not clear enough and you mis-understood. I'll try to detail this out a little.
>From a long ago reading of Piaget, I remember he developed the idea
that cognition was developmental and proceeded through stages. These
stages could be demonstrated through a series of tests to show that
children understood and could manipulate certain mathematical
concepts. These concepts did not proceed from simple to complex, but
rather from very abstract toward the very concrete, where concrete
applications were the last form mastered in adolescence. This was in
effect a recapitulation of the mathematical pyramid, where
meta-constructs like categories, classes, or sets are considered the
most abstract and advanced of concepts and where points, lines, and
areas are considered the most concrete of concepts. So the theory was
that children mastered concepts related to sets first, and then
proceeded to discover more concrete applications like those say in
word problems found in middle school algebra. This presents the idea
that three year olds are living and thinking in Hilbert space, and
grow-ups think and live in Euclidean space.
Well, regardless of whether this is accepted or not, it gave me the idea that Piaget had missed something fundamental.
He was fascinated by Group Theory and was convinced that children formed their spatial reasoning through a series of group concepts, or symmetries of space. Piaget's mistake was to believe that these concepts were somehow innate to the internal dynamics of mental development, and something like Chomsky believed these to be innately given to cognition. Piaget's mistake is assume the symmetries were an aspect of mind and perception.
But it is space, the external form of physical reality independent of any mental construct that is the ground of these symmetries. They are not an artifact of human perception and cognition. The empirical proof of this is found in crystallography where spatial symmetries are expressed physically as chemically formed atomic lattice structures. In other words there is structure to physical reality, and our constructs of the world are formed through our interaction with these structures, which exist apriori to our mental formulation of them.
``But surely the effects of ongoing processes like genetics and evolution don't need to be taken into account for every sort of question about human meaning.'' (MT)
No, of course not. What I was alluding to is the idea that we need to find either a genetic or evolutionary explanation for ever aspect of a biological system in order to be satisfied that we have completely characterized that system. What I suspect, is that we will be forever frustrated with this approach, because it leaves out the rest of the world and its history, that is the concrete or material context within which genetics and evolution exists.
What does this mean? In biology, you are presented with what appears to be a discrete and well characterized physiological phenomenon. The one I worked on as a tech and part of a team was the effect of gravity on the growing primary root. Primary roots of many plant species are said to be gravitropic, that is they respond to the directional force of gravity. If you turn them sideways or up side down, they will re-orient themselves to point down. You can confuse the response by rotating them in a circle, and they will grow toward the circle perimeter, presumably in response to centripetal force.
So the question is, how do the cells of the primary root perform this feat? Nobody knows. There is an apparently related physiological response to light in which the primary stem is said to be phototropic, grow towards a light source. Now it turns out that these two responses in some species interact with each other so that there are light mediated gravitropisms. The importance of these responses is they form the perception and orientation system of plants. While there are a variety of known genetic mutations that interfere with these responses, there seems to be no single locus or even on identifiable constellation of loci in the genenome to tag and say, see here it is--this is the light and gravity orientation and regulation system and these are the genes responsible. Now there are genes known to alter the light perception abilities of cells by expressing, inhibiting, and timing of the formation of phytachrome and other light reactive pigments, but other than these not very well understood genes, the rest is up for guessing.
In long and contentious discussions where I was at a distinct disadvantage with no degree, no credentials, and little background I put out the basic idea that we were looking in the wrong place. That plants don't need to perform all this fancy genetic and chemical work, because the regularity of the environment already provides the structure, within which the plant lives. The plant doesn't have to do all the work (have organs of perception, genes to react, etc), because the work is already done. Well, this got zero approval, needless to say.
But I am still convinced that the unidirectional pole of gravity is the primary physical mechanism by which all biological systems can avail themselves for the purpose of space orientation---should the need arise. Everybody knows which way is `down'. You don't need a brain to figure it out.
Mathematically this amounts to what is called an orientable manifold---and that is what we live in. It is so ubiquitous that it goes un-noticed, simply because it is everywhere the same, i.e. the biological constant of spatial orientation is gravity--or so to speak.
Well, you can imagine what a fool I sounded going on about it. But what the hell, I was only getting 9.50/hr and I considered the university and NSF were getting a bargain--more nuts per hour than the contract called for.
Unfortunately, nobody on the team had taken enough mathematics. What I really wanted was to examine the topological theorems on orientable manifolds to see if you could demonstrate that common group properties arise from the orientability properties alone. If you could demonstrate this mathematically, then you could argue that our concepts of space arise because we developed, lived, and think within a gravitational field, or because we have evolved in an orientable manifold. The non-orientable manifold is the counter-example and requires that you can demonstrate that certain group properties can not arise therein.
This is a little like chicken-egg theory (as well as being complete out to lunch), but I think it has the potential to relieve a lot of fruitless search for organs, genes, and perceptual mechanisms that will never be found---simply because biology doesn't have to create these mechanisms, since they are already there in the space itself so to speak.
It could be thought of as an application of Occam's razor. The structure is in the world, not in the biology. Biology only has to follow along with the physics program, as it were. Explaining how gravitation generates physical organization, and hence physical evolution is somebody else's job--the craziods over in Evans or in Cory Hall.
Chuck Grimes
PS. I realize this hardly clears things up.