Belief Discovers No New Qualities

SINCE therefore belief implies a conception, and yet is something more; and since it adds no new idea to the conception; it follows, that it is a different MANNER of conceiving an object; something that is distinguishable to the feeling, and depends not upon our will, as all our ideas do. My mind runs by habit from the visible object of one ball moving towards another, to the usual effect of motion in the second ball. It not only conceives that motion, but feels something different in the con...

 The Mind as a Blank Slate

1. Idea is the object of thinking.—Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, “whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness,” and others. It is in the first place then to be enquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received doctrine, that men ha...

 Top-Down VS Bottom-Up Approaches to Design in Software

One of the hallmarks of the Athena project was that faculty were asked to build their own educational software. Most worked with a set of assumptions about learning: students begin by learning “fundamental concepts”; formal, mathematical representation is always the best approach; students would use simulations the way designers intended. As Athena unfolded, none of these assumptions proved true. To begin with, students approached simulation with a wide range of personal intellectual styl...

 Chess Concept: Running Out of Book

One of the problems with playing against computers is how quickly and how often they change. Grandmasters are used to preparing very deeply for our opponents, researching all of their latest games and looking for weaknesses. Mostly this preparation focuses on openings, the established sequences of moves that start the game and have exotic names like the Sicilian Dragon and the Queen's Indian Defense. We prepare new ideas in these openings, and look for strong new moves ("novelties") with whic...

 Imaginative Play Creates Ownership

Ultimately, the child as creator exercises a whole range of capacities that set the Stage for original thinking. We find the imprint of creative practice in the blending of experiences and ideas, the classifications of real and imagined things, the organization of systemic patterns and narrative sequences, the modeling of worlds, the generation of artifacts, and the synthesizing of all that is known and felt into one grand design. The creating self "owns" the processes and products of make-...

 Blends, Bricolage, and Chimeras of Association in Child I...

Blends and bricolage can tell us much about the young imagination and its potential for mature creativity. No one is surprised when a child substitutes a little toy truck television show—though perhaps we should be. No matter how unremarkable, all blends reflect the imagination at work. That said, our notice of make-believe chimeras generally increases, the more unlikely the juxtaposition of their elements. What we notice and notice again in child's play are the blends and complexes that ar...

 Considering Art Creative but Engineering Not as a Questio...

In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are inherently creative, whereas others, such as science or engineering, are not. Another assumption is that creativity is a function of one's ability to fantasize, which is to say,...

 Removing Prepositions in Defining Thought

Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he responded, “I think in thoughts.” It was a wonderful answer, but also wonderfully uninformative. What the hell’s a thought then? How does it carry information? Is it like ...

 Engineering New Ways to Think About Things

One cluster looks, for example, for new ways of representing and understanding complex systems. A second cluster aims for more access to knowledge by undoing contemporary media’s restrictions (such as the restriction of the screen, which produces, with its peek-a-boo access to complexity, impenetrable forms of knowledge such as the trillions of lines of code, written on screens and then stared at on screens). A third cluster explores new forms of representing time, and a fourth one more eff...

 Myths About Learning Quiz

True or false: When it comes to learning, metacognition (e.g., thinking about thinking) can be just as important as intelligence. RIGHT! True Research on growth mindset by Carol Dweck and others shows that people’s beliefs about the nature of intelligence affect their level of effort and in turn their performance. False What is the best way to learn from some text? Read and reread the text. RIGHT! Explain key ideas of the text to yourself while reading. Restating the text in...