“Even if it were clear what was meant, this sort of treatment would seem closer to describing what is taking place than to explaining it. I do not want to deny the value of describing a phenomenon; rich descriptions facilitate theorizing, and there is no more astute observer than Piaget. But in my view explanations of cognitive phenomena should specify the ways in which functional capacities operate. Piaget and Inhelder’s account is more on the level of intentionality, and hence is open to multiple interpretations at the level of the function of the brain. The do not specify how interiorized imitation operates, nor have they specified the format or content of the image. This level of discourse will never produce process adequacy, and hence seems of limited value.”

—  Stephen Kosslyn

Source: Image and Mind. 1980, p. 411

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Even if it were clear what was meant, this sort of treatment would seem closer to describing what is taking place than …" by Stephen Kosslyn?
Stephen Kosslyn photo
Stephen Kosslyn12
American psychologist 1948

Related quotes

John Von Neumann photo

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

"Method in the Physical Sciences", in The Unity of Knowledge (1955), ed. L. G. Leary (Doubleday & Co., New York), p. 157

Noam Chomsky photo

“[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

who differ on much else
Source: Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Rules and Representations (1980), p. 3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983).

“But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting. High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.”

Sean Reardon American sociologist

No Rich Child Left Behind, 2013

Kamila Shamsie photo

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”

Kamila Shamsie book Burnt Shadows

Source: Burnt Shadows

Heinz von Foerster photo

“What we need now is the description of the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.”

Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) Austrian American scientist and cybernetician

Source: 1980s, Notes on an epistemology for living things, 1981, p.258

Arthur James Balfour photo

“A distinguished agnostic once observed that in these days Christianity was not refuted, it was explained. Doubtless the difference between the two operations was, in his view, a matter rather of form than of substance. That which was once explained needed, he thought, no further refutation. And certainly we are all made happy when a belief, which seems to us obviously absurd, is shown nevertheless to be natural in those who hold it. But we must be careful. True beliefs are effects no less than false. In this respect magic and mathematics are on a level. Both demand scientific explanation; both are susceptible of it. Manifestly, then, we cannot admit that explanation may be treated as a kind of refutation. /…/ This way lies universal scepticism. Thus would all intellectual values be utterly destroyed.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

“Executive processes are specialized functions in what we know as organizations. If these functions are to be adequately described, the description must be in terms of the nature of the organization itself.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. vii

“If two classes express the same information, the most descriptive name should be kept. For example, although customer might describe a person taking an airline flight, Passenger is more descriptive.”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

Source: Object-oriented modeling and design (1990), p. 153; as cited in: Roger Chiang, ‎Keng Siau, ‎Bill C. Hardgrave (2009) Systems Analysis and Design. p. 163

Rollo May photo

“I, for one, believe we vastly overemphasize the human being’s concern with security and survival satisfaction because they so neatly fit our cause-and-effect way of thinking. I believe Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were more accurate when they described man as the organism makes certain values — prestige, power, tenderness — more important than pleasure and even more important than survival itself.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 17
Context: Certainly the neurotic, anxious child is compulsively concerned with security, for example; and certainly the neurotic adult, and we who study him, read our later formulations back in the unsuspecting mind of the child. But is not the normal child just as truly interested in moving out into the world, exploring, following his curiosity and sense of adventure- going out “to learn to shiver and to shake,: as the nursery rhyme puts it? And if you block these needs of the child, you get a traumatic reaction from him just as you do when you take away his security. I, for one, believe we vastly overemphasize the human being’s concern with security and survival satisfaction because they so neatly fit our cause-and-effect way of thinking. I believe Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were more accurate when they described man as the organism makes certain values — prestige, power, tenderness — more important than pleasure and even more important than survival itself. My thesis here is that we can understand repression, for example, only on the deeper level of meaning of the human being’s potentialities. In this respect, “being” is to be defined as the individual’s “pattern of potentialities.” … in my work in psychotherapy there appears more and more evidence that anxiety in our day arises not so much out of fear of lack of libidinal satisfactions or security, but rather out of the patient’s fear of his own powers, and the conflicts that arise from that fear. This may be the particular “neurotic personality of our time” – the neurotic pattern of contemporary “outer directed” organizational man.

James Burke (science historian) photo

“But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument — a new system — that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian, than ever before in history, could also blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards — and ethics and facts and truth — all depend on what your view of the world is — and that there may be as many views of that, as there are people.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 10 - Worlds Without End

Related topics