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03 Dec 09

Education for the 21st Century: Balancing Content Knowledge with Skills | Britannica Blog

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21st century skills critique education cognition

Flawed Assumptions Undergird the Program at the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills | Britannica Blog

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21st century skills education critique learning cognition

26 Aug 09

When Cognitive Science Enters Politics — Rockridge Institute

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framing cognition language politics

In thinking, the old view comes originally from Descartes’ 17th
Century rationalism. A view of thought as symbolic logic was
formalized by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege around the turn of the
20th Century, and a rationalist interpretation was revived by Chomsky
in the 1950’s. In that view, thought is a matter of (as Pinker puts it)
“old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason.” Here reason is seen as
the manipulation of meaningless symbols, as in symbolic logic.

The new view is that reason is embodied in a nontrivial way. The
brain gives rise to thought in the form of conceptual frames,
image-schemas, prototypes, conceptual metaphors, and conceptual blends.
The process of thinking is not algorithmic symbol manipulation, but
rather neural computation, using brain mechanisms. Jerome Feldman’s
recent MIT Press book, From Molecules to Metaphors, discusses such mechanisms.

Contrary
to Descartes, reason uses these mechanisms, not formal logic. Reason
is mostly unconscious, and as Antonio Damasio has written in Descartes’
Error, rationality requires emotion.
“Old-fashioned …
universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the
same way, that differences in world-view don’t matter. But anybody
tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody
reasons the same way and that world-view does matter.
5 more annotations...
- n short, I’m a realist, both about how the mind works and how the
  world works. Given that the mind works by frames and metaphors, the
  challenge is to use such a mind to accurately characterize how the
  world works. That is what “reframing” is about — correcting framing
  that distorts truths and finding framing that allows truth to be seen.
- “Spin
  is the manipulative use of a frame. Spin is used when something embarrassing
  has happened or has been said, and it’s an attempt to put an innocent
  frame on it—that is, to make the embarrassing occurrence sound normal
  or good.
  
  Propaganda
  is another manipulative use of framing. Propaganda is an attempt to
  get the public to adopt a frame that is not true and is known not to
  be true, for the purpose of gaining or maintaining political control.
  
  The
  reframing I am suggesting is neither spin nor propaganda. Progressives
  need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe,
  frames that express what their moral views really are. I strongly recommend
  against any deceptive framing.”
- “Surface frames are associated with phrases like “war on terror”
  that both activate and depend critically on deep frames. These are the
  most basic frames that constitute a moral worldview or a political
  philosophy. Deep frames define one’s overall “common sense.” Without
  deep frames there is nothing for surface frames to hang onto. Slogans
  do not make sense without the appropriate deep frames in place. “
- The results coming out of neuroscience and the cognitive sciences
  show that, far from there being “old-fashioned disembodied universal
  reason,” people really reason using frames, prototypes, image-schemas,
  and metaphors — and bring emotion into the mix as an inherent part of
  rationality. All of these mechanisms of thought are embodied —
  resulting from the nature of brain structure and neural computation on
  the one hand, and embodied experience on the other. They lie outside of
  the mechanisms of formal logic, which is the basis of the contemporary
  version of 17th Century rationalist thought.
- “higher rationality,” a mode of thought that
  takes into account the understanding of the view of mind that comes
  from cognitive science and neuroscience — a rationality that talks
  about frame-based and metaphorical thought explicitly and discusses
  their effects, especially in politics. But this is only possible if the
  true nature of thought is widely understood, and that takes honest,
  open public discussion.