Rob Wilson's Boundaries of the Mind is a thorough treatment of the role and conceptualization of the individual in psychology.
It was the first book in a planned three-volume set, entitled The Individual in the Fragile Sciences. The second volume was going to examine the individual in biological sciences and the third would have covered the individual's role in social sciences.
The book is divided into four parts:
- Part I motivates the study of the individual in psychology, provides a framework for contrasting nativist and empiricist views and provides a history of psychology that traces its gradual independence from physiology and philosophy to a subject in its own right.
- Part II spans topics for which Wilson is already well-known: the individualism-externalism debate, narrow and wide content, and the metaphysics of realization.
- Part III explores the consequences of this radical form of externalism from the perspective of various research programs in psychology: memory, development, and theory of mind. Wilson applies his externalist framework to stake out his own conception of consciousness, the TESEE acronym: Temporally Extended, Scaffolded, and Embodied and Embedded.
- Part IV closes the book with a discussion of the cognitive metaphor in the biological and social sciences.
TESEE
TESEE is an approach to the processes of awareness/introspection, meta-representation and attention. It is continuous with the embedded and embodied approach to memory, cognitive development, and theory of mind.
Its complicated processes of awareness extend beyond the immediate subject in space and time. They exploit information-rich external bits of language and navigation equipment (the scaffolds) and rely on dynamic relations between the subject's body and the environment in which it is located.
This approach can be extended to phenomenal consciousness, arguing that a phenomenal property is not an intrinsic property of experience but rather a feature of the representation of its objects. As such, phenomenal properties inherit their importance from the intentional contents to which they apply. According to representationalists such as Fred Dretske, William Lycan, and Michael Tye - phenomenal consciousness is externalistic. Thus Wilson thinks that this global externalism goes both too far and not far enough.
TESEE conceptions of vision and visual consciousness relies on the sensorimotor theory of visual consciousness of philosophers Alva Noё and Susan Hurley, and psychologist J. Kevin O'Regan, arguing that vision, like touch, involves active and dynamic exploration of the contingent features of the environment.
References
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 16 July 2007, at 20:10.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by PediaView.com. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with PediaView.com.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.