Word: minding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts...
Piaget's insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. By the end of a wide-ranging and remarkably prolific research career that spanned nearly 75 years--from his first scientific publication at age 10 to work still in progress when he died at 84--Piaget had developed several new fields of science: developmental psychology, cognitive theory and what came to be called genetic epistemology. Although not an educational reformer, he championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today's education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the displacement...
...Simon in Alfred Binet's child-psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their reasoning processes, he began to suspect that the key to human knowledge might be discovered by observing how the child's mind develops...
...examined nonjudgmentally, yet with a philosopher's analytic rigor. Since Piaget, the territory has been widely colonized by those who write about women's ways of knowing, Afrocentric ways of knowing, even the computer's ways of knowing. Indeed, artificial intelligence and the information-processing model of the mind owe more to Piaget than its proponents may realize...
...thinking of theorems as patterns of symbols, Godel discovered that it is possible for a statement in a formal system not only to talk about itself, but also to deny its own theoremhood. The consequences of this unexpected tangle lurking inside mathematics were rich, mind-boggling and--rather oddly--very sad for the Martians. Why sad? Because the Martians--like Russell and Whitehead--had hoped with all their hearts that their formal system would capture all true statements of mathematics. If Godel's statement is true, it is not a theorem in their textbooks and will never, ever show...