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262How does the environment affect the person?In L. T. Winegar & Jaan Valsiner (eds.), Children's Development Within Social Contexts: Metatheoretical, Theoretical and Methodological Issues, Erlbaum. 1992.How Does the Environment Affect the Person? Mark H. Bickhard invited chapter in Children's Development within Social Contexts: Metatheoretical, Theoretical and Methodological Issues, Erlbaum. edited by L. T. Winegar, J. Valsiner, in press
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116The Emergence of Contentful ExperienceIn T. Kitamura (ed.), What Should Be Computed to Understand and Model Brain Function?, World Scientific. 2001.There are many facets to mental life and mental experience. In this chapter, I attempt to account for some central characteristics among those facets. I argue that normative function and representation are emergent in particular forms of the self-maintenance of far from thermodynamic equilibrium systems in their essential far-from-equilibrium conditions. The nature of representation that is thereby modeled
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127A Process Model of the Emergence of RepresentationIn G. L. Farre & T. Oksala (eds.), Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy, Organization, Selected and Edited Papers From the Echo Iii Conference, Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica. pp. 3-7. 1998.Two challenges to the very possibility of emergence are addressed, one metaphysical and one logical. The resolution of the metaphysical challenge requires a shift to a process metaphysics, while the logical challenge highlights normative emergence, and requires a shift to more powerful logical tools -- in particular, that of implicit definition. Within the framework of a process metaphysics, two levels of normative emergence are outlined: that of function and that of representation
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175Some Consequences (and Enablings) of Process MetaphysicsAxiomathes 21 (1): 3-32. 2011.The interactivist model has explored a number of consequences of process metaphysics. These include reversals of some fundamental metaphysical assumptions dominant since the ancient Greeks, and multiple further consequences throughout the metaphysics of the world, minds, and persons. This article surveys some of these consequences, ranging from issues regarding entities and supervenience to the emergence of normative phenomena such as representation, rationality, persons, and ethics
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42If human cognition is adaptive, can human knowledge consist of encodings?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 488-489. 1991.
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78Operational definitions were a neo-Machean development that connected with the positivism of Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism failed, with the failure of operational definitions being just one of multiple and multifarious failures of Logical Positivism more broadly. Operationalism, however, has continued to seduce psychology more than half a century after it was repudiated by philosophers of science, including the very Logical Positivists who had first taken it seriously. It carries with i…Read more
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34Critical principles: on the negative sideNew Ideas in Psychology 20 1-34. 2002.neglected aspect: knowledge of error, or ‘‘negative’’ knowledge. The development of knowledge of what counts as error occurs via a kind of internal variation and selection, or quasi-evolutionary, process. Processes of reflection generate a hierarchy of principles of error.
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162The dynamic emergence of representationIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind, Elsevier. pp. 71--90. 2004.A final version of this paper is in press as: Bickhard, M. H.. The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger
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41You can't get there from here: Foundationalism and developmentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 124-125. 2011.The thesis of our commentary is that the framework used to address what are taken by Carey to be the open issues is highly problematic. The presumed necessity of an innate stock of representational primitives fails to account for the emergence of representation out of a nonrepresentational base. This failure manifests itself in problematic ways throughout Carey's book.
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