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176Some 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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43If human cognition is adaptive, can human knowledge consist of encodings?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 488-489. 1991.
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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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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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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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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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53If the general arguments concerning the involvement of variation and selection in explanations of “fit” are valid, then variation and selection explanations should be appropriate, or at least potentially appropriate, outside the paradigm historistic domains of biology and knowledge. In this discussion, I wish to indicate some potential roles for variation and selection in foundational physics – specifically in quantum field theory. I will not be attempting any full coherent ontology for quantum …Read more
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102Mind as processIn F.G. Riffert & Marcel Weber (eds.), Searching for New Contrasts, Vienna: Peter Lang. pp. 285-294. 2002.assumptions about the phenomena of interest with process models. Thus, phlogiston has been replaced by combustion, caloric by random thermal motion, and vital fluid by far- from-equilibrium self-reproducing organizations of process. The most significant exceptions to this historical pattern are found in studies of the mind. Here, substance assumptions are still ubiquitous, ranging from models of representation to those of emotions to personality and psychopathology. Substance assumptions do pern…Read more
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33Representation: Emulation and anticipationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (3): 418-418. 2004.We address the issue of the normativity of representation and how Grush might address it for emulations as constituting representations. We then proceed to several more detailed issues concerning the learning of emulations, a possible empirical counterexample to Grush's model, and the choice of Kalman filters as the form of model-based control.
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