Behind the mirror: a search for a natural history of human knowledge by Konrad Lorenz - ISBN 0156117762 - Harvest/HBJ 1978

book
http://books.google.com/books?id=ID&pg=PA

Motivation

Evolutionary Epistemology page on Wikipedia.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

  • Introduction - Epistemological prolegomena
    • "The physiological mechanism whose function it is to understand the real world is no less real than the world itself. This very obverse is the subject of my book." (p19)
  • Life as a process of learning
    • "as a Viennese friend of mine once put it, <<Life feeds on negative entropy>>" (p21)
  • The creation of new system characteristics
    • "Thorpe demonstrated that the most important creative principle in evolution is the emergence of a totality from a mass of different parts which become more and more dissimilar in the process - as well as more dependent on each other." (p32)
  • Strata of existence
    • Summary at the end of the chapter
  • Short-term information gain
  • Adaptive modifications of behavior
  • Feedback of experience: conditioning by reinforcement
  • The roots of conceptual thought
  • The human mind
  • Culture as a living system
  • Factors making for the invariance of culture
  • Culture and change
  • Symbols and language
  • The aimlessness of cultural development
  • Oscillation and fluctuation as cognitive functions
  • Behind the mirror
    • quoting Donald Campbell, including in references Evolutionary epistemology (to check too)

See also

Overall remarks and questions

  • this? that?

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Categories

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