🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22JAN93.20070220.0093@VM1.MCGILL.CA> QWFK@MUSICT.MCGILL.CA (QWFK000) writes:
>Christopher Green says:
>"Analogy, judgement,
>reasoning, concept formation etc. are in awful shape, as far as I'm conc
>I have seen little in those areas that I would recognize as a theory...
>and they have been my central areas of interest, so it's not as though
>I'm not familiar with their literature."
>
>This comment interests me because for a while now I've had a nagging
>worry that a lot of the so-called theories in these fields were not
>exactly theories.  The problem is, I can't put my finger on the
>reason why.  I think it partly has to do with the overuse/abuse of
>"models".  But there's a lot more to it than that.  Chris, how do
>explanations in those fields fall short of your definition of a
>theory?
>
Obsessive use of an unexplicated notion of "model"  ("schema", etc.)
is at the core.  The "theories" put forward by researchers such a 
Johnson-Laird, Lakoff, Rosch, Gick & Holyoak, Cheng & Holyoak lack 
rigor in the extreme. To act like a Hempelian for a moment, theories
have got to have formal objects manipulated by formal rules or they
are in grave danger of relying upon our intuitions for their
explanatory power. Theories by all those mentioned above do exactly
this and, thus, are popular and influential without really adding
much to our knowledge. Of course, Lakoff would say I'm in the
grip of an outdated "objectivist" ideology, but I have yet to see
anything offered that can adequately replace it.

-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1