Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas
What is this about How badly we’re getting history While the world of history and anthropology of the last 30-40 years has completely redrawn the picture of our past, the common perception of the overall shape of history and the development of humanity is still firmly rooted in the view that took hold in the…
Read more →TLDR; Reports that AI beat humans on certain benchmarks or very specialised tasks don’t mean that AI is actually better at those tasks than any individual human. They certainly don’t mean that AI is approaching the task with any of the same understanding of the world people do. People actually perform 100% on the tasks…
Read more →Note: This is a slightly edited version of a post that first appeared on Medium . It elaborates and exemplifies examples I gave in the more recent posts on metaphor and explanation and understanding . One of the less fortunate consequences of the popularity of the conceptual metaphor paradigm (which is also the one I…
Read more →Recently, I've been exploring the notion of explanation and understanding . I was (partly implicitly) relying on the notion of 'mental representations' as built through deliberate practice. My plan was to write next about how I think we can reconceptualize deliberate practice in such a way that it draws on a richer conception of 'mental…
Read more →This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure. (opening sentence of the preface…
Read more →TL;DR This post outlines 5 levels or types of understanding to help us better to think about the role of metaphor in explanation : Associative understanding: Place a concept in context without any understanding. Dictionary understanding: Repeat definitions, give examples, and make basic connections. Inferential understanding: Make useful inferences based on knowledge about - but…
Read more →TL;DR There are at least 3 uses of metaphor in the educational process: 1. Invitation to enter; 2. An instrument to grasp knowledge with; 3. Catalyst to transform understanding. Many educators assume that 1 is enough but it rarely leads to any useful understanding. Explanation is a salient part of the educational process to such…
Read more →Background This is a lightly edited version of a comment posted on Martin Haspelmath's blog post " Against traditional grammar – and for normal science in linguistics ". In it he offers a critique of the current linguistic scene as being unclear as to its goals and in need of better definitions. He proposes 'normal…
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