164
Chapter Notes
4. The Mind-Made Firmament
1. Many psychological experiments over the years have shown that when a
human subject views a scene, the objects in it are recognized spontaneously,
and so are their identities. This research may be found in the article “On the
semantics of a glance at a scene” by Irving Biederman. Further details are in
the article “Global shape cannot be attended without object identification” by
Boucart and Humphreys. (See in References.)
2. Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher who wrote widely
on language. Much of his philosophy relating to language may be found in his
book Word and Object.
3. Konrad Lorenz was one of the first and greatest ethologists—that is, a
scientist of animal behavior. Among his several books, the most celebrated,
perhaps, is the volume titled On Aggression. Since Lorenz was writing in the
1960s, it was his assumption that genes were the only source of inherited
information. Today we know that many behavioral traits—even phobias—are
transmitted “epigenetically” by certain markers which find their way onto the
DNA.
4. The structure of categories, and the question of how they are formed by
human and animal minds, is a central question of modern psychology. A
classical study of categorization is described in the book Classification and
Cognition by W. K. Estes. However, the entire discipline was transformed
by the doctoral thesis that Eleanor Rosch presented at Harvard in 1969. She
found that basic objects have a psychological centrality that transcends cultural
differences and applies to all people. She also showed that a basic principle of
categorization is the tendency of all people to classify things by their prototypes.
5. The question of insect cognition is of great interest to scientists and is a very
active area of research. The intelligence of bees, in particular, has been amply
documented. Bees navigate with the help of an internal cognitive map, and use
sophisticated deduction to discover new pathways using the map. They have
good memories and are surprisingly capable learners. It has even been found
that they have a sense of number—including the number zero. This surprising
fact is described in the magazine Science in a 2018 article titled “Numerical
ordering of zero in honey bees”.
6. These ideas are explained in Quine’s Word and Object, especially in Chapter 2
entitled “Translation and Meaning”.
7. This insight was made widely known by the American philosopher Hilary
Putnam. In the literature of philosophy, it is known as internal realism. It is
discussed at length in Hilary Putnam’s book “Reason, Truth and History”.
8. As explained previously, we are biologically “wired” to be totally committed
to the belief that what we perceive is precisely what there is in the world. In the
Chapter Notes
4. The Mind-Made Firmament
1. Many psychological experiments over the years have shown that when a
human subject views a scene, the objects in it are recognized spontaneously,
and so are their identities. This research may be found in the article “On the
semantics of a glance at a scene” by Irving Biederman. Further details are in
the article “Global shape cannot be attended without object identification” by
Boucart and Humphreys. (See in References.)
2. Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher who wrote widely
on language. Much of his philosophy relating to language may be found in his
book Word and Object.
3. Konrad Lorenz was one of the first and greatest ethologists—that is, a
scientist of animal behavior. Among his several books, the most celebrated,
perhaps, is the volume titled On Aggression. Since Lorenz was writing in the
1960s, it was his assumption that genes were the only source of inherited
information. Today we know that many behavioral traits—even phobias—are
transmitted “epigenetically” by certain markers which find their way onto the
DNA.
4. The structure of categories, and the question of how they are formed by
human and animal minds, is a central question of modern psychology. A
classical study of categorization is described in the book Classification and
Cognition by W. K. Estes. However, the entire discipline was transformed
by the doctoral thesis that Eleanor Rosch presented at Harvard in 1969. She
found that basic objects have a psychological centrality that transcends cultural
differences and applies to all people. She also showed that a basic principle of
categorization is the tendency of all people to classify things by their prototypes.
5. The question of insect cognition is of great interest to scientists and is a very
active area of research. The intelligence of bees, in particular, has been amply
documented. Bees navigate with the help of an internal cognitive map, and use
sophisticated deduction to discover new pathways using the map. They have
good memories and are surprisingly capable learners. It has even been found
that they have a sense of number—including the number zero. This surprising
fact is described in the magazine Science in a 2018 article titled “Numerical
ordering of zero in honey bees”.
6. These ideas are explained in Quine’s Word and Object, especially in Chapter 2
entitled “Translation and Meaning”.
7. This insight was made widely known by the American philosopher Hilary
Putnam. In the literature of philosophy, it is known as internal realism. It is
discussed at length in Hilary Putnam’s book “Reason, Truth and History”.
8. As explained previously, we are biologically “wired” to be totally committed
to the belief that what we perceive is precisely what there is in the world. In the