Mike Rinck's paper: "Spatial Situation Models" 2005

in Shah & Miyake: "The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking". Excellent article. Emphasises the spatially cognitive aspect of language-comprehension, and the exploratory, fragmentary, active, goal-directed nature of imagining spatial situations from descriptions.

General remarks on cognitive psychology... Based on the various articles, the psychological level of explanation is directed at around the level of "behaviour attractors" in thinking. This is a useful level, even though I get the impression that these researchers find the phenomenology of thought as confusing as I do. Some researchers seem addicted to the "mental images as pictures" model, but not all, e.g. Tversky, and Rinck, who proposes associative mechanisms in spatial situation model construction.

Spatial cognition and the psychological perspectives

Taking a bit of time to adjust to this psychology style of thinking about space (Shah & Miyake's book). Had to skip a few chapters (bit lazy there, motivation a bit elsewhere, must be london calling and the footie starting up again), and even the good ones need a bit of wood-chewing (Barbara Tversky article excellent, Newcombe & Learmonth good).

Interesting this continuing robots-n-philosophy dialogue with Haikonen. Mirrors, he's been doing a smoke and mirrors game for the AAAI symposium. This time I think an email will do, only a cupla points to raise there and anyway need to collect my writing strength a bit for the ol' "to-be-started".

Thompson on egocentric and allocentric space

see p.391 - emphasises the need to recognise others as having egocentric spaces in order to conceive of oneself as inhabiting an intersubjective space.

Review of Haikonen's article completed and sent, well done me. let's see what he thinks about it.

Remarks on a few articles

The journal "Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences" has some downloadable articles from Vol 6 (2007)... cue downloadings varieuse... Siewert, Noë, Thompson, all concerned to discuss Dennett's heterophenomenological method; and Dennett's reply to various authors from that issue.

As far as i can see, others criticise Dennett for his de-emphasis of first-person reporting as a possible methodology, while Dennett, typically, seeks to correct what he sees as the various misinterpretations of his method, with his own brand of gentle needling of opponents combined with imaginative "what about this?" scenarios.

Particularly enjoyed Dennett's version on the "I am great"-storyline ([c] Dylan Drummond, Andy Thompson, and men throughout the language phase of our natural history), where in conversation Ned Block says "The letters seemed blurry" as a first-person report and Dennett replies: "So, did they seem to you to be difficult to read because they were blurry, or did they seem blurry because they were difficult to read?" - goddim!

Also Dennett makes an amusing remark about how our cultural and intersubjective backgrounds may affect a supposedly controlled experiment - delays in word completion, where the words presented are "cun-" and "shi-".

Now then, Haikonen's article... plenty of relevant issues there to be considered... next week's essay project.