======== WDL Dis. #19 (Bcc: all WDL participants) ====== From thelene@indiana.edu Sun Mar 5 22:25:07 2000 Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 22:30:32 -0500 From: Esther Thelen To: Dr John J Weng Subject: Re: WDL Dis. #17 Dear readers, I think none of us would disagree in the necessity of understanding the "initial conditions" of development at whatever point in development we conveniently choose and at whatever level of analysis we focus on. And probably no one will disagree that the conservative forces of evolution will have imposed considerable constraints on our organism at each time and at each level. Our job is to describe those constraints in ways that are true to the organism's biological heritage. The problem for those of us dealing at the behavioral level is how much we can infer from behavior. The problem with looking for any kind of "knowledge" is that "knowledge" is a construct rather distantly removed from behavior and whose mutual mappings are ill-specified. It is always the experimenter who chooses the task that is supposed to uniquely demonstrate knowledge ("innate" or otherwise). But this often reduces to an exercise in task construction, and can only end up in arguments about whose task is more priviledged. For example, there are endless debates on whether reaching or looking is a better indicator of "the object concept" in infants and thus when "they really have it." I think we will make much more progress if we stick to behavior, where we can understand in clear detail what the organism can and cannot do under various circumstances. We will also have better data to systematically link with other levels of analysis. Esther -- Esther Thelen Professor Department of Psychology Indiana University Bloomington IN 47405 Phone: 812 855 2042 Lab: 812 855 0817 (Assistant: Melissa Foster) Fax: 812 855 4691 Email: Thelene@indiana.edu