Normativity and Mind

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 2004, Vol 49(2), 156–158. Reviews the book “Duality of the Mind: A Bottom Up Approach Toward Cognition” by Ron Sun (covered in its original form in record 2001-05104-000). As is apt for a work with a thematic focus on dualities, this book proceeds on two levels. The first is concerned with a computer model of problem solving and learning that the author has been developing for some years, called (in its current version) Connectionistic Learning with Adaptive Rule Induction ON-line, or CLARION. Grounding the concern with duality, this computer model consists of two strata, intending to capture implicit (lower stratum) and explicit (higher stratum) aspects of representation, learning, and problem solving. The second level of the book is concerned with broad and deep issues in the philosophy of mind, such as the purported Heideggerian nature of representation, the nature of consciousness, and sociocultural factors in cognition- and the implications and connections between the computational model and these broader issues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)