Computers, Minds, and Texts
Preliminary Reflections
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4990672 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William Paulson (0000-0002-9643-5441, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1989 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 291 |
| Publication date | 1989-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/469102 |
| OpenAlex | W2315684882 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
the Delphic and Socratic injunction to Know thyself, one must face a double challenge of reflexivity and complexity: the mind is at once subject and object of knowledge, and the mind as object to be known is as rich in structure and variety as the mind as knowing subject. Attempts to know the mind thus proceed by detours, by exteriorizations, by models that simplify in the interest of gaining partial, figural insights. In this respect the study of the mind follows a path common to many other forms of inquiry, differing mainly in the radical difficulty of passing from indirect, modeled, or figurative approaches to something like direct knowledge. Fontenelle, writing in the early eighteenth century, noted that the fables of antiquity and modern, Newtonian share a common principle: explain the unknown things of nature by those that we have before our eyes, and we transport into Physics the ideas with which experience provides us. For the ancient fabulists, this known experience centered on the life and movement of the human body, whence the anthropomorphism of their explanations of nature; for the moderns, known experience includes weights, springs, and levers can do, whence the mechanicism of theirs. We have always represented the unknown in the figure of what was known to us.1 For Plato and Aristotle, memory and mind could be compared to a wax tablet, a medium of writing.2 The tabula rasa was to be a standard figure of philosophy until at least Locke, who compared the mind
Cognitive science · Linguistics · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 1990 - 2011 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |