Page 44 - Deep Learning

The Nature of the Enterprise 27

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human behavior. The disposition to think that the structure of mind mirrors
the structure of the environment and that the former is therefore explainable
in terms of the latter appears in several forms throughout history and contin-
ues to be recycled. 10
The fundamental mistake of the environmentalist approach is that it
replaces the goal of explaining mind with the goal of explaining behavior. This
move confuses means and ends. The end goal of psychology is to understand
how the mind works; proposing explanations of overt and hence observable
behavior is the method psychologists use to subject their theories of mind to
the test of evidence. It is not an end in itself. Even if it were, reduction to the
environment is not possible. The environmentalist approach is refuted by the
observation that people are guided by goals as well as by the situation at hand.
A goal is a mental representation of some desired, future state of affairs. Goals
are cognitive constructions, not events in the world. Furthermore, a person
changes his response to the environment over time, and different individuals
react differently to one and the same environment. Such basic facts cannot be
understood without postulating significant internal processing.
A related form of escape is to replace the description of mind with a descrip-
tion of the social environment or the surrounding culture. This approach has
long flourished in social anthropology and related sciences, and in the last two
decades of the 20th century the members of the so-called situated cognition
school gave it a particularly radical formulation: We act in the context of groups
of different kinds, and we carry out the actions that are considered appropriate
in those groups. According to the situated cognition view, to learn is to adopt a
set of related behaviors – a practice – that is valued in some community of prac-
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titioners. So far, so good. The radical claim is that the process of passing from
peripheral participation in a group to being a central member of that group
can be described without reference to the novice’s mind. There are no mental
processes; no internal mechanisms need to be described to explain the adop-
tion of a new practice. Once the interactions within the relevant community of
practitioners have been fully described, there is nothing left to describe.
The error in the sociocultural approach is once again the failure to
acknowledge that complex systems like people need to be understood at dif-
ferent levels of description. Consider a car. There are many questions one can
ask about the relations between cars. For example, how will the traffic flow in
city X change when the new motorway opens up? The traffic analyst’s answer
takes the car as the unit of analysis and describes the impact of the new high-
way in terms of the density of cars on a given road over time. The question
is posed and answered at the level of the traffic system. On the other hand,