Literacy and intelligence

“In learning to read and write one is learning not only a skill but learning to think about language and mind in a new way. This learning is summarized in the concept of metarepresentation. Whereas language is about, and in that sense represents, the world, writing is a representation of language, hence, a metarepresentation (Adams, Freiman, & Pressley, 1998; Homer & Olson, 1999). To oversimplify somewhat, one is learning to think not only about the world but learning to think about
one’s representations of the world. Literacy is, in this sense, a pro typically metarepresentational way of thinking.” - Olson, D.R., 2005. Technology and Intelligence in a Literate Society. In Intelligence and Technology: The Impact of Tools on the Nature and Development of Human Abilities. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 61.

Technology and cognition

“Was there ever a time when human beings existed and they did not use technology, broadly defined, to aid cognition? Presumably as soon as humans learned to count and to measure, they made devices to help them do so and to remember the results. The development of symbol systems and written language was certainly among the most noteworthy technological achievements of prehistory; there is no other technological advance whose effects on human history rival those of this one. But there are countless examples of artifacts (devices, systems, procedures) that have been invented throughout history to facilitate the performance of cognitive tasks or to amplify human cognition in one or another way…The relationship between technology and cognition is one of dependency that goes both ways. There would be little in the way of technology in the absence of cognition. And cognition would be greatly handicapped if all its technological aids were suddenly to disappear. Technology is a product of cognition, and its production is a cyclic, self-perpetuating process. Cognition invents technology, the technology invented amplifies the ability of cognition to invent additional technology that amplifies further the ability of cognition…and so it goes.” - Nickerson, R.S., 2005. Technology and Cognition Amplification. In Intelligence and Technology: The Impact of Tools on the Nature and Development of Human Abilities. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 25.

Everyday Management

“A central argument of In Search of Management is that it is not helpful to think of ‘management’ as a special area of knowledge and practice whIch uses skills and knowledge which are essentially different from the types of skill and knowledge that people use elsewhere in social life. We might say that a skilled manager in a work organisation, once one goes beyond specific organisational or technical knowledge, is a human being generally skilled at influencing events and people, thinking economically, acting with political astuteness , and adept at building relationships of trust and shared obligation with all of those they deal with. To understand this, however, means setting our appreciation of what those who are employed as ‘managers’ in the broader context of how human beings generally have culturally ‘evolved’ and have continually needed to manage their whole lives and identities.” - Watson, T.J., 2001. In Search of Management, Cengage Learning EMEA., p. xvi.

Outfits of Symbolism

“However far we go back in recorded history, we are within the period of high grade functioning of mankind, far removed from mere animal savagery. Also, within that period it would be difficult to demonstrate that mankind has improved upon its inborn mental capacity. Yet there can be no doubt that there has been an immense expansion of the outfit which the environment provides for the service of thought. This outfit can be summarized under the headings, modes of communication, physical and mental, writing, preservation of documents, variety of modes of literature, critical thought, systematic thought, constructive thought, history, comparison of diverse languages, mathematical symbolism, improved technology providing physical ease, This last list is obviously composed of many partially redundant and overlapping items. But it serves to remind us of the various ways in which we have at our service facilities for thought and suggestions for thought, far beyond those at hand for our predecessors who lived anywhere from two to five thousand years ago. Indeed the last two hundred years has added to this outfit in a way which may create a new epoch unless mankind degenerates, Of course, a large share of this outfit had already accumulated between two and three thousand years ago, It is the brilliant use which the leading men of that millennium made of their opportunities which makes us doubt of any improvement in the native intelligence of mankind.” (p. 55) - Whitehead, A.N., 1933. Adventures of Ideas, MacMillan., p. 55, quoted in Winchester, I., 1985. Atlantans, Centaurians, and the litron bomb: some personal and social implications of literacy. In Literacy, Language, and Learning. Cambridge University Press, pp. 34–49.

Epistemic monopolies

“The thesis that there is only one kind of knowledge, only one science, and only one scientific method has been challenged in the past on the grounds that the natural scientific approach is not applicable to the human sciences and their distinct goal of understanding actors’ meanings in concrete historical situations…Nonetheless, the image of a unified natural science still informs the social sciences and contributes to their dominant theoretical and methodological orientation. The debates raging over realist, pragmatist, skepticist, or perspectival interpretations of science all tend to assume science is a unitary enterprise to which epistemic labels can be applied across the board. The enterprise, however, has a geography of its own. In fact, it is not one enterprise but many, a whole landscape-or market-of independent epistemic monopolies producing vastly different products.” - Knorr-Cetina, K.D., 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Harvard University Press., p. 3-4.

Material posthumanism

“Although I think that serious consideration needs to be given to how certain characteristics associated with the liberal subject, especially agency and choice, can be articulated within a posthuman context, I do not mourn the passing of a concept so deeply entwined with projects of domination and oppression. Rather, I view the present moment as a critical juncture when interventions might be made to keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity. I see the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects… my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” - Hayles, N.K., 1999. How we Became Posthuman, University Of Chicago Press., p. 5

Wandering objectivism

“The Western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a traveling lens…Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another. Here is the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is, partial connection.” - Haraway, D., 1988. Situated Knowledges. Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp.575–599.

Unintended (philosophical) consequences

“The history of thought and culture is, as Hegel showed with great brilliance, a changing pattern of great liberating ideas which inevitably turn into suffocating straight jackets, and so stimulate their own destruction by new emancipating, and at the same time, enslaving conceptions. The first step to understanding of men is the bringing to consciousness of the model or models that dominate and penetrate their thought and action. Like all attempts to make men aware of the categories in which they think, it is a difficult and sometimes painful activity, likely to produce deeply disquieting results.” - Bernstein, R.J., 1978. The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 57

Disembodied machines

“What was clearly new about the Turing model of computation was its successful disembodiment of the machine. For practical purposes, this was not as complete as the post-Turing theoretician likes to pretend: the reembodied computer that is now a familiar feature of the modern world was hard won by pioneering engineers. But, for the purposes of the stored program computer, and for the proof of incomputability of the halting set, the essential disembodiment was that delivering program-data duality. This playing down of distinction between information and process has been taken further, and become a familiar feature of programming and theory.” - Cooper, S.B., 2012. Turing's Titanic Machine? Communications of the ACM, 55(3), p.74.