Discrimination

[From Bruce Abbott (980223.1535 EST)]

Bruce Gregory (990223.1420 EST) --

Bruce Abbott (980223.1130 EST)

Let me try again.

Bruce, the process you are labeling as "creating new distinctions" is a
familiar one to psychologists. We call it "learning to discriminate," or
"discrimination learning." (No need to invent a new term.) Learning to
discriminate is certainly an important part of learning to control certain
variables (if you can't perceive them you can't control them).

"Tool" can exist like a concept. That is, one can describe the
concept tool and a student can learn this definition and repeat
it back to you correctly. In _Being and Time_, Heidegger talks
about tools in a very different way. Tools "come ready to hand"
in life. As I was helping my wife assemble some bookcases
yesterday, the parts "suggested" the tools needed to assemble
them. In such an activity, a philips-head screwdriver "shows up"
in a quite different way that it does if I am assigned the task
of discriminating a philips-head screwdriver from a slot-head
screwdriver. This "showing up" as an affordance is what I am
trying to get at when I talk about the distinction "tool". It is
a perceptual organization within which tools can show up--be
perceived as tools and not just objects that differ from one
another.

That's clearer than your first try, and I understand your point: what
discriminations a person learns (and subsequently attends to) depend on what
discriminations are possible, which will allow the person to establish and
maintain good control over some CV. With luck (or help!) reorganization
will lead to the establishment of such conditional discriminations.

In your earlier post, you said that you disliked discrimination as a term
because of its "origin in a stimulus-response way of thinking." However,
the term actually has its origin in common usage. To discriminate is to
distinguish; a person of "discriminating taste" knows the difference
between, say, a fine wine and a lesser version. It is true, however, that
discrimination learning studies have been carred out extensively within an
S-R framework. Could this be what you have in mind? Even so, the term
itself carries no S-R implications.

Regards,

Bruce

[From Bruce Gregory (980224.1011 EST)]

Bruce Abbott (980223.1535 EST)]

Thanks.

Bruce