Theories of extended mind and embodied thinking present an alternative that can address these features with ease. This section addresses the role of gesture in the cognitive unfolding of the visual, spatial, and conceptual processes involved in sketching.
Philosophical approaches to the mind
- Cognitivism
- Connectionism
- Embodied – embedded cognitive science
- The Extended Mind
Clark also wants to adequately account for the active nature of perception and the way our cognitive organization reflects our physical involvement in the world. The external features are therefore "just as causally relevant as typical internal features of the brain" (1998: 9).
Approaching drawing as thinking
- What tools are needed to explain such a complex phenomenon
The investigation of drawing will in turn help to answer the call of advocates of the extended view for a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of cognitive practices. This will be followed by an attempt to appreciate this practice in combination with an understanding of the context and nature of the.
The act of drawing
- The hand enters thinking/thinking is of the hand
- Thinking in action /action as thinking
- The complexity of the drawing act and of drawing skill
- Cognitive change
The German philosopher Heidegger also considers the activities of the hand to be important in thinking. This act of drawing is preceded (regardless of whether the object is present or not) by an act of visualization or "inner rehearsal"2 of the drawing to be made.
Drawing skill represented
- Representational challenge
- From “representation as mirroring and encoding” to “representation as control”
- Knowing-how and knowing-that
- Heidegger on practical engagement
- Smooth coping and “its own kind of sight”
- Transcending the subject-object dichotomy
- From everyday cognition to the theoretical attitude
- The un-ready to hand
- Between doing and knowing
- Sculpting and shaping towards expertise
The subject-object structure is thus necessarily part of the scientific encounter with the world (Wheeler 2005: 136). P]ractical problem solving in the not-ready-to-hand domain – is a spectrum of intermediate cases.
Representational Redescription
- From knowledge ‘in’ the system to knowledge ‘to’ the system
- Representational change
While this is the endpoint of learning in a connectionist network, in the human case it is the starting point for generating redescriptions of implicitly defined representations.” pattern recognition/connectionist special purpose system, so that knowledge initially embedded in effective special purpose procedures subsequently becomes a data structure available to other parts of the system (Clark and Karmiloff-Smith.
According to Karmiloff-Smith, “conscious self-reflection” results from multi-level representations of the type described here (Boden, 2004: 84). Clark and Karmiloff-Smith conclude that the Representational Redescription model portrays the “true knower” as a multifaceted representative of his (external and internal) world,” who “must somehow manage a symbiosis of different forms of consciousness.”
From embodiment to cognitive extension
- Extending and transforming
- Hermeneutic relations
- How inscription and visualisation adapt to our cognitive strengths and weaknesses
- The medium is the message: image and technology
- Word vs. image
- Drawing at the interface: mediating different modes of knowledge production
- Visually constituted knowledge
- Hidden drawings
- Multidimensional reasoning integrates diverse components and strategies
- Interaction between internal and external representations
- No single mind tool
- Complexity and invisibility
Plato regards the methods of technology as too powerful to be left in the hands of artists and craftsmen, where they would pose a threat to the 'thinkers' of the Republic (see Hickman. He believes that the genius of the new science was the discovery of her that "knowledge is a matter of assurance, no. Relativistic transformations of mathematical quantities became surprisingly easy when geometric reformulation was used.
In a fragment entitled "Physicist and Engineer", Dirac argued that mathematical beauty exists in the approximate reality of the actual world we live in, rather than in the realm of pure and exact proof (Galison 2000: 159). The mathematician Henri Poincaré preceded Dirac as an exponent of the countercurrent, who saw great scientific value in the image.
Thinking space
- The drawing as epistemological object
- The mangrove effect
- Where, then, is the mind?
- Cognitive circuits and ensembles
In his discussion of "what calls us to think," Heidegger contrasts "calculating kinds of thinking, however vital to the development of the sciences," with another kind of thinking, that of the poet, which is "more less precise, but no less strict". . Poetry is here understood as a "carnival of possibilities" (Rosenberg as a creative letting go of the calculation of means and ends. He compares the way the known and the unknown and perhaps even the unknown act on each other, to the way the sea and land influence each other – “the sea (knowingly) constantly re-maps the shape of the coast.
It thinks with the stochastic reflexes of the hand; and these reflexes cannot be fully understood in reflection. It requires an epistemology where the virtues of the ensemble cannot be reduced to the virtues of any of its parts taken separately.
Gesture
- Kinaesthesia
- What words cannot say
- Imagery: not rival but integral to language
- Productive dialectic
- Material carriers and dimensions of meaning
- Self-stimulation
- Structuring, shaping, accomplishing
These sensations are conveyed to the mind by the nerves of the muscular, tendinous, and articular systems (Noland. Gibson (cited by Paterson) sees kinesthesia as part of the haptic system, which, in perceiving the movement of the body, hosts several perceptors McNeill's analysis for the implications of a dialectic is important not only for the dialectic of the language of the image, but also for the ongoing dialectic that is often observed within the act of drawing-thinking.
Because both modes operate simultaneously in the speaker's mental experience and represent the same idea, their dialectic constitutes a "benevolent instability." Although both McNeill and Goldin-Meadow view the physical gesture as an integral part of the cognitive process, each has a different view of this.
From gestural dialectic to dialectic on paper
- Interactive imagery
- Dialectics of sketching
- Dialectic as scaffolded action
- Epistemic actions and cognitive routines
He claims that the self-created sketch “responds,” with its feedback reflecting “something of the sketcher. This often happens in the early stages of the design process, where the designer's ability to extract information from her own sketch increases her ability to approach the design problem by increasing the problem space. Arguments of seeing as are directly related to sketching, as they involve analogical thinking and reinterpretation of the figural properties of a sketch or the creation of new figures.
On the other hand, events that would take a long time in the built world – the carving of a slope, the shaving of the trees – can be made to happen instantly in the drawing”. Vygotsky was the pioneer behind the notion that the use of common language had a significant impact on cognitive development.
The design sketch
- Approaching wicked problems
- Sketch properties
- Importing structural – and content-novelties
- Hybrid forms of seeing
- Reinterpretation and emergence
- The consequences of an external view
- Associative system as “workshop of the possible”
Lawson's point can then be rephrased as: it is impossible to understand the drawing on its own - it must be connected to other parts of the designer's extended mind. The drawings are examined accordingly for the knowledge embodied in them and the insight they can give us into the connection between the representation made in the drawing and the rest of the extended mind of which it is a part. Fish and Scrivener propose a "hybrid spatial theory of sketching" to explain how these sketch properties amplify and aid the manipulation of mental images and provoke the generation of new ones.
Wittgenstein (quoted in McGinn writes: “the aspects of the triangle: it is as if an image came into contact, and remained in contact for a time, with the visual. Margaret Boden believes that the computational properties of connectionist systems can help us to understand “ how a rich associative system like the brain could function as “a workshop of the possible.”
Beyond dialectics and emergence: Brief discussion of more cognitive advantages of
- Memory augmentation (storing and recalling data)
- Simplification
- Connections and relationships
- Interactivity
- Organise, manipulate, prune and filter
- Parallel lines of thought
- Interplay between words and images
- Expanding cognition
Edward Tufte points out that rather than implying rules for the amount of information presented, "the essence of Miller's work is to suggest strategies, such as placing evidence in context, that extend the reach of memory beyond tiny lumps of information". Goel distinguishes four stages in the design process—problem structuring, preliminary planning, design refinement, and detailing. The sketch is used to first identify and then reflect on essential details - details that, if not recognized, could hinder - or in any case significantly affect - the eventual execution of the final, fully articulated design.
By allowing a temporally limited and simplified view of the state of affairs, or by presenting defined features of the nature of the problems being solved, a diagram draws attention to those features, helping the designer understand the situation (Lawson, 2004: 42). However, when it is brought out and into the field of view, the very process of seeing – the way the eye moves and checks for consistency – allows them to see the ambiguity.
William Kentridge
- Cognitive integration and cognitive character
- Exploiting the natural condition
- Making connections
- Movement
- Suspending and expanding
- Interplay between memory and imagination
Kentridge describes his process as “partly a projection of the image you have in your head; it is partly a reception, which you recognize as the drawing. For Kentridge, drawing is not about putting something into place, establishing static symbols or definitions: “The single point of view of the frontal image is on shaky epistemological ground. Christov-Bakargiev (quoted in Thain) describes Kentridge's reworking of the image through erasure as “a way of suspending the present.”
She suggests that, in addition, there is the intense movement of the body “which gives the process a productive vagueness” (Thain, 2008: 79). Ultimately, the film was mainly about the boy's journey (Kentridge & Breidbach, 2006: 60).
Finding images somewhere between chance and reason
- Between chance and reason
For Kentridge, this reliance on Fortuna in the production of images or texts reflects some of the ways in which we exist in the world, even outside the realm of images and texts”. In his introduction to a Darwinian theory of creative intelligence, Dennett cites Picasso's provocative statement as the perfect expression of the "anti-Darwinian answer" to the question of "what is a mind. After careful analysis of Picasso's sketches in terms of sequential and figural progression against the final version of the painting, a number of independent judges agreed that the creative process underlying Picasso's Guernica is best described as Darwinian.
Here we remember Kentridge, who had to wait about a year and a half before he understood that erasures were part of the meaning and interest in his films. Improvisation now names both the freedom and isolation of the artist who works without the guarantees of tradition.
Drawing as a model for thinking
- Tools and skills matter most – back to Heidegger
- From a scratch and a muddle to clarity
- A different route to knowledge
Dennett is critical of the idea of "content capture" in the study of intelligent systems (Clark, 2002a: 80). When Latour claims that attention to the "humble practice of re-representation" shifts the locus of science and manages to "eat up" the two extremes of the "representative mind" and the "represented world", he comes close to the extended mind. theorists' insistence that such practice is part of a cognitive system. The formative act of drawing leads to a stably present product – the drawing – which makes thought visible anew to the artist.
It was striking how persistent this theme - the ability of the sketch to manifest or make explicit what is hidden or only implicit - appears in the literature. His practice extends beyond a mere embedded and scaffolded account of cognitive abilities - the practice itself is part of the cycle of cognitive processing and not merely causally supportive of in-the-head processes.
