What is it to learn something, believe something and know something? Three articles have come out this week that look at the idea that these all involve representing the world in some way (and that we are very selective about what, and how, we represent). The first gives us a lot of background to the idea, tracing the idea that the brain is a representational organ from its roots in the nineteenth
century to the "muscles versus movements debate" of the 1970s and 1980s. The second considers the question of whether the concept of 'belief' plays a useful role in understanding cognition. They do, argue the authors, but only insofar as "to believe an idea is to process the relevant representations in certain ways—where the representations in question could be products of any of a variety of cognitive systems." And that brings us to the article about explanation: "explanation search and evaluation are effective mechanisms for learning by virtue of their selectivity. In other words, our proclivity to explain could support learning precisely because it effectively directs us to investigate certain aspects of the world over others and to evaluate the fruits of our investigation by particular criteria." It's enough to make you think!
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