DOI: 10.5176/2251-1865_CBP16.15
Authors: Athanassios Raftopoulos
Abstract: In recent years, cognitive sciences have seen an increasing influx of methods and tools brought from other disciplines. One should be very careful, however, as to what is transferred from the base to the target and the exact way in which it is used in its new field of application. It could be argued that the modern developmental and cognitive psychology is full of ill conceived and misguiding terms. The reason is that psychologists tend uncritically to borrow tools and terms from other disciplines without submitting them to the necessary conceptual. This leads to misleading and ungrounded concepts, circular explanations, and unbearable reifications. Lourenco [1], for example, argues that a literal interpretation of terms, such as, “attractor,” “dynamics,” and “equilibration cycles,” in psychology yields gibberish because there are no attractors in the mind/brain, no ‘equilibration cycles,” and so forth. In this paper, I argue that there are attractors, equilibration cycles, and dynamics in the mind/brain, in so far as the mind/ brain is a physical system.
Keywords: attractors, non-linear dynamics of mind, connectionism
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