Conclusion
Notes
It is time to return to the question we started with.
How do humans make the transition from not knowing any simple facts about
particular things in a given domain to possessing some such knowledge?
Part of the answer is this.
At four- to five-months of age they already have in place a system
of object indexes which enables them to track briefly occluded physical objects.
Although the system of object indexes operates in accordance with some
basic physical principles, assigning indexes to objects is not the same as knowing facts.
Indeed infants at this age appear incapable of knowing even the simplest
facts about an object’s location.
Object indexes are therefore a potential bridge between lacking any
abilities to track objects and having full-blown knowledge of them.
To be a bridge, object indexes must somehow influence thoughts and actions.
This they can do indirectly, via metacognitive feelings.
If this partial answer is roughly right,
development is a process of rediscovery.
Many facts about physical objects’ movements and interactions
are already implicit in systems that appear early in development.
But these systems are inferentially isolated from knowledge
states and so the facts implicit in them have to be discovered again.
Glossary
inferential integration :
For states to be inferentially integrated means that: (a) they can come to be nonaccidentally
related in ways that are approximately rational thanks to processes of inference and practical reasoning;
and
(b) in the absence of obstacles such as time pressure, distraction, motivations to be
irrational, self-deception or exhaustion, approximately rational harmony will
characteristically emerge, eventually, among those states.
inferential isolation :
Converse of inferential integration.
metacognitive feeling :
A metacognitive feeling is a feeling which is caused by
a metacognitive process.
Paradigm examples of metacognitive feelings include the feeling of
familiarity, the feeling that something is on the tip of your tongue, the
feeling of confidence and the feeling that someone’s eyes are boring into
your back.
On this course, we assume that one characteristic of metacogntive
feelings is that either they lack intentional objects altogether, or else
what their subjects take them to be about is typically only very distantly
related to their intentional objects. (This is controversial---see
Dokic, 2012 for a variety of conflicting theories.)
metacognitive process :
A process which monitors another cognitive process.
For instance, a process which monitors the fluency of recall, or of action selection,
is a metacognitive process.
tracking an attribute :
For a process to track an attribute or thing is for the presence or absence of the attribute or thing
to make a difference to how the process unfolds,
where this is not an accident. (And for a system or device to track an attribute is for some process
in that system or device to track it.)
Tracking an attribute or thing is contrasted with computing it.
Unlike tracking, computing typically requires that the attribute be represented.
References
Dokic, J. (2012). Seeds of self-knowledge: Noetic feelings and metacognition. In M. J. Beran, J. L. Brandl, J. Perner, & J. Proust (Eds.),
Foundations of metacognition (pp. 302–321). Oxford University Press Oxford, England.
Leibniz, G. W. (1996).
New essays on human understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, J. (n.d.).
An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.