J.M.C.Dow of Spontaneity and Receptivity tagged me with the 123 meme. The rules are:
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
- Open the book to page 123
- Find the fifth sentence on that page
- Post the next three sentences
- Tag five people
*Looks below the Wii Operations manual* – Aha! Here is the winner!
The book is Mapping The Mind – Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (editors:Lawrence A. Hirschfeld and, Susan A. Gelman) and is a collection of essays on, well, domain specificity. I started reading it the other day. Let me see what’s on the page 123…
Thereafter, each subsystem can develop in parallel. My discussion concentrates upon the first of these levels, mechanical Agency, and deals with the other two levels only to mark off what else I think comprises the core notion of Agency that is not dealt with at the first level. I begin then with the emergence of a processing mechanism (probably somewhere around 3 or 4 months of age) that equips the infant to attend to the mechanical properties of objects and events.
There is no excuse for mentioning the phrase ‘processing mechanism’ on this blog. I don’t have against processing mechanisms, but the idea that the people are some sum of processing mechanisms for different domains is just not something that should be included on a family friendly blog. I will tag this post as PG-13 or NC-17.
BTW, related to the topic of knowledge domains, I’m eagerly waiting for Young Children’s Thinking about Biological World by Giyoo Hatano. The description on Amazon:
This book is a study of young children’s naive biology. It examines such theoretical issues as processes, conditions and mechanisms in conceptual development using the development of biological understanding as the target case. Based on the review of recent studies in the North America and Australia as well as in Japan, the authors claim that children as young as five years of age, that is, before formal schooling, possess a naive theory of biology, which is differentiated from naive theories of psychology and physics. They characterize this initial form of biology as personifying and vitalistic. At a more general level, the authors try to offer an integrative and moderate model of conceptual development as a domain-specific construction of theory-like knowledge systems under cognitive and sociocultural constraints.
Exciting, right?
Back to the meme thing… As I seem to have been the last person on Earth that wasn’t tagged in this meme, there isn’t anyone else to tag, so I declare this meme FINISHED! *Applause*
A brood comb 