Cognitive Structure Quotes

You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

I don't think all thinking is a kind of rational structure. But I don't think it is correct to identify the rational-nonrational dichotomy with the linguistic-nonlinguistic dichotomy.

Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.

Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.

The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

The object of pure Mathematic (is) that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

Ideology is: intellectual ordering of the feelings; an objective connection among them that makes the subjective connection easier.

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

In studying language we can discover many basic properties of this cognitive structure, its organization, and also the genetic predispositions that provide the foundation for its development. So in this respect, linguistics, first of all, tries to characterize a major feature of human cognitive organization. And second, I think it may provide a suggestive model for the study of other cognitive systems. And the collection of these systems is one aspect of human nature.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Knowledge is structured in consciousness

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?

The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.

We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.

In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.

In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.

Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a perfect and very slightly allegorical expression of the actual present views we hold today.

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.