Dognitive Science

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Since "Dognition" is now a Coursera MOOC as well as a company, it might be time to revisit an old, obscure and bitter joke — Garrison Cottrell, "Approaches to the Inverse Dogmatics Problem: Time for a Return to Localist Networks?", Connection Science 1993:

The innovative use of neural networks in the field of Dognitive Science has spurred the intense interest of the philosophers of Dognitive Science, the Dogmatists. The field of Dogmatics is devoted to making sense of the effect of neural networks on the conceptual underpinnings of Dognitive Science. Unfortunately, this flurry of effort has caused researchers in the rest of the fields of Dognitive Science to spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to make sense of the philosophers, otherwise known as the Inverse Dogmatics problem (Jordan, 1990). The problem seems to be that the philosophers have allowed themselves an excess of degrees of freedom in conceptual space, as it were, leaving the rest of us with an underconstrained optimization problem: should we bother listening to these folks, who may be somewhat more interesting than old Star Trek reruns, or should we try and get our work done?


You pass History of Connection Science 101 if you can decode the list of references:

Extra credit if you can do it without internet access.



6 Comments

  1. Bill Benzon said,

    September 8, 2017 @ 10:18 am

    What about the rival Catastrophe Theory?

  2. David L said,

    September 8, 2017 @ 10:56 am

    aka catatonics

  3. bratschegirl said,

    September 8, 2017 @ 12:42 pm

    I'd be very curious to see what S. Gonad has to say concerning the question of whether children should be taught to sponke their monkeys.

  4. ErikF said,

    September 8, 2017 @ 4:42 pm

    "Dog processing" sounds like a method for producing a meat that you might find in Asia!

  5. Viseguy said,

    September 9, 2017 @ 8:12 pm

    Is arf a dognate for ?

  6. Viseguy said,

    September 9, 2017 @ 8:13 pm

    woof?

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