Conceptual Lego

This was the week I had to do a presentation for the Philosophy of Mind seminar. I had assumed that it would be ok, because the paper was by an author we had read before. Things were also going well in the other seminars. I had written the survey article for the Skills & Methods class. This time I had asked “my” professor for recommended reading (remember my fiasco with the fundamentalist book review), and I even plucked up the courage to ask him to review my effort. It turned out I had drawn an overhasty conclusion. Sloppiness, really. I still have to get used to checking wording en phrasing really carefully. Anyway, my professor also gave me feedback on the structure of my article, so by the time I handed it in, I was happy with it.

A little too relaxed

So maybe I was relaxing a little too much. I wasn’t even bothered when the article I had to present was changed just a week beforehand. Only 13 pages, that would be a doddle, I thought. Hubris! Then everything happened at once. At work, a situation which had been smouldering for a while, suddenly exploded, causing all kinds of havoc. Also, I had taken a fall at the sauna a week before, causing a bad knee scrape. Suddenly this wound got inflamed so badly I had to go to the first aid post on a sunday morning. They gave me a shitload of penicillin, which made me feel so sleepy I had to take time of work, plus I had to miss one of my classes. And then there was the normal study workload plus this presentation to do. I already felt sorry for myself before I even started to do the actual prepartion.

Deconstructing jargon

So, the article. It was by a guy called Di Paolo, who specialises in the “enacted mind”. The great mystery to be explained is how cognition develops. I made a wordle out of the text for your amusement.

Now this is not a simple subject, and the way this Di Paolo guy writes about it is a nightmare. He doesn’t really explain much, he refers to other papers, by himself, and by other philosophers. Plus it is all jargon, meant for an in-crowd which I certainly don’t belong to. I had to go through his source material, and read up on lots of reviews to help me understand what his theory was all about. Because the article did not have a helpful structure, I constructed “conceptual Lego” as the basis for my presentation. See below. Colourful, eh?

Thanks to my husband who is still (!) driving me to university, I was well in time to set up my presentation. I really was nervous. Fortunately, the professor-duo teaching this class apologised for the horrendous text as soon as they saw me. That took the edge of my nerves! The conceptual Lego worked even better than I had hoped. I felt I really liked this theory I was presenting. Maybe a good topic for the end-of-term paper I am to write soon.

Busy bees

It is all so very interesting, and I am learning so much! None of these theories were around when I first went to university. Back then, there was no joint research between disciplines. Now it is like a beehive, philosophical bees, psychological bees, sociological bees, neurological bees, all working on cognition. And on language, as a special form of cognition. I just wish there were more hours in a day :–)