(I’ll add a few more once I’ve decided what I think of them)

The Conduit Metaphor (1993)

This is easily the best paper I read all year. The idea was and is mind-blowing. The metaphor is Reddy’s description for treating language like a box that is transported to a listener/reader who then retrieves from the box whatever meaning, emotion, etc., was stored in it. The toolmakers paradigm is an alternative approach, leaning more towards subjectivism. Reddy argues that, regardless of whether or not the toolmakers paradigm is actually useful (which he suggests it is, by the way), the conduit metaphor is, unfortunately, here to stay. One of my favourite demonstrations was that even seemingly innocent phrases like “You must try to express your ideas clearer,” conceal traces of the conduit. The word “express” comes from ex (meaning “out”), and pressare (meaning “to push”). Putting the two together, we see that baked into the word is the idea of squeezing out meaning.

The reach of the conduit metaphor is insane in and of itself, but the way Reddy explains issues that the metaphor causes, and the long-lasting nature of those issues, takes it to another level. For example, Reddy argues that a word like “sentence” actually has two distinct “senses” in everyday speech: i) the literal sequence of words, and ii) a more abstract, conduit-influenced sense of the word. “You shouted that sentence (i)” vs “Your sentence (ii) was very moving” where in this second example, we are implicitly referring to the sentence’s “insides,” that is, “conceptual and emotional material.” If any of that sounded intriguing, definitely check the paper out; Reddy provided a lot more depth and nuance than I have managed to here! As a bonus, see if you can spot cases where I used the conduit metaphor to describe itself!

Nativism, empiricism, and the origins of knowledge (1998)

This paper was my first good look at developmental psychology, and gave me a solid understanding of the empiricism-nativism debate through a series intriguing experiment examples. I talk about this paper a lot as a result, not necessarily for any transcendental properties of its content, but because of the specific experience I had with it. The paper explores the extent of infants’ object representations through a variety of contexts, in an attempt to see when infants develop the ability to, for example, represent partly-occluded objects as continuous. I think this paper was my first encounter with preferential looking methods, where attention is effectively a direct measure of novelty, allowing psychologists to determine what babies expect and what their surprised by. The part with the chicks is equally intriguing, as is the final section applying the results nicely to the debate.

Favourite cognitive science texts

The Conduit Metaphor (1993)

Nativism, empiricism, and the origins of knowledge (1998)

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