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PROFESSOR MARK H. BICKHARD
Mark H. Bickhard, Ph.D. is
Henry R. Luce Professor of
Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge, Director, Institute
for Interactivist Studies, Lehigh University.
He is Editor of
New Idea in Psychology and is a member of the
The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence
Program Committee.
He is on the Editorial Board of
Cognitive Systems Research
and on the Board of Directors of the
Jean Piaget
Society.
Mark is interested in the nature of persons — both in the sense of
the
modeling of biological and social persons and in the sense of the design
of artificial persons. These interests take him from neurobiology and
the
philosophy of mind to the higher reaches of psychological processes
—
such as language, rationality, and consciousness — and beyond to
sociality, personality, and social processes and
structure.
The central axis of these models is an original perspective on the
problems of the nature of knowledge and of representation. In
particular, he has discovered a radical critique of the standard
assumption that representation is essentially some form of encoding, and
has developed an alternative model — an interactive model —
that
succeeds in avoiding the fatal consequences of that
critique.
The focus
of many of his publications is the development of the implications of
this alternative approach to representation with respect to all domains
of psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Most
crucially, this has involved the cognitive hierarchy of perception,
cognition, and language. Although the model that he has developed is
related to computer models and robotics, it logically forces a dynamic
systems approach, and is strongly critical of the defining assumptions
of information processing and artificial intelligence approaches,
including PDP. It involves foundational critiques of, and corresponding
revisions of, the fundamental underlying mathematics of cognitive
science: Turing machine theory (formal process) and Tarskian model
theory (formal semantics).
A broad theme in his work is the evolutionary and developmental
emergence of normative phenomena out of prior forms of process. In this
regard, he has developed, for example, models of function,
representation, rationality, language, psychopathology, and sociality.
The interactive model of representation has deep implications concerning
the fundamental importance of robotics and autonomous agents and the
differentiation of those fields from standard artificial intelligence
and cognitive science approaches.
Mark authored
Cognition, Convention and Communication,
Representational Content in Humans and Machines,
Interactivism: A Manifesto,
Levels of representationality,
How Does the Environment Affect the Person?,
Piaget on Variation and Selection Models: Structuralism, Logical
Necessity, and Interactivism,
Autonomy, Function, and Representation, and
Why Children Don't have to Solve the Frame Problems,
and coauthored
On the Nature of Representation: A Case Study of James Gibson's Theory
of Perception,
Foundational Issues in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science:
Impasse and Solution,
The Process Dynamics of Normative Function, and
Topologies of Learning and Development.
Read the
full list of his publications!
See
additional papers available for downloading.
Mark earned his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in
1966, his M.S. in Statistics from the University of Chicago in 1970, did
a Clinical Internship at the University of Chicago Counseling Center
from 1969
to 1971, and earned his Ph.D. in Human Development with the dissertation
"A Model of Developmental and Psychological Processes" in
1973.
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