Howard Gardner

First came the telephone, then the television, then the Internet, and now the app. Apps are designed to make a task simpler, a search faster, or a day timelier. But what happens when apps pervade a society? At what level to automated programs change the people using them? Young people today between the ages of 15 and 25 have a hard time recalling a world without electronic devices, without smartphones, or without the Internet. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, in The App Generation, tackle the show more subject and along the way, learn about the fundamental social and moral landscape of a generation raised in the digital age.

Gardner and Davis focus their attention on what they call the three I’s: identity, intimacy, and imagination. In the digital world, identity is fully customizable and can be carefully constructed by what the user posts in online forums and image galleries. Intimacy is gauged by how users interact or nurture their social connections online. Lastly, imagination is just that, but it is also measured by how different relationships and creations are viewed online. Their research integrates psychological, sociological, and philosophical studies to get at just how apps are interacting with individuals and even society as a whole. Many different angles are taken in their investigation, including focus groups and online messages.

For the most past, the authors get at what they are looking for: a better picture of how the current generation views the world through apps and what that means for the future of society. There a few times when a one-off comment is seen as an indicator for a whole group, but the discussion of the “app attitude” is fun and pertinent. While I was drawn more to the comments from individual Internet content creators, the dual fields of computer science and psychology definitely keep this book in the academics’ arena. It reads fairly quickly and has a good amount of statistics about today’s app users. An interesting but not outstanding book. show less

Although now (in its 1987 edition) a quarter of a century old, this book remains valuable not so much for its argument in favour of the development of the then relatively new discipline of cognitive science as for its insights into how science actually works.

Regardless of that, the book remains a useful history of six loosely related disciplines - the humanistic social 'science' of anthropology and the hard science of neuroscience at the edges of the proposed (in 1984) new science and its show more core cognitive disciplines of philosophy, psychology, linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Gardner's argument is that these disciplines are the basis for a science of cognition covering such problems as how we perceive the world (contributing to epistemology), how we imagine the world, how we categorise and classify the world and not only how we reason but if we can be said to be rational at all.

These are questions that do not replace philosophy - certainly not the ontological basis for existentialism or any viable philosophy of meaning - but they usefully limit the claims of philosophy to what cannot be known by evidence-based scientific method (so that philosophy still includes core questions not only of meaning but of value).

Gardner takes his story no further than 1987 (in the paperback edition). Much has happened since yet this is still an excellent guide to the relevant sciences up to the mid-1980s.

However, the general reader should be warned that he writes clearly but that he is telling a complex story for the benefit of his peers. You should expect to be stretched and perhaps to find it a difficult book if rewarding one.

Gardner's judgments strike me as generally sound and especially useful when helping us to understand why the mid-twentieth century behaviourist model crumbled so quickly and how the more simple models applying computing analogies to the human condition were already becoming unsustainable as he was writing his book.

The dialectic between computing and brain studies has been fruitful but a basic awareness of continental philosophy would have cast doubt on any project that would make simple analogies betwen evolved brain and the technology of calculation and analysis.

'Being human' is a highly complex business that owes a great deal to our inheritance as an evolved biological entity with predispositions for survival in a hostile world.

The 'social' or cultural is simply an extension of the peculiarities of our condition so that research that shows that our rationality is suspect should not be confused with any value judgment that our lack of rationality is necessarily a bad thing.

The serious follower of the relevant sciences may find this book merely a reference point for a subsequent 25 years of discovery and theory but the book remains valuable and cautionary, regardless, as a description of how scientific paradigms (in the Kuhnian sense) rise and fall.

Gardner is assiduous in arguing for his thesis but not being polemical. There is no case (it would seem) where he is not prepared not merely to put an argument but to put all the criticisms of the argument. He is wholly fair-minded and generous - and scientific.

The result is that we get a strong picture both of progress in science and theory (not the same thing) but also of the very contingent nature of all theory and even of much experimentation at any particular moment in time.

This is important because a belief in science and scepticism about claims made by scientists are not incompatible. This book helps us to understand why - it is something to be borne in mind when evaluating claims about any application of science as technology or public policy.

What might be true now (as behaviourism once affected public policy in the 1950s) might not be true tomorrow. Caution is the appropriate response to all applications of science that are directed ultimately at society or the individual - whether they be claims about 'nudge', climate change, 'peak oil', GMOs or whatever.

What science can do is tell us what is true to all intents and purposes when dealing with matter (rather than with consciousness working on and in relation to matter as in the social) and what is negatively proven to be not possible or to be unlikely.

However, in dealing with mind and societies, let alone meaning and values, its paradigms are going to be unreliable when it comes to telling us much about what we are or should do when our complexity and reflexiveness is taken into account.

The cognitive science project is an important project to pursue but will be dangerous if it moves from the descriptive to the normative or the prescriptive.

While there is no sense that Gardner wishes to pursue anything but responsible science, one cannot be so sure of policymakers or vested interests that stand between us and the top end of the scientific community.

We certainly cannot be sure of those in the twenty-first century who want to get in on the band wagon of state funding of cognitive science for purposes that are political - the manipulation of the population into a state of order or compliance.

And even amongst scientists, there are those who are deluded into value and meaning from self interest, creating problems, diseases and conditions for which cognitive manipulations are assumed to be the solution.

In other words, while we may fear that cognitive science may assist in creating some monster of the Singularity, a cognitively advanced AI, we would do better to be frightened of the use of cognitive science in the hands of authority to force us into compliance with its values rather than our own.

Fortunately, no matter how much funding is thrown at the new neuroscience or at the militarisation of anthropology or at the core investigations of cognition, there is reason to be optimistic.

Human resistance and creativity, the nature of man in time, his desires and wilfulness and the sheer complexity of the social, more complex than the weather which can never be predicted beyond a short period, guarantee the utter failure of such projects in the long run.

With luck the new investment in these sets of 'sciences' (actually rational evidence-based investigations that fall between the hard science of matter and the non-science of the so-called social sciences) will find some cures for genuine suffering.

They may also provide people with improved choices in life and give us insights into the destructive modelling of such idiocies as religion and ideology. We should not be luddite - just cautious.

As with so much in the twenty-first century, the intellectual class sits between the people and states made up of coalitions of special interests.

The quasi-hard sciences, while expressing a 'truth' of sorts, are tools and weapons that might be made available to either side in what amounts to a large-scale but covert social war. show less

This book was not an easy read, in fact, early on I was wondering whether to finish it. I'm glad that I persisted and finished it because, although the author tries hard not to force his opinions on us, it does turn out that he has an opinion. He just wants us to keep going beyond his ideas and find our own applications. He is also very clear that intelligence and morality should not be confounded. Intelligence can be used for moral or immoral purposes. The intelligence is indifferent to how show more it is applied. That alone makes the book worth reading. There are a few things from the book that are worth mentioning.

"But wisdom is not a predictable feature of aging; many old people do not show particular range in reaching their judgements, and certainly some young people are wise beyond their years. The historian George Kennan and the philosopher Isaiah Berlin did not suddenly become wise when they entered their eighth or ninth decade, and fortunately for them and us, their skill at synthesizing did not decline noticeably with age." (Page 133)

"A crucial point about wisdom is its modesty, its humility. Neither intelligence nor creativity nor leadership reserveds a place for silence, for quite, for resignation. ... The wise person knows when to say nothing, and when to step down and make room for someone else. The wise adult knows about the fraility of humanity and the difficulty of bringing about enduring changes." (Page 134)

"When someone hears or observes the responses of others, particularly those at a higher stage, their own thinking may become more complex and rich." (Page 189) This reminded me of Flow which emphasizes the importance of increasing levels of complexity for happiness.

And why is the author so modest about forcing his views on us: "Unfortunately, we don't know a lot about the personal intelligences." (Page 201) Ultimately, we all have a lot to learn, and this book emphasizes that the quick application of Multiple Intelligence theory is liable to be a misapplication. Gardner advocates avoiding simplistic application of what we only vaguely understand, and striving for a deeper understanding. show less

I can't imagine a better single explanation about what education should be. He hints at just enough of his own worldview to tell me we wouldn't agree on everything. But in a way, that is the point, because Gardner adeptly conveys that an educated mind is one that can intelligently assess ideas at a level beyond initial impressions and patterns. The antithesis of his ideal is the "cultural literacy," which Gardner equates as a "barn full" of facts absent the cognitive powers to abstract show more meaning and project into other problems. He uses three scenarios (evolution, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Holocaust) as subject matter for demonstrating his point that education must achieve depth before breadth. He also advocates truth, beauty, and good as the primary themes for education. show less