conversation

conversation theory Gordon Pask (1928-96)

from [|Conversation theory] (Wikipedia)

Pask's Conversation Theory (Pask, 1975) is a cybernetic and dialectic framework that offers a model to explain the "construction of knowledge", or, as Pask preferred "knowing" (wishing to preserve both the dynamic/kinetic quality, and the necessity for there to be a "knower"). Conversation Theory describes interaction between two or more cognitive systems, such as a teacher and a student or distinct perspectives within one individual, and how they engage in a dialog over a given concept and identify differences in how they understand it. Through recursive interactions called "Conversation" their differences may be reduced until agreement--that is, agreement up to a point which Pask called "agreement over an understanding"--may be reached. A residue of the interaction may be captured as an "entailment mesh", an organized and publicly available collection of resultant knowledge, itself a major product of the theory as they afford many advantages over [|semantic nets] and other, less formalized and non-experimentally based "representations of knowledge".
 * Conversation theory**

"Pask held that concurrence is a necessary condition for modeling brain functions and he remarked IA was meant to stand AI, Artificial Intelligence, on its head"
 * Interactions of Actors Theory**

He dismissed the digital computer as a kind of kinematic "magic lantern". He saw mechanical models as the future for the concurrent kinetic computers required to describe natural processes. He believed that this implied the need to extend [|quantum computing] to emulate true field concurrency rather than the current [|von Neumann architecture].