YOU CAN'T PLAY 20 QUESTIONS WITH NATURE AND WIN: PROJECTIVE COMMENTS ON THE PAPERS OF THIS SYMPOSIUM

“It is, as Newell once wrote, as if “science advances by playing twenty questions with nature” [2].”

“In the end, however irresistible dichotomies are to the human mind (Kelso & Engstrøm 2006; Newell 1973), dichotomizing implies oversimplifying (Keren & Schul 2009; Kruglanski et al. 2006).”

“I think this is a mistake, and that playing 20 Questions with nature (asking simple yes-or-no questions to work something out) is as limited as it was several decades ago, when Alan Newell (1973) made his”

“…as in illness diagnosis, proving theorems, and so on, spawned the mind as a computer metaphor, which in turn fed into many theories of cognitive psychology (Lachman, MisterLachman, & Butterfield, 1979; Murray, 1984) and stimulated the development of numerous research paradigms (Newell, 1973).”

“Advocacy for a systems-level approach dates back to Newell (1973), who argued for the value of systems-level research as a vehicle for integration in cognitive science and AI, claiming “You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win.””

“In other words, the accounts of wide approaches follow the steps of “trying to play 20 questions with nature and win,” as Newell (1973) has put it.”

“Newell (1981) terms this the fixedmethod fallacy “.”

“…it has long been acknowledged that excessive focus on confined experimental designs, based on strictly controlled but potentially unnatural or uninformative stimuli and responses, can hamper theory development in psychology and cognitive science (Newell, 1973; Neisser, 1976; Broadbent, 1991).”

“These are like a collection of anecdotes that the field must assemble into a comprehensive description of the neural basis of mental functions, akin to “playing twenty questions with nature” [1].”

“While these architectures are labeled “ cognitive, ” cognitive architectures have been developed to provide complete processing models including the entire range of cognitive, perceptual, and psychomotor behavior, 10 and ACT-R in particular is an implementation of a uni fi ed theory of cognition.”

“…and processes of the mind cannot be understood purely on the basis of behavioral experiments, with tests that inevitably amount to probing only relatively superficial features of human behavior, which are further obscured by individual/group differences and contextual factors (Newell, 1973).”

“Allen D o w n l o a d e d by [ U n i v e r s it y o f C a m b r i dg e ] a t 12 : 26 14 J a nu a r y 2016 Newell (1973) pioneered the idea of unifying existing theories in cognition in his famous paper “You Can’t Play 20 Questions With Nature and Win” at the 1973 Carnegie Symposium.”

“Newell issued his injunction to the field in his infamous, “You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win” (Newell, 1973), sometimes referred to as “Newell’s complaint.””

“However, unifying these psychological processes to model the relation between brain and mind in any given situation remains a great challenge (Newell, 1973•).”

“Indeed, one might be suspicious of binary distinctions in psychology more generally (Newell 1973).”

“Newell (1973) famously fretted about an emerging strategy in cognitive science to identify points of dissent, and debate whether one or another perspective on these points is correct.”

“…(2009), it was the development of computational methods in the first half of the twentieth century that gave the cognitive sciences the wherewithal to explore processes at a level of detail that behavioural experiments alone do not permit (cf. Newell, 1973, for an early argument to this effect).”

“Therefore, a narrow topical focus, especially early in its history, may reduce the chance of the community reaching self-sustaining critical mass (Allen, 1988; Markus, 1987).”

“…effort represents the way that science ought to progress — by developing a general account of memory and its processes in a working computational system to produce a common explanation of behavior rather than a set of lab-specific and domain-specific theories for different behaviors (Newell 1973).”

“…and Luck, 2003) and we suspect that the argument will only be settled in the context of a broader theory that accounts for a greater range of phenomena (as Newell, 1973, pointed out, individual experiments by themselves cannot settle questions such as whether a process is serial or parallel).”

“In the ‘20 Questions’ paper, Newell (1973) bemoans the fact that, at a symposium gathering together with many of the greatest psychologists at the time, there is nothing whatsoever to indicate that any of their work is an organised, integrated program aimed seriously at uncovering the nature of…”

“Our “something borrowed” would be the power law of practice (Anderson, 1982, 1987; Fitts & Posner, 1967; Newell & Rosenbloom, 1981) and the importance of a hierarchy of methods as the key to task performance (Card et al., 1983; Newell, 1973; New-ell & Simon, 1972; Simon, 1962).”

“Redressing the Balance between Scope and Accuracy It has often been noted (e.g. Newell, 1973; Allport, 1975) that research in cognitive psychology is driven heavily by phenomena, and that the questions which are addressed in this way rarely receive definitive answers.”

“Many erstwhile proponents of Standard Practice have begun to call for the wholesale rejection of the distinction (Penn & Povinelli 2007; Allen 2006; Heyes & Papineau 2006).”

“In a now famous commentary reflecting on a set of papers presented at a symposium on information processing psychology, Newell (1973) expressed serious concern at the direction in which theorizing within cognitive psychology was progressing.”

“However, rather than estimating parameters each time a study is run, many researchers use the default values for these parameters (i.e., values set by the ACT-R system) or try to estimate them in separate studies (see Newell, 1973a).”

“Possible relation to interference in perceptual paradigms Newell (1973) has issued a very general warning against presuming that each distinct paradigm that we study reveals a distinct cognitive problem.”

“For it must truly be a single system in order to provide the integration we seek’’ (Newell, 1973, p. 305).”

“…concluons que l’effet de la production est conforme a` la théorie actuelle, pour ensuite discuter de notre analyse en relation avec la critique d’Alan Newell (1973) de la psychologie tout en souhaitant que soit réalisée une analyse de principes psychologiques plutôt que de phénomènes de…”

“…of psychological explanations, such as the possible cultural dependency of many phenomena (Gergen, 1973), the incompleteness of processing models (Newell, 1973), and the tautological nature of many theories (Wallach & Wallach, 1998), but the lack of mechanistic ambition that I criticize here…”

“Newell (1973) argued that if a single AI system could solve a diverse set of intelligence test problems, then we could consider it to be intelligent.”

“We also conducted a corresponding experimental study to validate the potential effectiveness of this system in reducing driver workload (See Section VII).”

“Almost 100 years after James’ warning, Allan Newell (1973) echoed a similar theme in his commentary on empirical research in cognitive psychology titled: ‘You can’t play Twenty Questions with nature and win’.”

“(Newell, 1973, p. 294) Second Injunction of Psychological Experimentation: Never average over methods.”

“The consequence of such an activity is an impediment of cumulative theoretic progress, with entire research communities trapped in vicious cycles in which theories never die but simply fade away (see also Newell, 1973).”

“Introduction In 1973, Newell wrote a commentary in which he caricatured the current psychological practice as “playing a game of 20 questions [with nature]” [1].”

“The goal of this line of research was set by Newell (1973): “to construct a single program that would take a standard intelligence test”.”

“In 1973, Allen Newell challenged scientists to achieve “a science of [humans] adequate in power and commensurate with [their] complexity” [44].”

“First, to show the contemporary relevance of the problems raised by Newell (1973), we present modern illustrations of the encumbrances faced by dichotomy-based research, we review some attempts to rely on nonempirical criteria to overcome the empirical impediments in empirical theory testing, and…”

“In his famous paper, “You Can’t Play 20 Questions With Nature and Win,” Allen Newell (1973) argued that experimental psychology, although adept at answering binary questions about psychological phenomena, was not advancing cognitive psychology toward a unified understanding of the mind.”

“…continue to dominate much of research on bilingualism, forcing discussions into a binary opposition not unlike those that have recently characterized the consequences of bilingualism (Nichols et al., 2020; c.f. Leivada et al., 2020), as well as psychological research more generally (Newell, 1973).”

“Newell (1973) beseeches psychologists to develop higher-level theories to integrate the numerous advances in cognitive science.”

“Like those two systems, the development of the SP system was inspired by the writings of Allen Newell, putting the case for greater breadth and depth in theories of cognition (Newell, 1973, 1990).”

“Many others have also complained about the lack of interest in these issues (e.g. Newell, 1973; Smith, 1989).”

“If it was propositional, hypotheses about external events could be generated by operating on the propositional data base to produce discrete predictions of the input at short intervals throughout the continuously changing environment (see Newell 1973).”

“Unfortunately, experimental psychology is currently not grounded in any such system, which means many clusters of empirical findings are isolated fragments with questionable relevance (Allport, 2008; Hommel & Colzato, 2015; Kingstone, Smilek, & Eastwood, 2008; Newell, 1973).”

“…model (on the advantages of formal modeling, see Fum, Del Missier, & Stocco, 2007; Hintzman, 1991; Lewandowsky, 1993; Marewski & Olsson, 2009; A. Newell, 1973). heuristic does not merely represent a poor substitute for linear weighted-additive models that integrate many variables but closely…”

“In developing such models, it is critical that the models remain on a solid ecological footing, always with the goal of accounting for “genuine slabs of human behavior” (Newell, 1973 p.303), rather than just performance in a task that may not be ecologically representative.”

“In his famous essay, “You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win”, Allen Newell [22] writes about the sterility of developing theories in narrow fields and calls for each researcher to focus on “a genuine slab of human behaviour” (p. 303).”

“These limitations notwithstanding, the proposed model’s unified account of skill learning serves as a step toward Newell’s (1990) grand vision of a unified account of cognition and behavior.”