The Ontological Coherence of Intuitive Physics

Abstract

Ference Marton has produced a characteristically lucid and elegant commentary, for which I am grateful, He took the time to resay, from his position, that from my monograph which is most compelling to him-a contribution in itself. He identifies as a central product my uncovering the "structures of awareness" that underlie both everyday experience and, with development and learning, scientific apprehension of the physical world. I am happy for his descriptions of those aspects of my work. Marton also feels it is worth the trouble to try to save me and others from the "dogma of cognitivism." He doubts the wisdom of the fundamental commitments of information as a layer "between the brain and behavior." Instead, he advocates the experiential turn, analyzing experience itself rather than, as he sees it, looking for dubious constructs, such as "dictionaries, interpreters, and semantic nets," that constitute ghosts in the machine, an invisible and unlikely causal fabric that produces experience as an epiphenomenon.