Harmony of the triads: A response to Nicholas Swindale.

Abstract

Despite few misunderstandings, I thank Nicholas Swindale for his efforts in writing a lengthy review of Harmony, Perspective and Triadic Cognition (HPTC; Cook, 2012). He is precisely the type of reader I wanted to address-someone with broad knowl- edge in human psychology and an interest in the possibility of a general theory of the mind. Unfortunately, despite a history of abject failures misapplying sophisticated mathematical theory (sta- tistical mechanics, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, and so on) to the problems of mind, he seems to suffer from the scientoid delusion that formal mathematics is the key to psychological insight. He is therefore quick to dismiss the kinds of low-level mental associations that I argue are central to the way people actually think.With regard to his mixed evaluation of my proposal concerning triadic mechanisms, I would say that his accusations of occult numerology are truly off target. My proposal in HPTC is that concrete three-way associations have been amply demonstrated in the specifically human aspects of cognition related to music, art, language, tools, and attention. The essential point that Swindale repeatedly acknowledges and then repeatedly forgets is that: Fundamental cognitive triads at the heart of the outstanding talents of our species are necessary, but not sufficient, to produce the astounding behavioral accomplishments of human culture. The sufficiency argument will demand many more insights and en- cyclopedic knowledge that I do not possess, but the minimalist cognitive necessities are the issues that I have addressed in HPTC. I would remind Swindale that it took more than a half-century to proceed from the biological insight of the structure of DNA to the unraveling of the human genome, and much work still remains before we understand the genetic data that is in hand. In my view, cognitive neuroscience is now mature enough to elucidate funda- mental psychological processes- but it will take some time before a comprehensive theory of the human mind is established.In certain key subfields within human psychology, there is already clear evidence of triadic mechanisms (often, but not al- ways, unprecedented in the animal world) that are, to varying degrees of certainty, the starting points for our unusual cognitive and behavioral skills. A formal theory of the unique set of triadic processes (three-way Boolean logic?) is yet to be achieved, so it may be possible to put Swindale's intellect to constructive pur- pose, but I would nonetheless argue that the triadic arguments in HPTC are successful in clearing the way toward precisely that goal.The tonal combinations that result in the phenomena of musical harmony are undoubtedly the most easily perceived and most well-known of the perceptual triads, but the alignment of visual cues that lead to pictorial depth perception (light source/object/cast shadow or three similar objects aligned in linear perspective) is also empirically unambiguous. In linguistics, the three-way tree structure of the phrase lies at the heart of Chomsky's transfor- mational grammar. Its triadic nature has been discussed by Derek Bickerton (1990) and Guy Deutscher (2005), among others, but most of modern-day syntactic theory deals with the complexities of multiple recursively embedded phrases. Similarly, most empir- ical studies on social interactions address higher-level issues, but the underlying phenomenon known as joint has a well-understood triadic cognitive basis. See, for example, work by Michael Tomasello (2008) and Rebecca Saxe (2006, p. 235) who notes that such cognition requires representing triadic relations: You and Me, collaboratively looking at, working on or talking about This. In all of these cases, the psychophysics of the triadic phenomena has received much less attention than the more com- plex multiply embedded triads of real psychology, but there is an argument to be made that the first step in meaningful, reductionist, scientific analysis is identification of the core phenomena that can then be used to reconstruct larger-scale phenomena. …