From the acknowledgments of my book Consciousness and the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 1987) drafted at CASBS 1983-4:
“Pride of first acknowledgment must go to the Center for Advanced Study in the Baheavioral Sciences, where I had the privilege of spending the year 1983-84 as a Fellow. In this beautiful and pampering environment, with its pride in encouraging intellectual exploration and growth, I was given the leisure to learn what I needed to learn in the course of formulating and drafting this work. I am deep grateful to the administration and staff of the Center for nurturing not only the Fellows but also the atmosphere and traditions of the institution.
“I am especially indebted to my colleagues at the Center for making the year intellectually personally so enriching. IN particular, David Olson organized an ad hoc workshop on language and cognition that continued throughout the year and kept strangely evolving into a workshop on consciousness. Though we continued throughout the year to disagree violently — and some of the arguments got pretty heated — I think we all came to understand and respect the others’ point of view a great deal more than when we started. Indeed, toward the end of the eyar, when some visitors came to give talks, we found to our surprise that we all had the same objections: eviedntly we had, without noticing it, developed a common framework. In addition to David, I must especially thank Lynn Cooper, Carol Krumhansl, James Cutting, Mardi Horowitz, Christopher Peacocke, Stephen Stich, Robert Seyfarth, Barbara Smuts, Hersch Leibowitz, and Elizabeth Traugott for being invaluable sources of information and insight, for being willing to have my half-baked ideas bounced off them, even when they were not sure they wanted to listen, for letting me listen to their own ideas, half-baked or not, and for innumerable shared cups of coffee and walks in the cow-pasture.”
I might add that my contact with the primatologists that year — Dorothy Cheney, Robert Seyfarth, Tom Struhsaker, Richard Wrangham, and Barbara Smuts — made an indelible impression on me that led to a strand in my work on the structure of social cognition. This culminated in my book Language Consciousness, Culture (MIT Press, 2007), much of which rests on the foundations laid out by the primatologists. CASBS has been the gift that keeps on giving.
Leave a Reply