The common criticisms from professors about broad, superficially philosophical questions apply perfectly well to the title of this piece. What is a perfect memory? We may try to divide up the question and ask what both perfection, and memory are. We may ask whether memory refers to a memory of something or that reified agglomeration […]
Black boxes are mechanisms, systems, or tools that we use without knowledge or interest in how they work internally; instead we look only at the input and output, or stimulus and response. Psychology, in its drive to establish itself as a hard science, appears to accept the closing of its black boxes with too great a readiness. What I suggest here is simply that we would benefit from a more scrupulous assessment of the validity and pragmatism of the black boxes we create, endorse and use within our field.