Notes on a Journey From Symbols to Multifractals: A Tribute to Guy Van Orden

Abstract

Rejecting traditional cognitive science put us in a bind. On the one hand, traditional cognitive science is our heritage; our curiosity about the big questions of cognition led us initially to invest in the conventional approaches. On the other hand, we eventually became dissatisfied with the fundamentals of traditional cognitive science. Rather than criticize from the sidelines, we struggled for a new way to address the same problems with a new explanatory framework. Guy Van Orden spurred us forward on 2 counts. First, his work inspired us to consider fractal scaling as a new framework for exploring change in cognitive structure. Second, his provocative contrast between pink and white noises as diagnostic of interactions and components, respectively, intrigued us. Our struggle for a new direction became a struggle to understand what Guy meant and how his ideas might translate within our research domains. Guy helped us to forge a perspective that would have surprised us before, namely, the perspective that cognitive and, more generally, biological structure reflects turbulent flows structured over many different scales with multifractal fluctuations.