Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 204

FIGURE 2. Cluster analysis of the 36 words of Fig. 1 classified by 20 adult subjects.
Note that syntactic categories are faithfully respected, while semantic relations are
almost completely ignored.
it demands is at once apparent when one realizes that “relevance” is a
triadic relation that relates a set of propositions (P 1 ,P 2 , . . .) to another set
of propositions (Q 1 ,Q 2 , . . .) in the mind (M) of one who wishes to estab-
lish this relation. If P are the causes that are to explain the perceived effects
Q, then the principle of necessary and sufficient cause forces us to reduce
our perception of effects further and further until we have hit upon the nec-
essary and sufficient cause that produces the desired effect: everything else
in the universe shall be irrelevant.
It is easy to show that resting one's cognitive functions upon these two
pillars is counter-productive in contemplating any evolutionary process, be