MINDBUGS
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2128 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
Mental distorsions that affect the ways people understand situations and issues.
This term has been recently introduced by J. WARFIELD, who “so far” identified four categories:
- “Mindbugs of Misinterpretation: those where concepts are misconstrued or misattributed because of faulty interpretation;
- “Mindbugs of Clanthink: those where concepts are widely perceived to be correct, but which are demonstrably incorrect;
- “Mindbugs of Habit: those which involve ingrained behavior, evinced with essentially no conscious thought;
- “Mindbugs of Error: just plain mistakes.
- “A fifth category that is under consideration has been designed as ”Mindbugs of Specific Human Shortcomings“ This category is based on the hypothesis that there may be something inherent in people as people that causes mindbugs which can never be corrected” (1995, p.3).
Many of the 25 mindbugs hitherto identified by WARFIELD became manifest after the appearance of systemics and cybernetics. Others, of psychological and sociological origins, are obvious but were never explicitly acknowledged in a systematic way until now.
Some of the mindbugs listed to date:
- Affinity to all-encompassing dichotomies
- Indistinguished affinity to unstructured discussion
- Insensivity to conceptual scale
- Misconstruing technology as science (and vice versa)
- Mistaken sense of similarity
WARFIELD even proposes a “mentomology”, as the discipline of the study of mindbugs!
For more details, see WARFIELD's reference.
See also
Blindspot