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Stevan Harnad

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Stevan Harnad
Harnad in 2014
Born1945 (age 78–79)
Budapest, Hungary
CitizenshipCanadian
Alma materMcGill University, Princeton University
Known forEPrints (1978)
Scientific career
FieldsCognitive science
InstitutionsUniversité du Québec à Montréal, University of Southampton
ThesisGrounding Symbolic Representation in Categorical Perception (1992)
Websitewww.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/harnad

Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born 1945) is a Canadian cognitive scientist based in Montreal.

Early life and education

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Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. Harnad completed his Master of Arts degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1969,[1] his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1992.[2] He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University of Liège in 2013.[3]

Research

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Harnad's research interests are in cognitive science, open access and animal sentience.[4][5] He is currently professor of psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), McGill University, and professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. Elected external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001 (resigned in protest, 8 October 2016[6]), he was Canada Research Chair in cognitive science 2001–2015. His research is on categorization,[7] communication,[8] cognition,[9] and consciousness[10] and he has written extensively on categorical perception, symbol grounding, origin of language, lateralization, the Turing test, distributed cognition, scientometrics, and consciousness. Harnad is a former student of Donald O. Hebb[11] and Julian Jaynes.[12]

Research publishing and open access

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In 1978, Harnad was the founder[13] of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, of which he remained editor-in-chief until 2002.[14] In addition, he founded Psycoloquy (an early electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association), CogPrints (an electronic eprint archive in the cognitive sciences hosted by the University of Southampton), and the American Scientist Open Access Forum[15] (since 1998; now the Global Open Access List, GOAL[16]). Harnad, an active promoter of open access self-archiving and EPrints[17] is currently Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal Animal Sentience.[18]

Scholarly skywriting

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Scholarly skywriting, coined by Harnad around 1987,[19] is the combination of multiple email and a topic threaded web archive such as a newsgroup, electronic mailing list, hypermail, netnews or Internet forum, linked and sortable by date, author, or subject-heading threads.[20] The name derives from the idea that texts can be written in the "sky" (via multiple email and a web archive) for all to see ("skyreading") and all to add their own comments to ("skywriting").[20] Harnad suggested that it could be a kind of open peer review,[20] a supplement to classical peer review, but not a substitute for it.[21] What Harnad called student skywriting is scholarly skywriting done in a teaching/learning context.[22]

Political activism

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Harnad is the author of a 2011 open letter[23] signed by over 60 external members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences addressed to the Academy's President, József Pálinkás, concerning the press and police harassment campaign against Hungarian philosophers who were critics of the current Hungarian ruling party, Fidesz, and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán.[24][25] Harnad resigned from his external membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 8 October 2016[6] in protest against the increasingly "Illiberal democracy" of Viktor Orban.

Animal welfare

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Harnad is Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal Animal Sentience[18] launched in 2015 by the Institute of Science and Policy of The Humane Society of the United States. A vegan,[26][27] Harnad is increasingly active in animal welfare,[28][29] animal rights,[30] and animal law.[31][32]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Harnad, Stevan (1969). The effects of fixation, attention, and report on the frequency and duration of visual disappearances (MA thesis). McGill University. ProQuest 302385436.
  2. ^ Harnad, Stevan (1992). Grounding Symbolic Representation in Categorical Perception (PhD thesis). Princeton University. ProQuest 85555174.
  3. ^ "Université de Liège - Academic Year Opening Ceremony 2013". ulg.ac.be. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  4. ^ Stevan Harnad publications indexed by Google Scholar
  5. ^ Stevan Harnad at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  6. ^ a b "Nobel winner joins scientists' protest of Hungarian policies". AP NEWS. 20 October 2016. Retrieved 21 June 2023.
  7. ^ Harnad, Stevan (2005). To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization. Archived 8 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier.
  8. ^ Cangelosi, Angelo and Harnad, Stevan (2001). The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories. Archived 17 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine Evolution of Communication 4(1) 117-142
  9. ^ Harnad, Stevan (2006). The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence. Archived 9 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer
  10. ^ Harnad, Stevan & Scherzer, Peter (2008). First, Scale Up to the Robotic Turing Test, Then Worry About Feeling. Archived 8 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89
  11. ^ "D.O. Hebb (1904 - 1985)". cogprints.org. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  12. ^ What It Feels Like To Hear Voices: Fond Memories of Julian Jaynes Archived 9 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  13. ^ "Editorial". soton.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  14. ^ "BBS Valedictory Editorial 2003". soton.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  15. ^ Archive of American Scientist Open Access Forum Archived 17 June 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  16. ^ "GOAL Info Page". soton.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  17. ^ "Open Access". eprints.org. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  18. ^ a b Animal Sentience An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling Archived 21 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  19. ^ Harnad, Stevan (25 May 2011) [1987]. "Sky-writing, or, when man first met troll". The Atlantic. Retrieved 30 September 2020.
  20. ^ a b c Harnad, Stevan (November 1990). "Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication continuum of scientific inquiry". Psychological Science. 1 (6): 342–344. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1990.tb00234.x. S2CID 58105259.
  21. ^ Adler, J. R., Chan, T. M., Blain, J. B., Thoma, B., & Atkinson, P. (2019). # OpenAccess: free online, open-access crowdsource-reviewed publishing is the future; traditional peer-reviewed journals are on the way out. Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 21(1), 11-14.
  22. ^ "Student Skywriting (Hypermail Discussion) Archives". www.southampton.ac.uk. 1994–2001. Retrieved 30 September 2020.
  23. ^ "Open Access Archivangelism". eprints.org.
  24. ^ Bohannon, John (4 February 2011). "Hungarian Academicians Blast Government Over Inquiry Into Research Funds". ScienceInsider. Archived from the original on 9 February 2011.
  25. ^ "Hungarian newspaper targets former dissidents". Monsters and Critics. 8 January 2011.
  26. ^ Elise Desaulniers "I Am Ashamed to Have Been a Vegetarian for 50 Years" Archived 31 July 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Huffington Post, 30 May 2013.
  27. ^ Stevan Harnad (2012) "Luxe, nécessité, souffrance: pourquoi je ne suis pas carnivore" Quèbec humaniste 8(1) [dead link‍]
  28. ^ Harnad, S. (2014) Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine. LSE Impact Blog 6/13 June 13, 2014
  29. ^ Marc Bekoff & Stevan Harnad (2015) Doing the Right Thing: An Interview With Stevan Harnad [dead link‍]. Psychology Today Blog. January 2015
  30. ^ Harnad, Stevan (2012). How/Why Explaining the Causal Role of Consciousness is Hard Archived 21 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine Turing Centenary Institute on the Evolution and Function of Consciousness
  31. ^ Manifesto for the Evolution of Animals’ Legal Status in the Civil Code of Quebec
  32. ^ "Droit Animalier Québec".
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