![]() ![]() But the very idea that there are important theoretical divisions between such presumed subsystems as “long-term memory” and “reasoning,” (or “planning”) is more an artifact of the divide-and-conquer strategy than anything found in nature. ![]() This central arena is thought to avail itself of material held in various relatively subservient systems of memory. This tends to have the effect of leaving too much of the mind’s work to be done “in the center,” and this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount of understanding” that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain.įor instance, theorists tend to think of perceptual systems as providing “input” to some central thinking arena, which in turn provides “control” or “direction” to some relatively peripheral systems governing bodily motion. Reading these examples should help you to see how to make paraphrase an effective strategy for building an argument grounded in sources.īelow is the original passage as it appears on page 39 of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).Īlmost all researchers in cognitive science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers, tend to postpone questions about consciousness by restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious thought” and “experience” take place. Only the third example is an effective and fair paraphrase: The writer marks the boundaries between her voice and the source’s voice, and she puts the source’s idea to work in service of her own argument. The second retains long phrases verbatim from the original. The first alters the original without changing its form or content. The first and second are examples of plagiarism because they both blur the line between the writer’s voice and the source idea. ![]() Below are three examples of an attempt to paraphrase the passage from Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. Restating a source’s idea in your own words may not seem too difficult, but offering a paraphrase that distinguishes your voice from the source’s voice and furthers your own argument is actually rather challenging. One of the decisions you need to make when engaging with a source is whether to quote the source’s language directly or to paraphrase it in your own words. ![]()
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