Biography:Stevan Harnad

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Short description: Hungarian-born Canadian cognitive scientist (born 1945)
Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad
Harnad in 2014
Born (1945-06-02) June 2, 1945 (age 79)
Budapest, Hungary
NationalityHungarian
Alma materMcGill University, Princeton University
Scientific career
FieldsCognitive science
InstitutionsUniversité du Québec à Montréal, University of Southampton
ThesisGrounding Symbolic Representation in Categorical Perception (1992)
InfluencesDonald O. Hebb, Julian Jaynes, Noam Chomsky, Alan Turing, Charles Darwin
Websitewww.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/harnad

Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal , Canada.

Education

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

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

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

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

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[26] in protest against the increasingly "Illiberal democracy" of Viktor Orban.

Animal welfare

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,[27][28] Harnad is increasingly active in animal welfare,[29][30] animal rights,[31] and animal law.[32][33]

See also

  • List of animal rights advocates

References

  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. http://www.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_3298161/en/academic-year-opening-ceremony-2013. 
  4. Stevan Harnad publications indexed by Google Scholar
  5. {{DBLP}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  6. Gorondi, Pablo, Nobel winner joins scientists’ protest of Hungarian policies, AP News https://apnews.com/8b425fded59840d9b5c37817cdd293b1/nobel-winner-joins-scientists-protest-hungarian-policies
  7. Harnad, Stevan (2005). To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization. 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. Evolution of Communication 4(1) 117-142
  9. Harnad, Stevan (2006). The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence. 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. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89
  11. "D.O. Hebb (1904 - 1985)". cogprints.org. http://cogprints.org/1652/1/hebb.html. 
  12. What It Feels Like To Hear Voices: Fond Memories of Julian Jaynes
  13. "Editorial". soton.ac.uk. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/Kata/bbs.editorial.html. 
  14. "BBS Valedictory Editorial 2003". soton.ac.uk. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/bbs.valedict.html. 
  15. Archive of American Scientist Open Access Forum
  16. "GOAL Info Page". soton.ac.uk. http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal. 
  17. "Open Access". eprints.org. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/. 
  18. 18.0 18.1 Animal Sentience An Interdisciplinary Journal on Animal Feeling
  19. Harnad, Stevan (May 25, 2011). "Sky-writing, or, when man first met troll". https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/sky-writing-or-when-man-first-met-troll/239420/. 
  20. 20.0 20.1 20.2 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. http://www.cogprints.org/1581/1/harnad90.skywriting.html. 
  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". 1994–2001. https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/. 
  23. "Open Access Archivangelism". eprints.org. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?serendipity%5Baction%5D=search&serendipity%5BsearchTerm%5D=palinkas&serendipity%5BsearchButton%5D=%3E. 
  24. Bohannon, John (February 4, 2011). "Hungarian Academicians Blast Government Over Inquiry Into Research Funds". ScienceInsider. http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/02/hungarian-academicians-blast-government.html. 
  25. "Hungarian newspaper targets former dissidents". Monsters and Critics. January 8, 2011.
  26. Gorondi, Pablo, Nobel winner joins scientists’ protest of Hungarian policies, AP News https://apnews.com/8b425fded59840d9b5c37817cdd293b1/nobel-winner-joins-scientists-protest-hungarian-policies
  27. Elise Desaulniers "I Am Ashamed to Have Been a Vegetarian for 50 Years" , Huffington Post, May 30, 2013.
  28. Stevan Harnad (2012) "Luxe, nécessité, souffrance: pourquoi je ne suis pas carnivore" Quèbec humaniste 8(1) [|permanent dead link|dead link}}]
  29. Harnad, S. (2014) Animal pain and human pleasure: ethical dilemmas outside the classroom . LSE Impact Blog 6/13 June 13, 2014
  30. Marc Bekoff & Stevan Harnad (2015) Doing the Right Thing: An Interview With Stevan Harnad [|permanent dead link|dead link}}]. Psychology Today Blog. January 2015
  31. Harnad, Stevan (2012). How/Why Explaining the Causal Role of Consciousness is Hard Turing Centenary Institute on the Evolution and Function of Consciousness"
  32. Manifesto for the Evolution of Animals’ Legal Status in the Civil Code of Quebec
  33. "Droit Animalier Québec". https://daq.quebec. 

See also

External links