Comments

• Sascha

  September 27

  Is the fundamental question on how to build on the argument IPT not being able to explain cognition fully?

  I am a Zettler
• c4lvorias

  September 27 edited September 27

  @Sascha said:
  Is the fundamental question on how to build on the argument IPT not being able to explain cognition fully?

  The goal is to write a critical analysis of IPT with empirical observations from metacognition research.

  There are well-developed critiques I should include and I have to add my own perspective either in the form of new critique or new perspective to existing critique. So, it's half open-ended.

  My structure note of IPT includes context, structure (concepts, constructs, mechanisms and boundaries) and function (assumptions, strengths, limitations and implications).

  There are two problems:

  1. My leaps in arguments are small.
  2. I both use top-down and bottom-up thinking and the physical process of juggling everything is not intuitive yet. But I know the answer is not to force atomicity, first. So I chose to go with more targeted questions.

  Selen. Psychology freak.

  “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

  ― Ursula K. Le Guin
• Lawyer147

  December 17

  Your setup already does something very valuable: you decompose the IPT critique into small, reusable argumentative moves and treat them as building blocks in your Zettelkasten. This is exactly the level of granularity that tends to pay off later, when you revisit or recombine notes in other projects.
  A few concise suggestions:
  • Inside each note, aim for one clear claim in your own words, a sentence or two of why it matters for your project, and at least one explicit link (“supports/challenges IPT on X”, “relates to metacognition finding Y”). That keeps notes atomic but still decision relevant for your future self, not just context less sentences.
  • You don’t have to store every micro step forever. In the exploration phase it’s fine to over capture; later you can “compress” the chain and keep only those steps you might want to reuse in a different argument (e.g. “I/O models struggle with complex systems”) and merge ultra local moves that only make sense inside this one essay.
  • The top down vs bottom up tension is normal. A practical pattern is to maintain:
  • structure notes for IPT (context, mechanisms, assumptions, limits);
  • observation notes for metacognition data and patterns.
  The links between them are your analysis: “this pattern strains assumption A”, “these findings suggest an extra mechanism IPT doesn’t capture”. You don’t need to rotate the whole workflow in your head; let links and a few focused tags do the heavy lifting.
  On generating novel insight: critical analysis can be creative if you treat the “gaps” themselves as first class objects. For example: “IPT silently assumes X, but metacognition data suggests X is unstable”, or “to handle these findings, IPT would need an extra layer Y that the original model doesn’t articulate”. Writing such gap notes, not only prose in the final essay, makes those moves discoverable and recombinable later.
  If at some point you want your system to be more transparent and useful for other readers (e.g. dissertation reviewers, collaborators), you might borrow a bit from G. A. Brutian’s conception of argumentation (see Logic, Language, and Argumentation in Projection of Philosophical Knowledge and later summaries of his logical conception). A light weight way to do this in Zettelkasten is to explicitly tag some notes as theses, some as supporting arguments, some as counter arguments, and some as background assumptions. This mirrors Brutian’s structure “thesis – arguments – grounds – demonstration” without forcing you into a fully formal system, and turns your Zettelkasten from a personal thinking log into a readable argument map for others as well.