Dear Keith,
I'm glad you brought up Plato, as you often do.
It is worth remembering that "memory" and "invention" are closely connected
in Western thought.
For Plato, invention is a kind of remembering or recovering what one has
known all along. Herbert Simon, too, links memory and invention, but he
regards memory as the long-term storage of previous perceptions and
solutions to problems. In contrast, Aristotle distinguished between memory
and invention, but he showed how "recollection" works in "discovering" what
has been stored in memory. And, of course, there is a fourth tradition in
which invention is a distinct art that applies both to discovery of what
already exists as well as the creation of what does not yet exist.
More from Pittsburgh--see you in Melbourne.
Dick
Richard Buchanan
Carnegie Mellon University
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