Author: Nicholas Shea
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0198812884
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience can now reveal information processing in the brain in unprecedented detail. They show how the brain performs complex calculations on neural representations. Drawing on this cutting-edge research, Nicholas Shea uses a series of case studies from the cognitive sciences to develop a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation. His approach is distinctive in focusing firmly on the 'subpersonal' representations that pervade so much of cognitive science. The diversity and depth of the case studies, illustrated by numerous figures, make this book unlike any previous treatment. It is important reading for philosophers of psychology and philosophers of mind, and of considerable interest to researchers throughout the cognitive sciences.
Author: Antoine Culioli
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027276536
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
The objective of this book is to better acquaint English-speaking linguistics with a corpus of texts hitherto untranslated, containing the cognitive-based research in formal linguistics of one of the most important theoreticians in the field: Antoine Culioli (b. 1924). Culioli's viewpoint is grounded in Emile Benveniste's (1902-1976) revolutionary answer to Saussure's opposition between competence (langue) and performance (parole) captured in the idea of énonciation, in which the relationship between an individual and a language is one of appropriation. The translation has been prepared to provide the reader with as obstacle-free a path as one can clear to a theory that requires, and indeed commands, a very close, attentive reading. As an additional aid to understand Culioli's argument, footnotes throughout the work show similarities and differences with the work of the cognitive linguist Ronald W. Langacker.
Author: Jerry Bobrow
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483299155
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
Representation and Understanding
Author: Graham Macdonald
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199270260
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Teleosemantics seeks to explain meaning and other intentional phenomena in terms of their function in the life of the species. This volume of new essays from an impressive line-up of well-known contributors offers a valuable summary of the current state of the teleosemantics debate.
Author: William M. Ramsey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521859875
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Publisher description
Author: Slim Masmoudi
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1848729731
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
"This volume is intended to reach out to basic and applied psychological researchers, cognitive and affective scientists, learning scientists, biologists, sociologists, neuropsychological researchers, and philosophers, who have an interest in an integrated understanding of the mind at work, particularly pertaining to explanations of real-life phenomena that have social and practical significance."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Armin W. Schulz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262546736
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
An argument that representational decision making is more cognitively efficient, allowing an organism to adjust more easily to changes in the environment. Many organisms (including humans) make decisions by relying on mental representations. Not simply a reaction triggered by perception, representational decision making employs high-level, non-perceptual mental states with content to manage interactions with the environment. A person making a decision based on mental representations, for example, takes a step back from her perceptions at the time to assess the nature of the world she lives in. But why would organisms rely on representational decision making, and what evolutionary benefits does this reliance provide to the decision maker? In Efficient Cognition, Armin Schulz argues that representational decision making can be more cognitively efficient than non-representational decision making. Specifically, he shows that a key driver in the evolution of representational decision making is that mental representations can enable an organism to save cognitive resources and adjust more efficiently to changed environments. After laying out the foundations of his argument—clarifying the central questions, the characterization of representational decision making, and the relevance of an evidential form of evolutionary psychology—Schulz presents his account of the evolution of representational decision making and critically considers some of the existing accounts of the subject. He then applies his account to three open questions concerning the nature of representational decision making: the extendedness of decision making, and when we should expect cognition to extend into the environment; the specialization of decision making and the use of simple heuristics; and the psychological sources of altruistic behaviors.
Author: William J. Clancey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521448710
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
This 1997 book examines recent changes in the design of intelligent machines which afford heightened interactivity with the environment.
Author: Fred Keijzer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263327
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT), the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. Representation is a fundamental concept within cognitive science. Most often, representations are interpreted as mental representations, theoretical entities that are the bearers of meaning and the source of intentionality. This approach views representation as the internal reflection of external circumstances—that is, as the end station of sensory processes that translate the environmental state of affairs into a set of mental representations. Fred Keijzer stresses, however, that representations are also the starting point for a set of processes that lead back to the external environment. They are used as theoretical components within an explanation of a person's outwardly visible behavior. In this book Keijzer investigates the usefulness of representation for behavioral explanation, irrespective of mental issues. Viewing representation solely in terms of its contribution to explaining behavior allows him to build a serious case for a nonrepresentational approach and to evaluate representation's role in cognitive science. Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT). AT is the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. He proposes an alternative to AT called Behavioral Systems Theory (BST), which explains behavior as the result of interactions between an organism and its environment. Keijzer compares BST to related work in the biology of cognition, in the building of animal-like robots, and in dynamical systems theory. Most important, he extends BST to the difficult issue of anticipatory behavior through an analogy between behavior and morphogenesis, the process by which a multicellular body develops.
Author: C. Eastman
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080530311
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Wide aspects of a university education address design: the conceptualization, planning and implementation of man-made artifacts. All areas of engineering, parts of computer science and of course architecture and industrial design all claim to teach design. Yet the education of design tends ot follow tacit practices, without explicit assumptions, goals and processes. This book is premised on the belief that design education based on a cognitive science approach can lead to significant improvements in the effectiveness of university design courses and to the future capabilities of practicing designers. This applies to all professional areas of design. The book grew out of publications and a workshop focusing on design education. This volume attempts to outline a framework upon which new efforts in design education might be based. The book includes chapters dealing with six broad aspects of the study of design education: • Methodologies for undertaking studies of design learning • Longitudinal assessment of design learning • Methods and cases for assessing beginners, experts and special populations • Studies of important component processes • Structure of design knowledge • Design cognition in the classroom
