Grounds for Cognition

Grounds for Cognition PDF Author: Radu J. Bogdan
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780507
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Q: Why do organisms need cognition? A: To get information about their environments. Q: Why such information? A: Because organisms need to guide their behaviors to goals. Q: Why guidance? A: Because it leads to goal satisfaction. Q: Why goals? Cognition is a naturally selected response by genetic programs to the evolutionary pressure of guiding behaviors to goals. Organisms are material systems that maintain and replicate themselves by engaging their world in goal-directed ways. This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information. Guidance to goal also makes a difference to the understanding of human cognition. Simpler forms of cognition evolve to handle fixed informational transactions with the world, whereas human cognition evolves the abilities to script flexible goal situations that fit specific contexts of behavior. This teleoevolutionary approach has important implications for cognitive science, two of which are programmatic. One is that information that guides to goal is not exclusively cognitive; guidance is also affected by ecological facts and regularities as well as by design assumptions about them. The other implication is that the functional analyses dominant in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are incomplete and weak. They are incomplete in that they focus only on the explicitly encoded cognitive information and its behavioral consequences, thus ignoring the larger guidance arrangements; and weak because causal and functional relations implement but underdetermine goal-directed and goal-guided procesess. A work dealing expressly with the foundations of cognitive science, this book addresses basic but seldom-asked questions about the evolutionary rationale of cognition and the way this rationale has shaped the major types of cognition. It also provides a teleological answer to these basic questions in terms of goal directedness and particularly guidance of behavior to goal. In so doing, the work defends the scientific respectability and the explanatory necessity of teleology by showing that goal directedness characterizes the work of genetic programs.

Grounds for Cognition

Grounds for Cognition PDF Author: Radu J. Bogdan
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780507
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Q: Why do organisms need cognition? A: To get information about their environments. Q: Why such information? A: Because organisms need to guide their behaviors to goals. Q: Why guidance? A: Because it leads to goal satisfaction. Q: Why goals? Cognition is a naturally selected response by genetic programs to the evolutionary pressure of guiding behaviors to goals. Organisms are material systems that maintain and replicate themselves by engaging their world in goal-directed ways. This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information. Guidance to goal also makes a difference to the understanding of human cognition. Simpler forms of cognition evolve to handle fixed informational transactions with the world, whereas human cognition evolves the abilities to script flexible goal situations that fit specific contexts of behavior. This teleoevolutionary approach has important implications for cognitive science, two of which are programmatic. One is that information that guides to goal is not exclusively cognitive; guidance is also affected by ecological facts and regularities as well as by design assumptions about them. The other implication is that the functional analyses dominant in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are incomplete and weak. They are incomplete in that they focus only on the explicitly encoded cognitive information and its behavioral consequences, thus ignoring the larger guidance arrangements; and weak because causal and functional relations implement but underdetermine goal-directed and goal-guided procesess. A work dealing expressly with the foundations of cognitive science, this book addresses basic but seldom-asked questions about the evolutionary rationale of cognition and the way this rationale has shaped the major types of cognition. It also provides a teleological answer to these basic questions in terms of goal directedness and particularly guidance of behavior to goal. In so doing, the work defends the scientific respectability and the explanatory necessity of teleology by showing that goal directedness characterizes the work of genetic programs.

Cognition in the Wild

Cognition in the Wild PDF Author: Edwin Hutchins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262581469
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

Kant's Empirical Psychology

Kant's Empirical Psychology PDF Author: Patrick R. Frierson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This is the first English-language book to examine Kant's empirical psychology, applying it throughout Kant's philosophy and to contemporary philosophical issues.

Grounds for Cognition

Grounds for Cognition PDF Author: Radu J. Bogdan
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780493
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Q: Why do organisms need cognition? A: To get information about their environments. Q: Why such information? A: Because organisms need to guide their behaviors to goals. Q: Why guidance? A: Because it leads to goal satisfaction. Q: Why goals? Cognition is a naturally selected response by genetic programs to the evolutionary pressure of guiding behaviors to goals. Organisms are material systems that maintain and replicate themselves by engaging their world in goal-directed ways. This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information. Guidance to goal also makes a difference to the understanding of human cognition. Simpler forms of cognition evolve to handle fixed informational transactions with the world, whereas human cognition evolves the abilities to script flexible goal situations that fit specific contexts of behavior. This teleoevolutionary approach has important implications for cognitive science, two of which are programmatic. One is that information that guides to goal is not exclusively cognitive; guidance is also affected by ecological facts and regularities as well as by design assumptions about them. The other implication is that the functional analyses dominant in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are incomplete and weak. They are incomplete in that they focus only on the explicitly encoded cognitive information and its behavioral consequences, thus ignoring the larger guidance arrangements; and weak because causal and functional relations implement but underdetermine goal-directed and goal-guided procesess. A work dealing expressly with the foundations of cognitive science, this book addresses basic but seldom-asked questions about the evolutionary rationale of cognition and the way this rationale has shaped the major types of cognition. It also provides a teleological answer to these basic questions in terms of goal directedness and particularly guidance of behavior to goal. In so doing, the work defends the scientific respectability and the explanatory necessity of teleology by showing that goal directedness characterizes the work of genetic programs.

The Mind of the Criminal

The Mind of the Criminal PDF Author: Reid Griffith Fontaine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521513766
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Discusses the excusing nature of traditional and non-traditional criminal law defenses and questions the structure of these based on scientific findings.

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition PDF Author: Henri Cohen
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080471196
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
What were the circumstances that led to the development of our cognitive abilities from a primitive hominid to an essentially modern human? The answer to this question is of profound importance to understanding our present nature. Since the steep path of our cognitive development is the attribute that most distinguishes humans from other mammals, this is also a quest to determine human origins. This collection of outstanding scientific problems and the revelation of the many ways they can be addressed indicates the scope of the field to be explored and reveals some avenues along which research is advancing. Distinguished scientists and researchers who have advanced the discussion of the mind and brain contribute state-of-the-art presentations of their field of expertise. Chapters offer speculative and provocative views on topics such as body, culture, evolution, feelings, genetics, history, humor, knowledge, language, machines, neuroanatomy, pathology, and perception. This book will appeal to researchers and students in cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy. - Includes a contribution by Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited authors of our time

Unified Theories of Cognition

Unified Theories of Cognition PDF Author: Allen Newell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674921016
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
Newell introduces Soar, an architecture for general cognition. A pioneer system in AI, Soar is the first problem-solver to create its own subgoals and learn continuously from its own experience. Its ability to operate within the real-time constraints of intelligent behavior illustrates important characteristics of human cognition.

The Cognitive Animal

The Cognitive Animal PDF Author: Marc Bekoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262523226
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals discussed include antelopes, bees, dogs, dolphins, earthworms, fish, hyenas, parrots, prairie dogs, rats, ravens, sea lions, snakes, spiders, and squirrels. The topics include (but are not limited to) definitions of cognition, the role of anecdotes in the study of animal cognition, anthropomorphism, attention, perception, learning, memory, thinking, consciousness, intentionality, communication, planning, play, aggression, dominance, predation, recognition, assessment of self and others, social knowledge, empathy, conflict resolution, reproduction, parent-young interactions and caregiving, ecology, evolution, kin selection, and neuroethology.

Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine

Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine PDF Author: Stefanie Buchenau
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822982374
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They investigated the anatomical structures and the physiological processes underlying the rise, differentiation, and articulation of human cognitive activities, and looked for the "anatomical roots" of the specificity of human intelligence when compared to other forms of animal sensibility. This edited volume focuses on medical and philosophical debates on human intelligence and animal perception in the early modern age, providing fresh insights into the influence of medical discourse on the rise of modern philosophical anthropology. Contributions from distinguished historians of philosophy and medicine focus on sixteenth-century zoological, psychological, and embryological discourses on man; the impact of mechanism and comparative anatomy on philosophical conceptions of body and soul; and the key status of sensibility in the medical and philosophical enlightenment.

Cognition and Addiction

Cognition and Addiction PDF Author: Antonio Verdejo García
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128152990
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Cognition and Addiction: A Researcher's Guide from Mechanisms Towards Interventions provides researchers with a guide to recent cognitive neuroscience advances in addiction theory, phenotyping, treatments and new vistas, including both substance and behavioral addictions. This book focuses on "what to know and "how to apply information, prioritizing novel principles and delineating cutting-edge assessment, phenotyping and treatment tools. Written by world renowned researcher Antonio Verdejo-Garcia, this resource will become a go-to guide for researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience and addiction. - Examines cognitive neuroscience advances in addiction theory, including both substance and behavioral addictions - Discusses primary principles of cutting-edge assessment, phenotyping and treatment tools - Includes detailed chapters on neuro-epidemiology and genetic imaging