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Author: Jerry A. Fodor
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262027909
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Two prominent thinkers argue for the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference to be concepts' sole semantic property.In cognitive science, conceptual content is frequently understood as the “meaning” of a mental representation. This position raises largely empirical questions about what concepts are, what form they take in mental processes, and how they connect to the world they are about. In Minds without Meaning, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn review some of the proposals put forward to answer these questions and find that none of them is remotely defensible.Fodor and Pylyshyn determine that all of these proposals share a commitment to a two-factor theory of conceptual content, which holds that the content of a concept consists of its sense together with its reference. Fodor and Pylyshyn argue instead that there is no conclusive case against the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference as their sole semantic property. Such a theory, if correct, would provide for the naturalistic account of content that cognitive science lacks—and badly needs. Fodor and Pylyshyn offer a sketch of how this theory might be developed into an account of perceptual reference that is broadly compatible with empirical findings and with the view that the mental processes effecting perceptual reference are largely preconceptual, modular, and encapsulated.
Author: Jerry A. Fodor
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262027909
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Two prominent thinkers argue for the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference to be concepts' sole semantic property.In cognitive science, conceptual content is frequently understood as the “meaning” of a mental representation. This position raises largely empirical questions about what concepts are, what form they take in mental processes, and how they connect to the world they are about. In Minds without Meaning, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn review some of the proposals put forward to answer these questions and find that none of them is remotely defensible.Fodor and Pylyshyn determine that all of these proposals share a commitment to a two-factor theory of conceptual content, which holds that the content of a concept consists of its sense together with its reference. Fodor and Pylyshyn argue instead that there is no conclusive case against the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference as their sole semantic property. Such a theory, if correct, would provide for the naturalistic account of content that cognitive science lacks—and badly needs. Fodor and Pylyshyn offer a sketch of how this theory might be developed into an account of perceptual reference that is broadly compatible with empirical findings and with the view that the mental processes effecting perceptual reference are largely preconceptual, modular, and encapsulated.
Author: Jerome Bruner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674253051
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as “information processor,” has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.
Author: Paul M. Pietroski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198812728
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.
Author: Paul Thagard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691142726
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it."--Jacket.
Author: Benjamin K. Bergen
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465028292
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
A cognition expert describes how meaning is conveyed and processed in the mind and answers questions about how we can understand information about things we've never seen in person and why we move our hands and arms when we speak.
Author: Gregg D. Caruso
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190460725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good. The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety. In Neuroexistentialism, a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.
Author: Nicolae-Sorin Drăgan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110659239
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
In a world of global communication, where each one’s life depends increasingly on signs, language and communication, understanding how we relate and opening ourselves to otherness, to differences in all their forms and aspects is becoming more and more relevant. Today, we often understand the differences in terms of adversity or opposition and forget the value of the similarities. Semiotic approaches can provide a critical point of view and a more general reflection that can redefine some aspects of the discussion about the nature of these semiotic categories, differences and similarities. The dichotomy differences – similarities is fundamental to understanding the meaning-making mechanisms in language (De Saussure, 1966; Deleuze, 1995), as well as in other sign systems (Ponzio, 1995; Sebeok & Danesi, 2000). Meaning always appears in the “play of differences” (Derrida, 1978) and similarities. Therefore, the phenomena of similarities and differences must be considered complementary (Marcus, 2011). This book addresses and offers new perspectives for analyzing and understanding sensitive topics in the world of global communication (humanities education, responsive understanding of otherness, digital culture and new media power).
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Author: Rasa Von Werder
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1430313978
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 531
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Book Description
GuruRasa answers, What is the purpose of dreams? Q 1 WHAT is a dream? A A communication system from the unconscious mind to the conscious Q 2 What are SYMBOLS? A The MEANS by which the unconscious SPEAKS to the conscious Q 3 What is the PURPOSE of dreams? A Dreams accomplish these things and more: 1 They SAVE LIVES and SOULS.................................... 2 Warn us of danger; physical, emotional and spiritual to ourselves and others 3 Tell us the true feelings, intentions or interior state of others 4 Reveal our own interior state, sins, virtues and gifts, phobias and desires 5 Explain mysterious situations or incidents 6 Explain WHAT WOULD BE if we did a certain thing 7 Explain the reactions of others to us if we met them or communicated with them 8 Explain what TO DO or NOT TO DO
Author: Claudio Paolucci
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030429865
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
This volume serves as a reference on the field of cognitive semantics. It offers a systematic and original discussion of the issues at the core of the debate in semiotics and the cognitive sciences. It takes into account the problems of representation, the nature of mind, the structure of perception, beliefs associated with habits, social cognition, autism, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. The chapters in this volume present the foundation of semiotics as a theory of cognition, offer a semiotic model of cognitive integration that combines Enactivism and the Extended Mind Theory, and investigate the role of imagination as the origin of perception. The author develops an account of beliefs that are associated with habits and meaning, grounded in Pragmatism, testing his Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on persons with autism spectrum disorders. He also integrates his ideas about the formation of the theory of mind with a theory of subjectivity, understood as self-consciousness which derives from semiotic cognitive abilities. This text appeals to students, professors and researchers in the field.
