Words, Thoughts, and Theories

Words, Thoughts, and Theories PDF Author: Alison Gopnik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262571269
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science. Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the philosophy and the psychology, the arguments and the data, address the same fundamental epistemological question: How do we come to understand the world around us? Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories. It is also the first to apply the theory to infancy and early childhood, to use the theory to provide a framework for understanding semantic development, and to demonstrate that language acquisition influences theory change in children.The authors show that children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of knowledge. These restructurings are similar to theory changes in science, and they influence children's early semantic development, since children's cognitive concerns shape and motivate their use of very early words. But, in addition, children pay attention to the language they hear around them and this too reshapes their cognition, and causes them to reorganize their theories.

Words, Thoughts, and Theories

Words, Thoughts, and Theories PDF Author: Alison Gopnik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262071758
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This text articulates and defends the 'theory theory' of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories.

Words, Thoughts, and Theories

Words, Thoughts, and Theories PDF Author: Alison Gopnik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262571269
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science. Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the philosophy and the psychology, the arguments and the data, address the same fundamental epistemological question: How do we come to understand the world around us? Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories. It is also the first to apply the theory to infancy and early childhood, to use the theory to provide a framework for understanding semantic development, and to demonstrate that language acquisition influences theory change in children.The authors show that children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of knowledge. These restructurings are similar to theory changes in science, and they influence children's early semantic development, since children's cognitive concerns shape and motivate their use of very early words. But, in addition, children pay attention to the language they hear around them and this too reshapes their cognition, and causes them to reorganize their theories.

Emotion, Thought and Therapy

Emotion, Thought and Therapy PDF Author: Jerome Neu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000688704
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of ‘thought-dependence’. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling.

30-Second Theories

30-Second Theories PDF Author: Martin Rees
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 1848314523
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
When it comes to big science, very few things are conclusively known. From Quantum Mechanics to Natural Selection, what we have instead are theories - ideas explain why things happen the way they do. We don't know for certain these are correct - no one ever saw the Big Bang - but with them we can paint beautiful, breathtaking pictures of everything from human behaviour to what the future may hold. Profiling the key scientists behind each theory, "30-Second Theories" presents each entry in a unique, eye-catching full-colour design, with thought-provoking extras and stylish illustrations. It is essential for anyone keen on expanding their mind with science's most thrilling ideas.

Mind in Motion

Mind in Motion PDF Author: Barbara Tversky
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093078
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

The Meaning of Meaning

The Meaning of Meaning PDF Author: Charles Kay Ogden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description


Thoughts and Ways of Thinking

Thoughts and Ways of Thinking PDF Author: Benjamin Brown
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
ISBN: 1911529218
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Why do we think differently from one another? Why do religious people adhere to their faith even against reason, whilst atheist thinkers label it “nonsense”? Why do some judges turn more to moral values and others less? Why do we attach different meanings to the same words? These questions can be tackled on psychological or sociological levels, but we can also analyze the subjects on the epistemological level. That is the purpose of this book. Thoughts and Ways of Thinking offers Source Theory as a single explanation for epistemic processes and their religious, legal and linguistic derivatives. The idea is simple: our senses, our understanding, our memory, the testimonies that we trust, and many other objects transmit data to us and so shape our beliefs. In this function they serve as our truth sources. Different beliefs stem from different sources or different hierarchies between same sources. This notion is formalized here through the new tool of Source Calculus, and, after balancing its relativistic consequences by adding pragmatic constraints, it is applied to the philosophies of religion, law and language. With this unified theory, old doubts are framed in new perspectives, and some of them even find their solution.

Metaphor and Thought

Metaphor and Thought PDF Author: Andrew Ortony
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521405614
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 700

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Book Description
Metaphor and Thought, first published in 1979, reflects the surge of interest in and research into the nature and function of metaphor in language and thought. In this revised and expanded second edition, the editor has invited the contributors to update their original essays to reflect any changes in their thinking. Reorganised to accommodate the shifts in central theoretical issues, the volume also includes six new chapters that present important and influential fresh ideas about metaphor that have appeared in such fields as the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, linguistics, cognitive and clinical psychology, education and artificial intelligence.

The Philosophical Baby

The Philosophical Baby PDF Author: Alison Gopnik
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374231966
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
A leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother, explains the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments as they relate to the development of very young children.

Thought and Language

Thought and Language PDF Author: Lev S. Vygotski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781614272441
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
2012 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Vygotsky's closely reasoned, highly readable analysis of the nature of verbal thought as based on word meaning marks a significant step forward in the growing effort to understand cognitive processes. Speech is, he argues, social in origins. Speech is learned from others and, at first used entirely for affective and social functions. Only with time does it come to have self-directive properties that eventually result in internalized verbal thought. A classic work.