Download or read book Similarity and Symbols in Human Thinking written by Steven A. Sloman and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Symbolism written by James Haig and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Symbols and Embodiment written by Manuel de Vega and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive scientists have a variety of approaches to studying cognition: experimental psychology, computer science, robotics, neuroscience, educational psychology, philosophy of mind, and psycholinguistics, to name but a few. In addition, they also differ in their approaches to cognition - some of them consider that the mind works basically like a computer, involving programs composed of abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols. Others claim that cognition is embodied - that is, symbols must be grounded on perceptual, motoric, and emotional experience. The existence of such different approaches has consequences when dealing with practical issues such as understanding brain disorders, designing artificial intelligence programs and robots, improving psychotherapy, or designing instructional programs. The symbolist and embodiment camps seldom engage in any kind of debate to clarify their differences. This book is the first attempt to do so. It brings together a team of outstanding scientists, adopting symbolist and embodied viewpoints, in an attempt to understand how the mind works and the nature of linguistic meaning. As well as being interdisciplinary, all authors have made an attempt to find solutions to substantial issues beyond specific vocabularies and techniques.
Download or read book Lines of Thought written by Lance J. Rips and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we think about maths, despite the immateriality of numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities? How are we able to think about what might have happened if history had taken a different turn? Questions like these turn up in nearly every part of cognitive science and are central to our human position of having limited knowledge of what is true.
Download or read book Thinking with Diagrams written by Sybille Krämer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diagrammatic reasoning is crucial for human cognition. It is hard to think of any forms of science or knowledge without the "intermediary world" of diagrams and diagrammatic representation in thought experiments and/or processes, manifested in forms as divers as notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawings and maps. Despite their phenomenological and structural-functional differences, these forms of representation share a number of important attributes and epistemic functions. Combining aspects of linguistic and pictorial symbolism, diagrams go beyond the traditional distinction between language and image. They do not only represent, yet intervene in what is represented. Their spatiality, materiality and operativity establish a dynamic tool to exteriorize thinking, thus contributing to the idea of the extended mind. They foster imagination and problem solving, facilitate orientation in knowledge spaces and the discovery of unsuspected relationships. How can the diagrammatic nature of cognitive and knowledge practices be theorized historically as well as systematically? This is what this volume explores by investigating the semiotic dimension of diagrams as to knowledge, information and reasoning, e.g., the 'thing-ness' of diagrams in the history of art, the range of diagrammatic reasoning in logic, mathematics, philosophy and the sciences in general, including the knowledge function of maps.
Download or read book Knowledge Representation and Symbols in the Mind written by René J. Jorna and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Connections and Symbols written by Steven Pinker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic analysis of the explosive new field of Connectionism that is challenging the basic tenets of cognitive science. Does intelligence result from the manipulation of structured symbolic expressions? Or is it the result of the activation of large networks of densely interconnected simple units? Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic analysis of the explosive new field of Connectionism that is challenging the basic tenets of cognitive science. These lively discussions by Jerry A. Fodor, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Joel Lechter, and Thomas G. Bever raise issues that lie at the core of our understanding of how the mind works: Does connectionism offer it truly new scientific model or does it merely cloak the old notion of associationism as a central doctrine of learning and mental functioning? Which of the new empirical generalizations are sound and which are false? And which of the many ideas such as massively parallel processing, distributed representation, constraint satisfaction, and subsymbolic or microfeatural analyses belong together, and which are logically independent? Now that connectionism has arrived with full-blown models of psychological processes as diverse as Pavlovian conditioning, visual recognition, and language acquisition, the debate is on. Common themes emerge from all the contributors to Connections and Symbols: criticism of connectionist models applied to language or the parts of cognition employing language like operations; and a focus on what it is about human cognition that supports the traditional physical symbol system hypothesis. While criticizing many aspects of connectionist models, the authors also identify aspects of cognition that could he explained by the connectionist models. Connections and Symbols is included in the Cognition Special Issue series, edited by Jacques Mehler.
Download or read book The Symbolic Species The Co evolution of Language and the Brain written by Terrence W. Deacon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998-04-17 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.
Download or read book The Robot s Rebellion written by Keith E. Stanovich and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that we might be robots is no longer the stuff of science fiction; decades of research in evolutionary biology and cognitive science have led many esteemed scientists to the conclusion that, according to the precepts of universal Darwinism, humans are merely the hosts for two replicators (genes and memes) that have no interest in us except as conduits for replication. Richard Dawkins, for example, jolted us into realizing that we are just survival mechanisms for our own genes, sophisticated robots in service of huge colonies of replicators to whom concepts of rationality, intelligence, agency, and even the human soul are irrelevant. Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering and disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools for the "robot's rebellion," a program of cognitive reform necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as individual human beings. He shows how concepts of rational thinking from cognitive science interact with the logic of evolution to create opportunities for humans to structure their behavior to serve their own ends. These evaluative activities of the brain, he argues, fulfill the need that we have to ascribe significance to human life. We may well be robots, but we are the only robots who have discovered that fact. Only by recognizing ourselves as such, argues Stanovich, can we begin to construct a concept of self based on what is truly singular about humans: that they gain control of their lives in a way unique among life forms on Earth—through rational self-determination.
Download or read book An Invitation to Cognitive Science Thinking written by Daniel N. Osherson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than surveying theories and data in the manner characteristic of many introductory textbooks in the field, An Invitation to Cognitive Science employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results.
Download or read book The Making of Human Concepts written by Denis Mareschal and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human adults appear different from other animals in their ability to form abstract mental representations that go beyond perceptual similarity. In short, they can conceptualize the world. This apparent uniqueness leads to an immediate puzzle: WHEN and HOW does this abstract system come into being? To answer this question we need to explore the origins of adult concepts, both developmentally and phylogenetically; When does the developing child acquire the ability to use abstract concepts?; does the transition occur around 2 years, with the onset of symbolic representation and language? Or, is it independent of the emergence of language?; when in evolutionary history did an abstract representational system emerge?; is there something unique about the human brain? How would a computational system operating on the basis of perceptual associations develop into a system operating on the basis of abstract relations?; is this ability present in other species, but masked by their inability to verbalise abstractions? Perhaps the very notion of concepts is empty and should be done away with altogether. This book tackles the age-old puzzle of what might be unique about human concepts. Intuitively, we have a sense that our thoughts are somehow different from those of animals and young children such as infants. Yet, if true, this raises the question of where and how this uniqueness arises. What are the factors that have played out during the life course of the individual and over the evolution of humans that have contributed to the emergence of this apparently unique ability? This volume brings together a collection of world specialists who have grappled with these questions from different perspectives to try to resolve the issue. It includes contributions from leading psychologists, neuroscientists, child and infant specialists, and animal cognition specialists. Taken together, this story leads to the idea that there is no unique ingredient in the emergence of human concepts, but rather a powerful and potentially unique mix of biological abilities and personal and social history that has led to where the human mind now stands. A 'must-read' for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences.
Download or read book How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe written by John R. Anderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University The argument John Anderson gives in this book was inspired by the passage above, from the last lecture by one of the pioneers of cognitive science. Newell describes what, for him, is the pivotal question of scientific inquiry, and Anderson gives an answer that is emerging from the study of brain and behavior. Humans share the same basic cognitive architecture with all primates, but they have evolved abilities to exercise abstract control over cognition and process more complex relational patterns. The human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions. In this book, Anderson discusses in detail how these various modules can combine to produce behaviors as varied as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation, but focuses principally on two of the modules: the declarative and procedural. The declarative module involves a memory system that, moment by moment, attempts to give each person the most appropriate possible window into his or her past. The procedural module involves a central system that strives to develop a set of productions that will enable the most adaptive response from any state of the modules. Newell argued that the answer to his question must take the form of a cognitive architecture, and Anderson organizes his answer around the ACT-R architecture, but broadens it by bringing in research from all areas of cognitive science, including how recent work in brain imaging maps onto the cognitive architecture.
Download or read book The Social Life of Trees written by Laura Rival and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The passionate response of the British public to the Newbury Bypass is a revealing measure of how strongly people feel about trees and the environment. Similarly, in the United States, the giant sequoia of California is an enduring national symbol that inspires intense feelings. As rainforests are sacrificed to the interests of multi-national corporations and traditional ways of life disappear, the status of forests, the cultural significance of trees, and the impact of conservation policies are subjects that have inspired intense engagement. Why do people feel so strongly about trees? With this explosion of interest in environmental issues, a serious study of what trees mean to people has long been overdue. This interdisciplinary book responds to this need by providing the first cross-cultural analysis of tree symbolism. Drawing on rich case studies, contributors explore the processes through which trees are used as metaphors of identity and continuity. Political struggles over forest resources feature prominently, and the perceptions of trees in various cultures provide telling insights into the ways in which human societies conceptualize nature.As well as being a major contribution to the field of symbolic anthropology, this comprehensive study will be essential reading for students in a wide range of courses and for anyone with a keen interest in the politics of ecology, the occult and neo-paganism, and the history and sociology of environmentalism in its widest sense.
Download or read book How the Body Shapes Knowledge written by Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer and published by American Psychological Association (APA). This book was released on 2019 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores the theory of embodied cognition, which suggests that human cognition is "grounded" in the neural pathways linked to bodily sensation.
Download or read book Grace and Grit written by Ken Wilber and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a Major Motion Picture Heartfelt, deeply moving, and incredibly real, this narrative shares the five-year journey of philosopher Ken Wilber and his wife, Treya Killam Wilber, through Treya’s illness, treatment, and death. Ken’s wide-ranging commentary—which questions conventional and New Age approaches to illness and reaches beyond the experience to find wisdom in pain—is combined with Treya’s journals to create a portrait of health and healing, wholeness and harmony, and suffering and surrender. This edition includes a new preface by the author.
Download or read book Bridging Times and Spaces Papers in Ancient Near Eastern Mediterranean and Armenian Studies written by Pavel S. Avetisyan and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents papers written by colleagues of Professor Gregory E. Areshian on the occasion his 65th birthday. The range of topics includes Near Eastern, Mediterranean and Armenian archaeology, theory of interpretation in archaeology and art history, interdisciplinary history, historical linguistics, art history, and comparative mythology.
Download or read book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition written by Michael Tomasello and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.
