Download or read book Mind As Action written by James V. Wertsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-08 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary social problems typically involve many complex, interrelated dimensions--psychological, cultural, and institutional, among others. But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa. In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.
Download or read book Mind as Action written by James V. Wertsch and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this work argues against reductionist accounts of human cognition, proposing a sociocultural theory whereby 'mediated action' and cultural tools shape cognitive processes and can explain how they are organized.
Download or read book Mind As Action written by James V. Wertsch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary social problems typically involve many complex, interrelated dimensions--psychological, cultural, and institutional, among others. But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa. In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.
Download or read book Mind in Motion written by Barbara Tversky and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Voices of the Mind written by James V. WERTSCH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or mediational means that shape both social and individual processes. In considering how these mediational means--in particular, language--emerge in social history and the role they play in organizing the settings in which human beings are socialized, Wertsch achieves fresh insights into essential areas of human mental functioning that are typically unexplored or misunderstood. Although Wertsch's discussion draws on the work of a variety of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, the writings of two Soviet theorists, L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), are of particular significance. Voices of the Mind breaks new ground in reviewing and integrating some of their major theoretical ideas and in demonstrating how these ideas can be extended to address a series of contemporary issues in psychology and related fields. A case in point is Wertsch's analysis of voice, which exemplifies the collaborative nature of his effort. Although some have viewed abstract linguistic entities, such as isolated words and sentences, as the mechanism shaping human thought, Wertsch turns to Bakhtin, who demonstrated the need to analyze speech in terms of how it appropriates the voices of others in concrete sociocultural settings. These appropriated voices may be those of specific speakers, such as one's parents, or they may take the form of social languages characteristic of a category of speakers, such as an ethnic or national community. Speaking and thinking thus involve the inherent process of ventriloquating through the voices of other socioculturally situated speakers. Voices of the Mind attempts to build upon this theoretical foundation, persuasively arguing for the essential bond between cognition and culture.
Download or read book Action Mind and Brain written by David A. Rosenbaum and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and accessible introduction to the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. This engaging and accessible book offers the first introductory text on the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. Written by a leading researcher in the field, it covers the interplay of action, mind, and brain, showing that many core concepts in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and technology grew out of questions about the control of everyday physical actions. It explains action not as a “one-way street from stimuli to response” but as a continual perception-action cycle. The informal writing style invites students to think through the evidence step by step, helping them develop general thinking stills as well as learn specific facts. Special emphasis is placed on the role of underrepresented groups. The book discusses the intellectual background of the field, from Plato to Kant, Dewey, and others; applications and methods; and the physical substrates of action—bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and nerves. It considers the control of actions in space; learning, and the roles of nature and nurture; feedback; feedforward, or anticipated feedback; and degrees of freedom—the multiple ways of getting things done and three methods for narrowing the alternatives. The book is generously illustrated, including many images of thinkers who contributed to the field.
Download or read book Thought in Action written by Barbara Gail Montero and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view--both in academia and in the popular press--that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, it is believed that reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Experts, accordingly, don't need to try to do it; they just do it. But is this true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea that highly accomplished skills are automatic and effortless, Barbara Gail Montero develops a theory of expertise that emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. Along the way, she dispels various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action and analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control impedes well practiced skills. She also explores real-life examples of optimal performance--culled from sports, the performing arts, chess, nursing, medicine, the military and elsewhere--and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to create a picture of expertise according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective.
Download or read book Supersizing the Mind written by Andy Clark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
Download or read book Voices of Collective Remembering written by James V. Wertsch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on numerous fields to provide a comprehensive review of collective memory.
Download or read book The Law of Mind in Action written by Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mind in Action written by Pentti Määttänen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.
Download or read book Personal Agency written by E. J. Lowe and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal Agency consists of two parts. In Part II, a radically libertarian theory of action is defended which combines aspects of agent causalism and volitionism. This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will—a 'two-way' power which rational agents can freely exercise in the light of reason. Lowe contends that substances, not events, are the causal source of all change in the world—with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. And he defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents. Part I prepares the ground for this theory by undermining the threat presented to it by physicalism. It does this by challenging the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms and by showing that a dualistic philosophy of mind—one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively—is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts.
Download or read book The Mind in Action written by Eric Berne and published by Grigson Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Download or read book The Mind s Construction written by Matthew Soteriou and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Soteriou provides an original philosophical account of sensory and cognitive aspects of consciousness. He explores distinctions of temporal character in our mental lives—especially in relation to the exercise of agency—and illuminates the more general issue of the place and role of mental action in the metaphysics of mind.
Download or read book Mind in Action written by Bede Rundle and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-10-16 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bede Rundle challenges the quasi-mechanical view of human action that is dominant in contemporary philosophy of mind. A materialist view of the mind and a causal theory of action fit together conveniently: the notion of action as caused by thoughts and desires allows philosophers to accommodate explanations of action within a framework that is congenial to scientific understanding, and the conception of mind as physical enables them to make sense of causal transactions between the two domains. Mind in Action offers an alternative approach. Compelling reasons are given for demoting causation and for shifting the emphasis to the role played by behaviour in accounts of thought, belief, desire, intention, freedom, and other key concepts. Rundle's approach sheds fresh light not only on human behaviour but also on animal mentality, and has important implications for the feasibility of current programmes in cognitive science.
Download or read book Coherence in Thought and Action written by Paul Thagard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-07-26 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an essay on how people make sense of each other and the world they live in. Making sense is the activity of fitting something puzzling into a coherent pattern of mental representations that include concepts, beliefs, goals, and actions. Paul Thagard proposes a general theory of coherence as the satisfaction of multiple interacting constraints, and discusses the theory's numerous psychological and philosophical applications. Much of human cognition can be understood in terms of coherence as constraint satisfaction, and many of the central problems of philosophy can be given coherence-based solutions. Thagard shows how coherence can help to unify psychology and philosophy, particularly when addressing questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. He also shows how coherence can integrate cognition and emotion.
Download or read book The Mind in Action written by Alan Garnham and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1991 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
