Philosophers have usually argued that the right way to explain people's actions is in terms of their beliefs and intentions rather than in terms of objective facts. Rowland Stout takes the opposite line in his account of action. Appeal to teleology is widely regarded with suspicion, but Dr Stout argues that there are things in nature, namely actions, which can be teleologically explained: they happen because they serve some end. Moreover, this teleological explanation is externalist: it cites facts about the world, not beliefs and intentions which only represent the world. Such externalism about the explanation of action is a natural partner to externalism about knowledge and about reference, but has hardly ever been considered seriously before. One dramatic consequence of such a position is that it opens up the possibility of a behaviourist account of beliefs and intentions.

Children's Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences, Seventh Edition by David Bjorklund remains the most comprehensive and current topical textbook available in cognitive development. The text presents up-to-date, thorough research studies and data throughout. Bjorklund expertly introduce readers to the concept of developmental function, which explains that healthy children can individually vary in their cognition as they develop. This concept is discussed throughout the text within the context of the typical progression of cognitive development through infancy and childhood. In addition, the text includes framework showing that, although some traits are established at birth, children's cognitive development is also shaped by the physical and social environments that surround them throughout their formative years. The seventh edition has been updated to include current and extensive research, sociocultural coverage, evolutionary coverage of memory development, children's development of prosocial cognition, moral development, and the concept of overimitation.

From Subject to Subjectivities profiles the recent debates about the role of qualitative and participatory methods in psychology, a discipline which has traditionally seen itself as a form of positivistic science. Contributors explain how fundamentally different views of the nature of reality and of scientific theory have shaped these debates, and how psychology is being transformed through the use of these methods.

At the heart of the book are 10 exemplars of interpretive and participatory action research which describe the rationale for and process of using these methods in actual cases. They also articulate some of the challenges psychologists may face in adopting them, offering insights into how these complications can be successfully negotiated. Relevant beyond psychology, the models provided can be used within the context of a wide array of social science disciplines, from sociology and anthropology to women's studies and public health.

The contributors represent a veritable "who's who" of qualitative scholars, including Lyn Mikel Brown, Larry Davidson, Michelle Fine, Louise Kidder, M. Brinton Lykes, Jeanne Marecek, Abigail Stewart, and Niobe Way.

No previous book has examined qualitative and participatory methods specifically within the context of psychology. From Subjects to Subjectivities provides a unique and badly needed resource for those interested in learning about the practice of these methods in the field.

Most of the research done in social cognition has been conducted with younger adults and may not be applicable to a much older population. Social Cognition and Aging provides a snapshot view of research that has been done with older adults or is directly applicable to this population. Focusing on issues of self identity, social interactions, and social perceptions, this book provides a broad overview of how aging affects one's own perceptions and actions as well as how others perceive and interact with the aged. Coverage includes such topics as self-control, memory, resilience, age stereotypes, moral development, and the "art" of living. With contributions from top researchers in both gerontology and psychology, this book is an important reference for academics and professionals alike in personality, cognition, social psychology, adult development, sociology, and gerontology.

This book presents a collection of essays honoring Professor Harry Heft, a leading figure in the field of ecological psychology, engaging critically with his work, thought and influence. Containing 12 chapters written by leading experts from philosophy and psychology, this text critically examines, questions, and expands on crucial ideas from Heft concerning the nature of cognition, its relationship to the body and the environment (including the social and cultural environment), and the main philosophical assumptions underlying the scientific study of psychological functions. It elaborates on the notion of affordance, and its connection to social, cultural and developmental psychology, as well as on the application of Roger Barker's eco-behavioral program for current psychology and cognitive science. The book includes an extensive interview with Heft, where he reflects about the history, challenges and future of ecological psychology. Finally, it presents a chapter written by Heft, that offers a systematic response to the critical feedback. Given the increasing popularity of ecological psychology and the highly influential work of Harry Heft in related areas such as developmental, social and cultural psychology, and philosophy, this book will appeal to all those interested in the cognitive sciences from a scientific and philosophical perspective. It is also a must read for students of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science departments.

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

This book offers an inspiring and naive view on language and reasoning. It presents a new approach to ordinary reasoning that follows the author's former work on fuzzy logic. Starting from a pragmatic scientific view on meaning as a quantity, and the common sense reasoning from a primitive notion of inference, which is shared by both laypeople and experts, the book shows how this can evolve, through the addition of more and more suppositions, into various formal and specialized modes of precise, imprecise, and approximate reasoning. The logos are intended here as a synonym for rationality, which is usually shown by the processes of questioning, guessing, telling, and computing. Written in a discursive style and without too many technicalities, the book presents a number of reflections on the study of reasoning, together with a new perspective on fuzzy logic and Zadeh's "computing with words" grounded in both language and reasoning. It also highlights some mathematical developments supporting this view. Lastly, it addresses a series of questions aimed at fostering new discussions and future research into this topic. All in all, this book represents an inspiring read for professors and researchers in computer science, and fuzzy logic in particular, as well as for psychologists, linguists and philosophers.

Perception and Cognition at Century's End contains cognitive psychology surveys that are up-to-date and historically based, as well as references to the development of cognitive psychology over the past century. The book can serve as a central or specialized text for a range of psychology courses.
Key Features
* Written by prominent active researchers in the field
* Presents broad coverage of perception and cognition
* Considers perception and cognition in the context of the thought of the past half-century
* Contains extensive references; excellent resource

This book provides an interdisciplinary, unified view of sensual cognition and its cultural manifestations. The contributors favour an ecological perspective and revisit and problematize some of the core assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics. One of the original tenets of CL states that human thinking is grounded in experiential gestalts as well as in interaction between peoples' embodied minds and their various environments or cultures. In addition to looking in detail at this tenet, the volume provides major insights into the methodological and theoretical dimensions of Cognitive Linguistics research and describes applications of the paradigm in diverse contexts and cultures.

This book explores the two major elements of Hintikka's model of inquiry: underlying game theoretical motivations and the central role of questioning. The chapters build on the Hintikkan tradition extending Hintikka's model and present a wide variety of approaches to the philosophy of inquiry from different directions, ranging from erotetic logic to Lakatosian philosophy, from socio-epistemologic approaches to strategic reasoning and mathematical practice. Hintikka's theory of inquiry is a well-known example of a dynamic epistemic procedure. In an interrogative inquiry, the inquirer is given a theory and a question. He then tries to answer the question based on the theory by posing questions to nature or an oracle. The initial formulation of this procedure by Hintikka is rather broad and informal. This volume introduces a carefully selected responses to the issues discussed by Hintikka. The articles in the volume were contributed by various authors associated with a research project on Hintikka's interrogative theory of inquiry conducted in the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) of Paris, including those who visited to share their insight.

This concise volume presents for the first time a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications.

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in the study of ageing-related changes in cognitive abilities. In this volume researchers from a variety of theoretical perspectives discuss adult age differences in a wide range of cognitive skills. Of special interest is the extent to which ageing effects on performance are related to variations in the representation, organization and utilization of knowledge, broadly defined. Recent research and theory in the field of ageing has emphasized the need to examine such processes more closely in order to provide a more complete understanding of ageing effects on cognitive behaviour.

Psychopaths constitute less than 1% of the general population but over 20% of prison populations. They commit a disproportionate amount of crime and violence in society. Given that the economic burden of crime in the United States is estimated to be over $2.3 trillion per year, psychopaths likely constitute one of the most expensive mental health conditions known today. This volume chronicles the latest science of psychopathy and the various ways the condition intersects with the criminal justice system. From the modern techniques to assess the symptoms, to its utility in predicting violent recidivism, to the latest neuroscience youth and adults, and the most promising avenues for treatment, this volume captures the modern science of the condition and discusses ethical and legal issues surrounding psychopaths.

How did social communication evolve in primates? In this volume, primatologists, linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science systematically analyze how their specific disciplines demarcate the research questions and methodologies involved in the study of the evolutionary origins of social communication in primates in general and in humans in particular. In the first part of the book, historians and philosophers of science address how the epistemological frameworks associated with primate communication and language evolution studies have changed over time and how these conceptual changes affect our current studies on the subject matter. In the second part, scholars provide cutting-edge insights into the various means through which primates communicate socially in both natural and experimental settings. They examine the behavioral building blocks by which primates communicate and they analyze what the cognitive requirements are for displaying communicative acts. Chapters highlight cross-fostering and language experiments with primates, primate mother-infant communication, the display of emotions and expressions, manual gestures and vocal signals, joint attention, intentionality and theory of mind. The primary focus of the third part is on how these various types of communicative behavior possibly evolved and how they can be understood as evolutionary precursors to human language. Leading scholars analyze how both manual and vocal gestures gave way to mimetic and imitational protolanguage and how the latter possibly transitioned into human language. In the final part, we turn to the hominin lineage, and anthropologists, archeologists and linguists investigate what the necessary neurocognitive, anatomical and behavioral features are in order for human language to evolve and how language differs from other forms of primate communication.

Significant improvements in lifestyle and medical science are leading to an ever increasing elderly population in the United States and other developed nations. The U.S census bureau estimates that the number of people over 65 will nearly double by 2030, and that the elderly will comprise nearly one-fifth of the world's entire population within the next 20 years. In Animal Models of Human Cognitive Aging, Jennifer Bizon, Alisa Woods, and a panel of international authorities comprehensively discuss the use of animal models as a tool for understanding cognitive changes associated with the aging process. The book provides substantive background on the newest and most widely used animal models in studies of cognition and aging, while detailing the normal and pathological processes of brain aging of humans in relation to those models. Additional chapters comprehensively review frontal cortical deficits and executive function in primates as related to humans, and the use of transgenic modulation in mice to model Alzheimer's and other age-related diseases. Groundbreaking and authoritative, Animal Models of Human Cognitive Aging provides a valuable resource for Neuroscientists, Gerontological Scientists and all aging medicine researchers, while serving as a primer for understanding current brain aging studies.

This book grew out of the Fourth Conference on Computers and the Writing process, held at the University of Sussex in March 1991. Fifteen refereed papers were selected from the conference and the authors were asked to develop them into chapters appropriate for this book, incorporating insights gained from their conference presentations. The book covers all aspects of computers and the writing process, including computer-based collaborative writing, hypertext, computers and writing education, computer and professional authors, evaluation of computer-based writing, computers and technical writing, and computer supported fiction. The resulting collection provides an up-to-date cross-section of this increasingly important interdisciplinary topic - with computer, cognitive and educational perspectives covered. The book will be of interest to workers and researchers in language, cognition and computer science; especially those interested in hypermedia, human - computer interaction and cooperative technologies.

Two dozen brief essays by the foremost experts in the field are presented in this volume. Each researcher comments on the nature of intelligence, its measurement, and the future of research in the field, bringing his or her own perspective to bear on the issues. Truly diverse viewpoints are represented: cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, psychometrics, artifical intelligence, cross-cultural psychology, educational psychology, and differential psychology. An introduction that sets an historical and philosophical context, and two essays that interrelate the contributions, complete the volume.

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive. Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation. This 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space.

This book presents a study of remembrance practices emerging after the 2005 London bombings. Matthew Allen explores a range of cases that not only illustrate the effects of the organisation of remembrance on its participants, but reveal how people engaged in memorial culture to address difficult and unbearable conditions in the wake of 7/7.

Few areas of study have led to such close and intense interactions among computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers as the area now referred to as cognitive science. Within this discipline, few problems have inspired as much debate as the use of notions such as meaning, intentionality, or the semantic content of mental states in explaining human behavior. The set of problems surrounding these notions have been viewed by some observers as threatening the foundations of cognitive science as currently conceived, and by others as providing a new and scientifically sound formulation of certain classical problems in the philosophy of mind. The chapters in this volume help bridge the gap among contributing disciplines-computer science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience-and discuss the problems posed from various perspectives.

This book investigates the fascinating concept of a continuum between human memory and memory of materials. The first part provides state-of-the-art information on shape memory alloys and outlines a brief history of memory from the ancient Greeks to the present day, describing phenomenological, philosophical, and technical approaches such as neuroscience. Then, using a wealth of anecdotes, data from academic literature, and original research, this short book discusses the concepts of post-memory, memristors and forgiveness, highlights the analogies between materials defects and memory traces in the human brain. Lastly, it tackles questions of how human memory and memory of materials work together and interact. With insights from materials mechanics, neuroscience and philosophy, it enables readers to understand and continue this open debate on human memory.

This book introduces the concept of the 'native speaker' frame: a perceptual filter within English Language Teaching (ELT) which views the linguistic and cultural norms and the educational technology of the anglophone West as being normative, while the norms and practices of non-Western countries are viewed as deficient. Based on a rich source of ethnographic data, and employing a frame analysis approach, it investigates the ways in which this 'native-speaker' framing influenced the construction and operation of a Japanese university EFL program. While the program appeared to be free of explicit expressions of native-speakerism, such as discrimination against teachers, this study found that the practices of the program were underpinned by implicitly native-speakerist assumptions based on the stereotyping of Japanese students and the Japanese education system. The book provides a new perspective on debates around native-speakerism by examining how the dominant framing of a program may still be influenced by the ideology, even in cases where overt signs of native-speakerism appear to be absent.

Providing an up-to-date, multi-perspective and cross-linguistic account of the centrality of the expressive function in communication, this book explores the conceptualization of emotions in language and the high emotional 'temperature' of a variety of contemporary discourses. Adopting a number of methodological angles, both qualitative and quantitative, the chapters present insights from cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as those resulting from the combination of these approaches. Using a wide variety of data types, from song lyrics and TV series to Twitter posts and political speeches, and through the analysis of a range of languages, including Arabic, English, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish, the book offers a panoramic view of the multi-faceted interaction between language, expressivity and cognition.