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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Philosophy & theory of psychology > Cognitive theory
From the acclaimed author of Lying, a brilliant exploration of happiness set in the context of the world's great philosophers, leaders, writers, and artists In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages. With nuance and elegance, Bok explores notions of happiness-from Greek philosophers to Desmond Tutu, Charles Darwin, Iris Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama-as well as the latest theories advanced by psychologists, economists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. Eschewing abstract theorizing, Bok weaves in a wealth of firsthand observations about happiness from ordinary people as well as renowned figures. This may well be the most complete picture of happiness yet. This book is also a clarion call to think clearly and sensitively about happiness. Bringing together very different disciplines provides Bok with a unique opportunity to consider the role of happiness in wider questions of how we should lead our lives and treat one another-concerns that don't often figure in today's happiness equation. How should we pursue, weigh, value, or limit our own happiness, or that of others, now and in the future? Compelling and perceptive, Exploring Happiness shines a welcome new light on the heart of the human condition.
This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a
comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase
structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components
of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central
hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time
reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an
optimal system.
This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic
typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive
features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from
another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a
set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an
integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty
underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The
usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is
uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and
universal rather than learned and language-specific has never,
until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account
Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of
natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred
of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different
families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than
71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed
either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes
that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently
unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings,
he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features
are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed
languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though
deafness is generally not hereditary.
This book makes a fundamental contribution to phonology, linguistic
typology, and the nature of the human language faculty. Distinctive
features in phonology distinguish one meaningful sound from
another. Since the mid-twentieth century they have been seen as a
set characterizing all possible phonological distinctions and as an
integral part of Universal Grammar, the innate language faculty
underlying successive versions of Chomskyan generative theory. The
usefulness of distinctive features in phonological analysis is
uncontroversial, but the supposition that features are innate and
universal rather than learned and language-specific has never,
until now, been systematically tested. In his pioneering account
Jeff Mielke presents the results of a crosslinguistic survey of
natural classes of distinctive features covering almost six hundred
of the world's languages drawn from a variety of different
families. He shows that no theory is able to characterize more than
71 percent of classes, and further that current theories, deployed
either singly or collectively, do not predict the range of classes
that occur and recur. He reveals the existence of apparently
unnatural classes in many languages. Even without these findings,
he argues, there are reasons to doubt whether distinctive features
are innate: for example, distinctive features used in signed
languages are different from those in spoken languages, even though
deafness is generally not hereditary.
Working memory - the ability to keep important information in mind while comprehending, thinking, and acting - varies considerably from person to person and changes dramatically during each person's life. Understanding such individual and developmental differences is crucial because working memory is a major contributor to general intellectual functioning. This volume offers a state-of-the-art, integrative, and comprehensive approach to understanding variation in working memory by presenting explicit, detailed comparisons of the leading theories. It incorporates views from the different research groups that operate on each side of the Atlantic, and covers working-memory research on a wide variety of populations, including healthy adults, children with and without learning difficulties, older adults, and adults and children with neurological disorders. A particular strength of this volume is that each research group explicitly addresses the same set of theoretical questions, from the perspective of both their own theoretical and experimental work and from the perspective of relevant alternative approaches. Through these questions, each research group considers their overarching theory of working memory, specifies the critical sources of working memory variation according to their theory, reflects on the compatibility of their approach with other approaches, and assesses their contribution to general working memory theory. This shared focus across chapters unifies the volume and highlights the similarities and differences among the various theories. Each chapter includes both a summary of research positions and a detailed discussion of each position. Variation in Working Memory achieves coherence across its chapters, while presenting the entire range of current theoretical and experimental approaches to variation in working memory.
This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the
perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that
progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that
phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived
from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple
problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of
topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction
and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially
with reference to phonological acquisition. Several aspects of
Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output
Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on
typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their
expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic
evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and
they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of
general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether
categories are discrete and whether mental computation is
probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete
proposals to guide future phonological research.
A recurrent issue in linguistic theory and psychology concerns the
cognitive status of memorized lists and their internal structure.
In morphological theory, the collections of inflected forms of a
given noun, verb, or adjective into inflectional paradigms are
thought to constitute one such type of list. This book focuses on
the question of which elements in a paradigm can stand in a
relation of partial or total phonological identity. Leading
scholars consider inflectional identity from a variety of
theoretical perspectives, with an emphasis on both case studies and
predictive theories of where syncretism and other "paradigmatic
pressures" will occur in natural language. The authors consider
phenomena such as allomorphy and syncretism while exploring
questions of underlying representations, the formal properties of
markedness, and the featural representation of conjugation and
declension classes. They do so from the perspective of contemporary
theories of morphology and phonology, including Distributed
Morphology and Optimality Theory, and in the context of a wide
range of languages, among them Amharic, Greek, Romanian, Russian,
Saami, and Yiddish. The subjects addressed in the book include the
role of featural decomposition of morphosyntactic features, the
status of paradigms as the unit of syncretism, asymmetric effects
in identity-dependence, and the selection of a base-of-derivation.
The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling
cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to
attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic
environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of
human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community
is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and
control that arise when integrating with the external environment
factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion,
cognition, and the cognitive system. These problems must be solved
in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately
complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on
the control of a central system, which includes control of the
central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such
as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results
of these functional processes. Because the control of the central
system is conceptually different from the internal control required
by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of
cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1
theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the
controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of
functional processes, including how and what they communicate to
the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for
both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current
approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important
resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive
science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.
Teleosemantics seeks to explain meaning and other intentional phenomena in terms of their function in the life of the species. This volume of new essays from an impressive line-up of well-known contributors offers a valuable summary of the current state of the teleosemantics debate.
This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions. Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much-discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages. Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest advanced students of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science at graduate level and above.
From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributesto our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.
In recent years, neuroscientists have made ambitious attempts to explain artistic processes and spectatorship through brain imaging techniques. But can brain science really unravel the workings of art? Is the brain in fact the site of aesthetic appreciation? Embodying Art recasts the relationship between neuroscience and aesthetics and calls for shifting the focus of inquiry from the brain itself to personal experience in the world. Chiara Cappelletto presents close readings of neuroscientific and philosophical scholarship as well as artworks and art criticism, identifying their epistemological premises and theoretical consequences. She critiques neuroaesthetic reductionism and its assumptions about a mind/body divide, arguing that the brain is embodied and embedded in affective, cultural, and historical milieus. Cappelletto considers understandings of the human brain encompassing scientific, philosophical, and visual and performance arts discourses. She examines how neuroaesthetics has constructed its field of study, exploring the ways digital renderings and scientific data have been used to produce the brain as a cultural and visual object. Tracing the intertwined histories of brain science and aesthetic theory, Embodying Art offers a strikingly original and profound philosophical account of the human brain as a living artifact.
The higher-order evidence debate concerns how higher-order evidence affects the rationality of our first-order beliefs. This Element has two parts. The first part (Sections 1 and 2) provides a critical overview of the literature, aiming to explain why the higher-order evidence debate is interesting and important. The second part (Sections 3 to 6) defends calibrationism, the view that we should respond to higher-order evidence by aligning our credences to our reliability degree. The author first discusses the traditional version of calibrationism and explains its main difficulties, before proposing a new version of calibrationism called 'Evidence-Discounting Calibrationism.' The Element argues that this new version is independently plausible and that it can avoid the difficulties faced by the traditional version.
The search for the 'furniture of the mind' has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali Khalidi present a naturalistic account of 'real kinds' to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories.
This work brings together classic and recent papers in the philosophical and linguistic analysis of fuzzy grammar, of gradience in meaning, word classes and syntax. Issues such as how many grains make a heap, when a puddle becomes a pond, and so forth, have occupied thinkers since Aristotle and, since the 1980s, have been the subject of increasing interest among linguists as well as in fields such as artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The work is designed to be of use to students in all these fields. It has a substantial introduction, is divided into thematic parts, contains annotated sections of further reading, and is fully indexed.
This edited book offers a broad selection of interdisciplinary studies within cognitive science. The book illustrates and documents how cognitive science offers a unifying framework for the interaction of fields of study focusing on the human mind from linguistics and philosophy to psychology and the history of science. A selection of renowned contributors provides authoritative historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on more than six decades of research with a special focus on the progress of cognitive science in Central Europe. Readers encounter a bird's eye view of geographical and linguistic diversity brought about by the cognitive revolution, as it is reflected in the writings of leading authors, many of whom are former students and collaborators of Csaba Pleh, a key figure of the cognitive turn in Central Europe, to whom this book is dedicated. The book appeals to students and researchers looking for the ways various approaches to the mind and the brain intersect.
During the past 25 years, the study of nonverbal behavior has become a signifcant subarea of psychology. Employing a variety of approaches and encompassing numerous perspectives, researchers have made important theoretical and empirical strides in discovering the origins, functions, and consequences of nonverbal behavior. This research has clearly shown that nonverbal behavior plays a far greater role than merely reflecting emotional experience -- it also plays a central role in psychological adaptation. This volume presents, in an integrated framework, contemporary perspectives on the role of nonverbal behavior in psychological regulation, adaptation, and psychopathology, and includes both empirical and theoretical research that is central to our understanding of the reciprocal influences between nonverbal behavior, psychopathology, and therapeutic processes. It has several objectives: One is to present fundamental theories and data relevant to researchers and clinicians working in such fields as psychopathology and psychotherapy. Another objective is to link contributions of basic research to clinical applications. Finally, the volume gathers contributions in different sub-fields that are rarely presented jointly, such as brain damage and non-verbal skills.
In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.
We all know what a voluntary action is - we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action. Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action. This presents us with a problem - if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action? The question guiding this book is: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action, and are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions with the findings from the sciences? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and social science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.
We all know what a voluntary action is - we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action. Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action. This presents us with a problem - if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action? The question guiding this book: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action, and are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions with the findings from the sciences? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and social science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.
In recent decades cognitive science has revolutionised our understanding of the workings of the human mind. Philosophy has made a major contribution to cognitive science and has itself been hugely influenced by its development. This dynamic book explores the philosophical significance of cognitive science and examines the central debates that have enlivened its history. In a wide-ranging and comprehensive account of the topic, philosopher M.J. Cain discusses the historical origins of cognitive science and its philosophical underpinnings; the nature and role of representations in cognition; the architecture of the mind and the modularity thesis; the nature of concepts; knowledge of language and its acquisition; perception; and the relationship between the brain and cognition. Cain draws upon an extensive knowledge of empirical developments and their philosophical interpretation. He argues that although the field has generated some challenging new views in recent years, many of the core ideas that initiated its birth are still to be taken seriously. Clearly written and incisively argued, The Philosophy of Cognitive Science will appeal to any student or researcher interested in the workings of the mind.
Cognitive Grammar offers a radical alternative to mainstream linguistic theories. This book introduces the theory in clear, non-technical language, relates it to current debates about the nature of linguistic knowledge, and applies it to in-depth analyses of a range of topics in semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Study questions and suggestions for further reading accompany each of the main chapters.
This book evaluates whether or not we can decide on the best theory of concepts by appealing to the explanatory results of cognitive science. It undertakes an in-depth analysis of different theories of concepts and of the explanations formulated in cognitive science. As a result, two reasons are provided for thinking that an appeal to cognitive science cannot help to decide on the best theory of concepts.
Implicit memory refers to a change in task performance due to an earlier experience that is not consciously remembered. The topic of implicit memory has been studied from two quite different perspectives for the past 20 years. On the one hand, researchers interested in memory have set out to characterize the memory system (or systems) underlying implicit memory, and see how they relate to those underlying other forms of memory. The alternative framework has considered implicit memory as a by-product of perceptual, conceptual, or motor systems that learn. That is, on this view the systems that support implicit memory are heavily constrained by pressures other than memory per se. Both approaches have yielded results that have been valuable in helping us to understand the nature of implicit memory, but studied somewhat in isolation and with little collaboration. This volume is unique in explicitly contrasting these approaches, bringing together world class scientists from both camps in an attempt to forge a new approach to understanding one of the most exciting and important issues in psychology and neuroscience. Written for postgraduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this is a book that will have an important influence on the direction that future research in this field takes.
The term 'episodic memory' refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past - our first day at school, the day we got married. It has again become a topic of great importance and interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken place)? Since Endel Tulving's classic book 'Episodic memory' (OUP, 1983) very few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In 'Episodic memory: new directions in research' three of the worlds leading researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a stellar team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we now know about about this fundamentally important topic. The list of contributors includes, amongst others, Daniel Schacter, Richard Morris, Fareneh Vargha-Khadem, and Endel Tulving. The work presented within this book will have a profound effect on the direction that future research in this topic will take. |
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