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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > General
Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated
by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the
development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs
of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical
knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent
framework.
In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant
psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework
and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of
the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery
shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct
kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this
very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known
phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts
are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical
notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical
apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with
theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling
psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged
psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be
developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the
dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow
down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate
classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical
issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone
interested in cognitive science's emerging view of the mind will
find Machery's provocative ideas of interest.
The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new
orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a
provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about?
What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing
grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language
faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing
understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly
original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic
reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are
not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of
their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect
information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main
evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are
largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought;
indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty.
Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to
anyone working on language and the mind.
Magnetic resonance imaging methods have taken a commanding position
in brain studies because they allow scientists to follow brain
activities in the living human. The ability to measure cerebral
anatomy, neuronal firing and brain metabolism has extended and
re-invigorated hopes of understanding the role that brain activity
plays in human life. The brain has assumed a central role in our
thinking of the world that can be traced back to the philosophies
that are expressed in psychology, religion, literature, and
everyday life. Brain scientists, planning and measuring brain
activities by imaging methods, have consciously or unconsciously
been influenced by these philosophical views. This book, in
describing the experiments using imaging methods, traces how
assumptions about the nature of brain function made in planning
scientific experiments are the consequences of philosophical
positions. Experiments that relate brain activities to observable
behavior are shown to avoid the philosophical and psychological
assumptions about mental processes that have been proposed to
underlie these behaviors. These promising, empirical experiments
are consistent with the philosophy of Pragmatism which, in judging
hypotheses about understanding by their consequences, has
questioned the value of everyday conceptualizations of brain
activity for imaging studies.
Prophecy is a key to the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. In Prophetic
Word Bank we share with you our gifts in the hope they will allow
you to bring forth your own greatness. Prophetic Word Bank is where
you will find the health, success and prosperity, faith and love
you deserve.
Trust is at the root of all positive relationships. This accessible
and empowering book teaches how to form an inner circle of trusted
confidants in your workplace and at home that will allow you to
live a more peaceful and more effective life, reduce stress, and
better deal with negative emotions. Building trust is crucial for
effective leadership, and trusting others is a necessary part of
working with others. But knowing whom to trust-and whom not to
trust-eludes many people. A surprising number of people report that
being betrayed by someone in their "inner circle" either at work or
in their personal lives is one of the most devastating things they
have endured. Lack of trust is also expensive in that it costs
companies money to surveil employees; and in our personal lives, if
we live with people we cannot trust, we expend needless amounts of
energy protecting ourselves from these untrustworthy people. How do
we increase trust, bounce back from betrayal, and form alliances
and positive relationships with those who ARE trustworthy? This
book provides a unique examination of trust and its
often-overlooked importance to our work and personal lives. It
identifies the characteristics of a trusting relationship,
considers the decision-making process that people should make
before granting individuals admission to their own "inner circle,"
and teaches how to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" in our
work environments and life in general. This revised and updated
edition contains new information on the negative mental and
physical aspects of telling lies; how to better manage our
emotions, which allows us to become "better guys" ourselves;
strategies for building more trusting relationships in our
families; and how trust works-and doesn't work-online in the
Internet age. It also includes a useful "Family Board Meeting" tool
for having family meetings in a way that encourages honest and open
dialogue between family members regardless of age or family
structure. Presents a system for assessing "the good guys and the
bad guys"-in other words, the trustworthy and untrustworthy people
that surround all of us in every arena of life Provides tools for
assessing our own trustworthiness as well as for evaluating our own
willingness to trust another Gives readers effective methods for
dealing with forgiveness, coping, and reconciliation; managing
"conditional" trust relationships; and for becoming more
trustworthy to themselves Suggests a practical "Honesty Challenge"
that dares readers to be more truthful-and as a result, more
successful
Language plays a major role in our daily lives. Humans are
specialized to live in a social environment, and our brains are
"designed" to manage interactions with others which are, for the
most part, accomplished through words. Language allows us to
function both cognitively and interpersonally, and without language
there are constraints on our ability to interact with others.
Language also plays a major role in that specialized form of
interpersonal interaction that we call psychotherapy or
psychoanalysis. In that setting we use words to express and
communicate meaning clearly, and through spoken language we help
our patients to organize and modify their experiences of self and
of the world, fostering adaptive change. Like the air we breathe,
when our language serves its function it is transparent to us. We
notice it most when it fails. When it does fail its basic function,
in life and in psychotherapy, it fails to reliably, effectively,
and comfortably help us to connect with others, as we deal with the
world around us. In Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words
Matter, Dr. Mary Davis addresses the role of language in our lives,
both internally, in creating psychic structure and regulating
affect, and interpersonally, in facilitating relationships with the
figures that have shaped our development and that inhabit our adult
lives. Using clinical material to illustrate, Davis looks at the
development of language and its role in creating our personalities,
at the life events which can distort our use of language to
interact with others, and the ways that language can lead to
misunderstanding as well as to understanding. Throughout, Language
and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter explores various
facets of the ways in which words matter as well as the times when
words are important but not sufficient to our ability to
communicate interpersonally. Davis suggests that the
psychotherapist is a master in bridging the gap between being and
saying: she can be conceptualized as an "interpreter," one who
turns behavioral language into verbal language, action language
into words, emotions into thoughts, who focuses and uses the
capacity of words to help us connect both with our internal selves
and with others.
The general focus of this book is on multimodal communication,
which captures the temporal patterns of behavior in various
dialogue settings. After an overview of current theoretical models
of verbal and nonverbal communication cues, it presents studies on
a range of related topics: paraverbal behavior patterns in the
classroom setting; a proposed optimal methodology for
conversational analysis; a study of time and mood at work; an
experiment on the dynamics of multimodal interaction from the
observer's perspective; formal cues of uncertainty in conversation;
how machines can know we understand them; and detecting topic
changes using neural network techniques. A joint work bringing
together psychologists, communication scientists, information
scientists and linguists, the book will be of interest to those
working on a wide range of applications from industry to home, and
from health to security, with the main goals of revealing,
embedding and implementing a rich spectrum of information on human
behavior.
Behavioral strategy continues to attract increasing research
interest within the broader field of strategic management. Research
in behavioral strategy has clear scope for development in tandem
with such traditional streams of strategy research that involve
economics, markets, resources, and technology. The key roles of
psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral decision making
in the theory and practice of strategy have yet to be
comprehensively grasped. Given that strategic thinking and
strategic decision making are importantly concerned with human
cognition, human decisions, and human behavior, it makes eminent
sense to bring some balance in the strategy field by complementing
the extant emphasis on the "objective' economics-based view with
substantive attention to the "subjective" individual-oriented
perspective. This calls for more focused inquiries into the role
and nature of the individual strategy actors, and their cognitions
and behaviors, in the strategy research enterprise. For the
purposes of this book series, behavioral strategy would be broadly
construed as covering all aspects of the role of the strategy maker
in the entire strategy field. The scholarship relating to
behavioral strategy is widely believed to be dispersed in diverse
literatures. These existing contributions that relate to behavioral
strategy within the overall field of strategy has been known and
perhaps valued by most scholars all along, but were not adequately
appreciated or brought together as a coherent sub-field or as a
distinct perspective of strategy. This book series on Research in
Behavioral Strategyi will cover the essential progress made thus
far in this admittedly fragmented literature and elaborate upon
fruitful streams of scholarship. More importantly, the book series
will focus on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for the
growing scholarship in behavioral strategy. In particular, the
volumes in the series will cover new views of interdisciplinary
theoretical frameworks and models (dealing with all behavioral
aspects), significant practical problems of strategy formulation,
implementation, and evaluation, and emerging areas of inquiry. The
series will also include comprehensive empirical studies of
selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government,
and non-profit activities with potential for wider application of
behavioral strategy. Through the ongoing release of focused topical
titles, this book series will seek to disseminate theoretical
insights and practical management information that will enable
interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive
understanding of the subject of behavioral strategy. Decision
Making in Behavioral Strategy contains contributions by leading
scholars in the field of behavioral strategy research. The 10
chapters in this volume cover a number of significant issues
relating to the decision making processes, practices, and
perspectives in the field of behavioral strategy, covering diverse
topics such as failures in acquisitions, entrepreneurs under
ambiguity, metacognition, neural correlates of emotion, knowledge
flows, behavioral responses, business modeling, and alliance
capability. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual
treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a
wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on
decision making in behavioral strategy.
The science of intelligence has created a plethora of theories and
measurements, which have various applications of both
computational, social, and managerial significance. Relational
Thinking Styles and Natural Intelligence: Assessing Inference
Patterns for Computational Modeling explores a specific set of
intelligence theories, unifying and quantifying to create a
verifiable model of various inferencing habits. Relational Thinking
Styles suggests that the inferencing patterns described and
demonstrated by this model may provide a platform from which to
examine and integrate various aspects of natural intelligence and
how these are expressed. This research provides valuable
information for businesses, social services, and any
decision-making process involving intelligence assessment.
The last decade has seen a rise in popularity in construction-based
approaches to grammar. Put simply, the various approaches within
the rubric 'construction grammar' all see grammar (morphemes,
words, idioms, etc.) as fundamentally constructions - pairings of
form and meaning. This is distinct from formal syntax which sees
grammar as a system of atomized units governed by formal rules.
Construction Grammar is connected to cognitive linguistics and
shares many of its philosophical and methodological assumptions.
Advocates of Construction Grammar see it as a
psychologically-plausible, generative theory of human language that
can also account for all kinds of linguistic data. The research
programs it has spawned range from theoretical morphological and
syntactic studies to multidisciplinary cognitive studies in
psycho-, neuro-, and computational linguistics. This Handbook is
the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the
theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will
be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a
representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications.
It has 24 chapters divided into 7 sections, with an introduction
covering the theory's basic principles and its relationship with
other theories including Chomskyan syntax. The book's readership
lies in a variety of diverse fields, including corpus linguistics,
thoeretical syntax, psycho and neurolinguistics, language
variation, acquisition, and computational linguistics.
The brain is a cognitive organ, and regions of the brain that traverse brainstem and cortical sites orchestrate the expression of bodily sensibility: intelligent action. They can appear perfunctory or intimate, calculating a sum or selecting a mate. Schulkin presents neuroscientific research demonstrating that thought is not on one side and bodily sensibility on the other; from a biological point of view, they are integrated. Schulkin further argues that this integration has important implications for judgements about the emotions, art and music, moral sensibilities, attraction and revulsion, and our perpetual inclination to explain ourselves and our surroundings. He begins the book by setting forth a view of the emotions not as a bodily burden to be borne, but rather as a great source of information. He then moves on to other domains, claiming that underlying the experience of aesthetics in at least some instances is the interplay between expectation and disappointment from its infraction, and suggesting that, among other things, repulsion and attraction to the cries and joys of others consitutes moral responsiveness. This book should appeal to researchers in behavioral neuroscience, emotion, and psychophysiology, as well as cognitive and social psychologists and philosophers of mind.
Concerns about philosophical methodology have emerged as a central
issue in contemporary philosophical discussions. In this volume,
Tamar Gendler draws together fourteen essays that together
illuminate this topic. Three intertwined themes connect the essays.
First, each of the chapters focuses, in one way or another, on how
we engage with subject matter that we take to be imaginary. This
theme is explored in a wide range of cases, including scientific
thought experiments, early childhood pretense, thought experiments
concerning personal identity, fictional emotions, self-deception,
Gettier and fake barn cases, the relation of belief to other
attitudes, and the connection between conceivability and
possibility. Second, each of the chapters explores, in one way or
another, the implications of this for how thought experiments and
appeals to intuition can serve as mechanisms for supporting or
refuting scientific or philosophical claims. Third, each of the
chapters self-consciously exhibits a particular philosophical
methodology: that of drawing both on empirical findings from
contemporary psychology, and on classic texts in the philosophical
tradition (particularly the work of Aristotle and Hume.) By
exploring and exhibiting the fruitfulness of these interactions,
Gendler promotes the value of engaging in such cross-disciplinary
conversations to illuminate philosophical questions.
Focusing on conceptual origins, this book shows that there is a
bond between hominid thinking and hominid evolution, a bond
cemented by the living body. This thesis is illustrated in eight
paleoanthropological case studies ranging from
tool-using/tool-making to counting, sexuality, representation,
language, death, and cave art.
"Theory of mind" is the phrase researchers use to refer to
children's understanding of people as mental beings, who have
beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions, and whose actions and
interactions can be interpreted and explained by taking account of
these mental states. The gradual development of children's theory
of mind, particularly during the early years, is by now well
described in the research literature. What is lacking, however, is
a decisive explanation of how children acquire this understanding.
Recent research has shown strong relations between children's
linguistic abilities and their theory of mind. Yet exactly what
role these abilities play is controversial and uncertain. The
purpose of this book is to provide a forum for the leading scholars
in the field to explore thoroughly the role of language in the
development of the theory of mind. This volume will appeal to
students and researchers in developmental and cognitive psychology.
Language pervades everything we do as social beings. It is, in
fact, difficult to disentangle language from social life, and hence
its importance is often missed. The emergence of new communication
technologies makes this even more striking. People come to "know"
one another through these interactions without ever having met
face-to-face. How? Through the words they use and the way they use
them.
The Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology is a unique
and innovative compilation of research that lies at the
intersection of language and social psychology. Language is viewed
as a social activity, and to understand this complex human activity
requires a consideration of its social psychological underpinnings.
Moreover, as a social activity, the use and in fact the existence
of language has implications for a host of traditional social
psychological processes. Hence, there is a reciprocal relationship
between language and social psychology, and it is this reciprocal
relationship that defines the essence of this handbook.
The handbook is divided into six sections. The first two sections
focus on the social underpinnings of language, that is, the social
coordination required to use language, as well as the manner in
which language and broad social dimensions such as culture mutually
constitute one another. The next two sections consider the
implications of language for a host of traditional social
psychological topics, including both intraindividual (e.g.,
attribution) and interindividual (e.g., intergroup relations)
processes. The fifth section examines the role of language in the
creation of meaning, and the final section includes chapters
documenting the importance of the language-social psychology
interface for a number of applied areas.
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