This book offers an analysis of experimental psychology that is embedded in a general understanding of human behavior. It provides methodological self-awareness for researchers who study and use the experimental method in psychology. The book critically reviews key research areas (e.g., rule-breaking, sense of agency, free choice, task switching, task sharing, and mind wandering), examining their scope, limits, ambiguities, and implicit theoretical commitments. Topics featured in this text include: Methods of critique in experimental research Goal hierarchies and organization of a task Rule-following and rule-breaking behavior Sense of agency Free-choice tasks Mind wandering Experimental Psychology and Human Agency will be of interest to researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, theoretical psychology, and critical psychology, as well as various philosophical disciplines.

For all of recorded history prior to the second half of the twentieth century, there has been but one realm in which the cognitive processes of reasoning and problem solving, learning and discovery, language and mathematics took place. The realm of human intellect no longer has an exclusive claim on these cognitive processes--artificial intelligence represents a parallel claim. Morton Wagman's text compares the two realms, identifies consonant and disparate modes of cognition, and identifies a general theory of human and artificial intelligence.

A general theory of intellect entails the specific components of intellect as conceptualized in the domains of human and artificial intelligence. These specific components include the conceptual areas of reasoning, language, learning, and discovery. Theories of these components of intellect, as well as problem solving, logic, and memory, are systematically examined and compared. Following the introductory chapter, each succeeding chapter focuses on a major cognitive component. Each component is analyzed from the perspectives of both human intellect and artificial intelligence. These dual perspectives are then compared, taking account of basic theory and contemporary research. The technical theory and research is considered against a broad background of intellectual history and psychological implication. "Cognitive Science and Concepts of Mind" is intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in cognitive science programs, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence courses. Wagman's book will also be of interest to professionals in these and related disciplines.

"The Self in Question" offers a humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, providing a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness. In Analytic philosophy, a resurgence of interest in the topic of self-consciousness has been inspired by the work of Gareth Evans. Both Evans and his successors make the plausible assumption that self-consciousness is a capacity manifested in the use of "I," or through behaviour which must be described in terms of "I." "The Self in Question" develops this assumption through an analysis of Wittgenstein's insights into "I"-as-subject and self-identification, relating them - as their author did not - to the epistemology of memory and bodily awareness. As a result, it is able to discern the truth in the apparently discredited memory criterion of personal identity. It also draws on Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body's significance for self-consciousness, to offer a critique of materialism about the body.

The idea that our memories, in some sense, make us who we are, is a common one-and not at all implausible. After all, what could make us who we are if not the things we have experienced, thought, felt and desired on these idiosyncratic pathways through space and time that we call lives? And how can we retain these experiences, thoughts, feelings and desires if not through memory? On the other hand, most of what we have experienced has been forgotten. And there is now a considerable body of evidence that suggests that, even when we think we remember, our memories are likely to be distorted, sometimes beyond recognition. Imagine writing your autobiography, only to find that that most of it has been redacted, and much of the rest substantially rewritten. What would hold this book together? What would make it the unified and coherent account of a life? The answer, Mark Rowlands argues, lies, partially hidden, in a largely unrecognized form of memory-Rilkean memory. A Rilkean memory is produced when the content of a memory is lost but the act of remembering endures, in a new, mutated, form: a mood, a feeling, or a behavioral disposition. Rilkean memories play a significant role in holding the self together in the face of the poverty and inaccuracy of the contents of memory. But Rilkean memories are important not just because of what they are, but also because of what they were before they became such memories. Acts of remembering sculpt the contents of memories out of the slabs of remembered episodes. Our acts of remembering ensure that we are in the content of each of our memories-present in the way a sculptor is present in his creation-even when this content is lamentably sparse and endemically inaccurate.

Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields. While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic "disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind and language.

This book represents an outstanding contribution to the field of somatic psychology. It focuses on the relationship between body and emotions, and on the linkages between mindfulness-based emotion studies and neuroscience. The author discusses the awakening of somatic intelligence as a journey through pain and trauma management, the moral dimensions of somatic passions, and the art and practice of embodied mindfulness. Issues such as the emotions and the body in relation to Buddhist contemplative practice, against the background of the most recent findings of current neuroscience, are expanded in the book. A broad review of the Darwinian-Jamesian heritage on emotion studies is a unique contribution to the tradition of the somatogenic strands of emotions, and provides a contrasting focus to the ideogenic emotions in Sigmund Freud. This work provides an invaluable resource for students of psychology and philosophy, psychotherapists and meditation teachers, students, and for anyone with an interest in the field of somatic psychology.

Self and World is an exploration of the nature of self-awareness. Quassim Cassam challenges the widespread and influential view that we cannot be introspectively aware of ourselves as objects in the world. In opposition to the views of many empiricist and idealistic philosophers, including Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, he argues that the self is not systematically elusive from the perspective of self-consciousness, and that consciousness of our thoughts and experiences requires a sense of our thinking, experiencing selves as shaped, located, and solid physical objects in a world of such objects. Awareness of oneself as a physical object involves forms of bodily self-awareness whose importance has seldom been properly acknowledged in philosophical accounts of the self and self-awareness. The conception of self-awareness defended in this book helps to undermins the idealist thesis that the self does not belong to the world, and also the claim that the existence of subjects or persons is only a derivative feature of reality. In the final part of the book, Cassam argues that the existence of persons is a substantial fact about the world, and that it is not possible to give a complete description of reality without claiming that persons exist. This clear, original, and challenging treatment of one of the deepest intellectual problems will demand the attention of all philosophers and cognitive scientists who are concerned with the self.

Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind aims to reassess the work of Wittgenstein in terms of its importance to contemporary debates surrounding the philosophy of mind.The first part of this study examines Wittgenstein in the context of current views on the human mind in relation to the body and behavior. The arguments confront the views of Quine and Dennett, as well as functionalism, eliminative materialism, and the current debate about consciousness. The essays that make up the second part focus on a particular psychological concept, thinking, imagining, sensation, knowledge, and reason. This study takes a fresh look at this established thinker and demonstrates both the relevance and power of his arguments in the 21st century.

As usual, the Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Cognitive Science include leading-edge work by outstanding researchers in the field. This volume contains three kinds of papers corresponding to three of the main disciplines in cognitive science: philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. The title - Cognition, Agency and Rationality - captures the main issues addressed by the papers. Of course, all are concerned with cognition, but some are especially centred on the very concept of rationality, while others focus on (multiple) agency. The diversity of their disciplinary origins and standpoints not only reflects the main topics and the range of different positions presented at ICCS-97, as well as demonstrating the richness, fruitfulness and diversity of research in cognitive science today.

This introductory text offers a clear, concise look at the philosophy of love. The author's presentation assumes no previous knowledge of philosophy, providing the humanities student with an insightful introduction to some of the most prominent writers and philosophers, both ancient and modern. From the dialogues of Plato to the writings of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Wagoner presents six major ideas of love: erotic love, Christian love, romantic love, moral love, love as power, and mutual love.

This study asserts that even though we have only one word for love, six fundamentally different meanings can be distinguished: erotic love, Christian love, romantic love, moral love, love as power, and mutual love. Wagoner identifies each of these ideas of love in terms of the special meaning it brings to experience. No one meaning is comprehensive. Each is shown to have a logic and legitimacy of its own. Why each view seems real and compelling is the focus of separate discussions, as well as the price that may be exacted by each idea. The extent to which these ideas throw light on actual experience is striking, but the book is not an empirical or psychological inquiry. How one self finds itself in another is first defined and then explored further to see how this shapes the rational and sexual aspects of life.

According to the dominant theory of meaning, truth-conditional semantics, to explain the meaning of a statement is to specify the conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Classical truth-conditional semantics is coming under increasing attack, however, from contextualists and inferentialists, who agree that meaning is located in the mind.How to Think about Meaning develops an even more radical mentalist semantics, which it does by shifting the object of semantic inquiry. Whereas for classical semantics the object of analysis is an abstract sentence or utterance such as Grass is green, for attitudinal semantics the object of inquiry is a propositional attitude such as Speaker so-and-so thinks grass is green. Explicit relativization to some speaker S allows for semantic theory then to make contact with psychology, sociology, historical linguistics, and other empirical disciplines.

Expressionism, Deleuze's philosophical commentary on Spinoza, is a critically important work because its conclusions provide the foundations for Deleuze's later metaphysical speculations on the nature of power, the body, difference and singularities. Deleuze and Spinoza is the first book to examine Deleuze's philosophical assessment of Spinoza and appraise his arguments concerning the Absolute, the philosophy of mind, epistemology and moral and political philosophy. The author respects and disagrees with Deleuze the philosopher and suggests that his arguments not only lead to eliminativism and an Hobbesian politics but that they also cast a mystifying spell.

The enactive approach replaces the classical computer metaphor of mind with emphasis on embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Researchers from a range of disciplines unite to address the challenge of how to account for the more uniquely human aspects of cognition, including the abstract and the nonsensical.

Jennifer Radden here provides a re-interpretation of the classic text by 17th century scholar Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Her new reading of Burton's essential text brings several key facets of his thought to light: the role of imagination in inciting and averting melancholy as disorder; the part played by daily habits of thought in engendering severe and incurable conditions; the multi-directional feedback loops linking feeling and thought in his model of mind; and an emphasis on symptoms and natural history in his understanding of disease. Much of Burton's account is derived from classical, medieval and renaissance writing about melancholy, yet he brought them together into something new: an account that - while it stands in contrast to many of the assumptions of later psychology - concurs surprisingly well with present day cognitivism. Moreover, although seventeenth century melancholy bears only a loose relationship to present day mood disorders such as depression and anxiety, on this reading the Anatomy anticipates a considerable number of findings and hypotheses associated with present day psychiatry, including its network models of depression, for example, and its emphasis on the part played by rumination and mind wandering in engendering affective disorder. Radden's new reading of a classic text should interest readers in philosophy of mind and psychiatry, clinical psychiatry and the history of medicine.

Hans-Christian Schmitz argues that a speaker has to utter a sentence in a way that makes the hearer perceive at least those words that are sufficient for understanding the entire sentence. In spoken language the speaker has to accentuate these words. Semantics effects of accentuation appear as epi-phenomena of their pragmatic function. The author defines a formal model for the interpretation of incompletely recognized sentences and derives a context-sensitive rule of accentuation. The rule of accentuation is experimentally evaluated.

People believe in a great many things; and yet most of us know almost nothing about why other people believe what they do, or indeed about how it feels to believe it. This book presents an objective method for understanding and comparing belief systems - irrespective of whether the investigator happens to agree with them.

Conversations on the Edge of Apocalypse is a collection of interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time about the future of the human race, and the mystery of consciousness, from scientific, philosophical and spiritual perspectives. It explores such topics as the future evolution of technology and consciousness, the relationship between science and religion, ecology and human values, altered states of consciousness, the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life, psychic phenomena, life after death, and the fate of the human race. Included are contributions from Noam Chomsky,Deepak Chopra, George Carlin, Ram Dass and Rupert Sheldrake. Part scientific exploration and part philosophical speculation, Conversations on the Edge of Apocalypse is a valuable and entertaining resource for our species' survival.

C. D. Broad's writing on various philosophical issues spans more than half a century. Rather than attempt to trace the development of his thought throughout these fifty years this book considers his most representative work, namely, The Mind and Its Place in Nature. Nor does the scope of this study encompass the whole of that book, but only some of the issues he discusses in it. Specifically, Oaklander considers what Broad has to say about such fundamental issues as substance, universals, relations, space, time, and intentionality in the contexts of perception, memory and introspection. L. Nathan Oaklander studied philosophy at the university of Iowa. He is a student of Gustav Bergmann, one of the most distinguished ontologist in 20th century philosophy.

The Intelligent Mind conceives the psychological reality of thought and language, explaining how intelligence develops from intuition to representation and then to linguistic interaction and thinking. Overcoming the prevailing dogmas regarding how discursive reason emerges, this book secures the psychological possibility of the philosophy of mind.

Do people have free will, or this universal belief an illusion? If free will is more than an illusion, what kind of free will do people have? How can free will influence behavior? Can free will be studied, verified, and understood scientifically? How and why might a sense of free will have evolved? These are a few of the questions this book attempts to answer.
People generally act as though they believe in their own free will: they don't feel like automatons, and they don't treat one another as they might treat robots. While acknowledging many constraints and influences on behavior, people nonetheless act as if they (and their neighbors) are largely in control of many if not most of the decisions they make. Belief in free will also underpins the sense that people are responsible for their actions. Psychological explanations of behavior rarely mention free will as a factor, however. Can psychological science find room for free will? How do leading psychologists conceptualize free will, and what role do they believe free will plays in shaping behavior?
In recent years a number of psychologists have tried to solve one or more of the puzzles surrounding free will. This book looks both at recent experimental and theoretical work directly related to free will and at ways leading psychologists from all branches of psychology deal with the philosophical problems long associated with the question of free will, such as the relationship between determinism and free will and the importance of consciousness in free will. It also includes commentaries by leading philosophers on what psychologists can contribute to long-running philosophical struggles with this most distinctly human belief.These essays should be of interest not only to social scientists, but to intelligent and thoughtful readers everywhere.

We seem to have private privileged access to our own minds through introspection, but what exactly does this involve? Do we somehow literally perceive our own minds, as the common idea of a 'mind's eye' suggests, or are there other processes at work in our ability to know our own minds? "Rethinking Introspection" offers a new pluralist framework for understanding the nature, scope, and limits of introspection. The book argues that, contrary to common misconceptions, introspection does not consist of a single mechanism but rather a diverse range of mental states and cognitive processes with a broad spectrum of epistemic properties. Building upon this revised conception of introspection, the book illustrates and analyzes the variety of ways in which we introspectively grasp the contents of our own minds, from the immediate phenomenal knowledge generated by conscious experience to the self-deceptive possibilities enabled by certain kinds of inner speech.

Inhuman Thoughts is a philosophical exploration of the possibility of increasing the physiological and psychological capacities of humans to the point that they are no longer biologically, psychologically, or socially human. The movement is from the human through the trans-human, to the post-human. The tone is optimistic; Seidel argues that such an evolution would be of positive value on the whole. Seidel's initial argument supports the need for a comprehensive ethical theory, the success of which would parallel that of a large-scale scientific revolution, such as Newtonian mechanics. He elaborates the movement from the improved-but-still-human to the post-human, and philosophically examines speculated examples of post-human forms of life, including indefinitely extended life-span, parallel consciousness, altered perception, a-sociality, and a-sexuality. Inhuman Thoughts is directed at those interested in philosophical questions on human nature and the best life given the possibilities of that nature. Seidel's overall argument is that the most satisfactory answer to the latter question involves a transcendence of the present confines of human nature.