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World without weight - Perspectives on an alien mind (Paperback)
Loot Price: R2,471
Discovery Miles 24 710
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World without weight - Perspectives on an alien mind (Paperback)
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Total price: R2,491
Discovery Miles: 24 910
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In every domain of reasoning-from time and space, to mental states
and physical illness-humans deploy an exceedingly diverse range of
intuitive 'theories' about how the world works. Children from
diverse cultures always seem to arrive at a few, common folk
theories as they hone their developing brains against roughly
similar interactions with people and objects. The result is an
impressive panoply of folk notions that the human species uses to
explain, predict, and just plain talk about everything from why the
sky is blue, to why we catch a cold when we stand out in the rain.
Unquestionably, all of this "higher-order" reasoning rests upon a
diverse and complex tool-kit of "lower-order" neural and bodily
mechanisms, much of which humans share in common with other species
(and which, collectively, are quite clever in their right). But
this book asks a different question: Are humans alone in trying to
make sense of the world by postulating theoretical entities to
explain how the world works? Povinelli and his colleagues approach
this highly controversial territory by investigating the seemingly
prosaic topic whether chimpanzees wield roughly the same
commonsense ideas about weight that human do. When it comes to the
physical world, they ask if chimpanzees reinterpret a broad range
of primary experiences-lifting objects, seeing objects fall or
collide, observing the differential effort others exert when they
move objects-in terms of a common, causal mechanism which, in our
everyday parlance, we refer to as 'weight.' The question is not
whether chimpanzees have a theory about weight that's any better or
worse than preschool children or Einstein or modern string
theorists. The question is whether chimpanzees have any theories at
all. And the answer comes in the form of over 30
never-before-published experiments from a decade-long research
project involving seven adult chimpanzees and one hundred and
twenty preschool children. Povinelli's work encourages us to stand
back and adopt a different perspective on even our closest living
relatives. Rather than seeing chimpanzees as watered-down versions
of ourselves, this book challenges us to see our joint encounter
for what it is: a meeting of alien minds.
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