Reconstructing Reason and Representation

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262545756
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Reconstructing Reason and Representation by : Murray Clarke

Download or read book Reconstructing Reason and Representation written by Murray Clarke and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. In Reconstructing Reason and Representation, Murray Clarke offers a detailed study of the philosophical implications of evolutionary psychology. In doing so, he offers new solutions to key problems in epistemology and philosophy of mind, including misrepresentation and rationality. He proposes a naturalistic approach to reason and representation that is informed by evolutionary psychology, and, expanding on the massive modularity thesis advanced in work by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, argues for a modular, adapticist account of misrepresentation and knowledge. Just as the reliability of representation can be defended on the basis of an account of the proper function of cognitive modularity, misrepresentation can be explained through an appeal to the "gap theory," by noting the divergence between the proper and actual domains of cognitive modules in a massively modular mind. Clarke argues for an externalist, modular reliabilism by suggesting that evolution has equipped us with generally reliable inferential systems even if they do not always produce true beliefs. He argues that reliable deductive and inductive inference occurs only when cognitive modules deal with actual domains that are sufficiently similar to their proper domains. This psychologically informed, naturalized adapticism leads to the suggestion that knowledge is a set of natural kinds housed in the modules of a massively modular mind. Typically, the proper function of these cognitive modules is to provide us with truths that enable us to satisfy our basic biological needs. Beyond reasoning modules, other cognitive modules discussed include the ability to orient ourselves in space, and our abilities with language, numbers, object reasoning, and social understanding. Clarke also defends Cosmides and Tooby's massive modularity hypothesis against such critics as Jerry Fodor by demonstrating that these critics consistently misrepresent Cosmides and Tooby's position.

Reconstructing the Cognitive World

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262232401
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (324 download)

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Book Synopsis Reconstructing the Cognitive World by : Michael Wheeler

Download or read book Reconstructing the Cognitive World written by Michael Wheeler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for a non-Cartesian philosophical foundation for cognitive science that combines elements of Heideggerian phenomenology, a dynamical systems approach to cognition, and insights from artificial intelligence-related robotics.

Ideals and Illusions

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262631457
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis Ideals and Illusions by : Thomas McCarthy

Download or read book Ideals and Illusions written by Thomas McCarthy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.

The Life of Reason

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life of Reason by : George Santayana

Download or read book The Life of Reason written by George Santayana and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Reconstructing Reality

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Publisher : Oxford Studies in Philosophy o
ISBN 13 : 0199380279
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Reconstructing Reality by : Margaret Morrison

Download or read book Reconstructing Reality written by Margaret Morrison and published by Oxford Studies in Philosophy o. This book was released on 2015 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines issues related to the way modelling and simulation enable us to reconstruct aspects of the world we are investigating. It also investigates the processes by which we extract concrete knowledge from those reconstructions and how that knowledge is legitimated.

Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

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Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 1317781600
Total Pages : 1212 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (177 download)

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Book Synopsis Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society by : Cognitive Science Society (US) Conference

Download or read book Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society written by Cognitive Science Society (US) Conference and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 1212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 14th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Connected Minds

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443839167
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Connected Minds by : Nicolas Payette

Download or read book Connected Minds written by Nicolas Payette and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme for this volume is social cognition, construed from a psychological and collective point of view. From the psychological point of view, the question is to understand how the human mind processes social information; how it encodes, stores and uses it in the social context. From a collective point of view, the question is to understand how individual cognition is influenced (improved, increased or impaired) by social interactions, for instance in communicating and collaborating with intelligent agents. These two dimensions of social cognition are obviously interdependent: the psychological dimension makes the collective dimension possible, which can in return modify the psychological dimension. The book is divided into four parts. The first part is about socio-cognitive skills. Among those, we count face recognition, imitation learning, embodied social interaction, cheater detection and psychological concept acquisition. The second part is about persons and memories: stereotypes, attraction judgements and impression formation are the subjects at hand. The third part is about understanding each other. A key part of that understanding is the motor system (whether or not we see it as a “mirror”), but community membership itself can also contribute to our understanding of others. The fourth and final part is about social cognition in societies. This section is unified by the common goal of understand how social cognition actually influences the structure of different societies, whether whole cultures, specific social networks, rural communities or even groups of caterpillars!

Species of Mind

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262511087
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Species of Mind by : Colin Allen

Download or read book Species of Mind written by Colin Allen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-07-26 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition. Colin Allen (a philosopher) and Marc Bekoff (a cognitive ethologist) approach their work from a perspective that considers arguments about evolutionary continuity to be as applicable to the study of animal minds and brains as they are to comparative studies of kidneys, stomachs, and hearts. Cognitive ethologists study the comparative, evolutionary, and ecological aspects of the mental phenomena of animals. Philosophy can provide cognitive ethology with an analytical basis for attributing cognition to nonhuman animals and for studying it, and cognitive ethology can help philosophy to explain mentality in naturalistic terms by providing data on the evolution of cognition. This interdiscipinary approach reveals flaws in common objections to the view that animals have minds. The heart of the book is this reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition. All theoretical discussion is carefully tied to case studies, particularly in the areas of antipredatory vigilance and social play, where there are many points of contact with philosophical discussions of intentionality and representation. Allen and Bekoff make specific suggestions about how to use philosophical theories of intentionality as starting points for empirical investigation of animal minds, and they stress the importance of studying animals other than nonhuman primates.

Year 1

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262044870
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Year 1 by : Susan Buck-Morss

Download or read book Year 1 written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences: liberating the past to speak to us in another way. Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for "reason" and Jerusalem for "faith." And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point--"year one"--that divides time into before and after is equally arbirtrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences. Buck-Morss aims to topple various conceptual givens that have shaped modernity as an episteme and led us into some unhelpful postmodern impasses. She approaches the first century through the writings of three thinkers often marginalized in current discourse: Flavius Josephus, historian of the Judaean war; the neo-Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria; and John of Patmos, author of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. Also making appearances are Antigone and John Coltrane, Plato and Bulwer-Lytton, al-Farabi and Jean Anouilh, Nicholas of Cusa and Zora Neale Hurston--not to mention Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kristeva, and Derrida. Buck-Morss shows that we need no longer partition history as if it were a homeless child in need of the protective wisdom of Solomon. Those inhabiting the first century belong together in time, and therefore not to us.

Varieties of Practical Reasoning

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262632201
Total Pages : 506 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (322 download)

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Book Synopsis Varieties of Practical Reasoning by : Elijah Millgram

Download or read book Varieties of Practical Reasoning written by Elijah Millgram and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the philosophical subfield of practical reasoning.

A Theory of Literary Explication

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443832308
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis A Theory of Literary Explication by : Kenneth B. Newell

Download or read book A Theory of Literary Explication written by Kenneth B. Newell and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents current multidisciplinary research and theory from 17 different fields (most of them never before applied to literary explication) in order to provide (1) justification for the practice of a relative-probability type of explication as distinguished from interpretation, (2) a relativistic foundation for the preference of some explication(s) of a literary work over others, and thereby (3) a middle way between the postmodern pluralist view that a work has only an unlimited number of equally acceptable though different explications and the modern intentionalist view that it has only one acceptable explication (the author’s). Nine of the 17 fields are of primary relevance: critical theory, hermeneutics, probability theory, philosophy of science, second-order logic, and four fields of cognitive science (linguistics, epistemology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence). But the book also touches upon textual criticism, legal theory, measure theory, fuzzy logic, animal learning behavior, developmental psychology, evolutionary epistemology, and neurobiology. The book shows that those using a relative-probability type of explication on a literary work can achieve consensus because the healthy, adult human brain has an evolved, uniform, and probably innate ability to form relative-probability judgments and to form them in the practice of activities (like reading and explicating) that are not uniform and innate. Lastly, the book contributes to the scholarly areas of explication theory and practice, first, by providing a relativistic foundation for a craft (explication) that currently is not acknowledged to have any foundation but nonetheless continues and will continue to be practiced and, second, by presenting a means (relative epistemic probability) by which judging some explication(s) of a literary work to be more acceptable than others may be justified philosophically—an uncommon circumstance in this postmodern era in which philosophical justification of many beliefs and practices is thought to be untenable.

Language and Reason

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262531450
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis Language and Reason by : Maeve Cooke

Download or read book Language and Reason written by Maeve Cooke and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of Juergen Habermas's "Theory of Communicative Action" and his later social theory know that the idea of communicative rationality is central to his version of critical theory. This text provides a general introduction to Habermas's programme of formal pragmatics - his reconstruction of the universal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, operate in everyday communicative practices. Philosophers of language should discover connections between Habermas's account of language and validity (especially his theory of meaning) and their own concerns. This work introduces the theory of communicative action as the background against which the programme of formal pragmatics must be understood. It then outlines the idea of communicative rationality as a postmetaphysical yet nondefeatist conception of reason. Two central chapters detail the connections Habermas asserts between language and validity, with particular attention to his theory of validity claims and his pragmatic theory of meaning. A final chapter looks at Habermas's account of the pathologies of modern society and at communicative rationality as a yardstick for measuring these pathologies. -- from http://www.amazon.ca (August 22, 2011)

Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030610527
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy by : Anton Killin

Download or read book Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy written by Anton Killin and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Multitude between Innovation and Negation

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1584350504
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (843 download)

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Book Synopsis Multitude between Innovation and Negation by : Paolo Virno

Download or read book Multitude between Innovation and Negation written by Paolo Virno and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-05-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influential Italian thinker offers three essays in the political philosophy of language. Multitude between Innovation and Negation by Paolo Virno translated by James Cascaito. The publication of Paolo Virno's first book in English, Grammar of the Multitude, by Semiotext(e) in 2004 was an event within the field of radical political thought and introduced post-'68 currents in Italy to American readers. Multitude between Innovation and Negation, written several years later, offers three essays that take the reader on a journey through the political philosophy of language. “Wit and Innovative Action” explores the ambivalence inevitably arising when the semiotic and the semantic, grammar and experience, rule and regularity, and right and fact intersect. Virno unravels the infinite potential and wonders of everyday linguistic praxis and ambiguity. Wit, he argues, is a public performance, and its modus operandi characterizes human action in a state of emergency; it is a reaction, an articulate response, and a possible solution to a state of crisis. “Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, and Mutual Recognition” examines the relationship of language and intersubjective empathy: without language, would human beings be able to recognize other members of their species? And finally, in “Multitude and Evil,” Virno challenges the distinction between the state of nature and civil society and argues for a political institution that resembles language in its ability to be at once nature and history. Few thinkers take the risks required by innovation. Like a philosophical entrepreneur, Virno is engaged in no less than rewriting the dictionary of political theory, an urgent and ambitious project when language, caught in a permanent state of emergency impossible to sustain, desperately needs to articulate and enact new practices of freedom for the multitude. Paolo Virno is the author of several books, including A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004).

Furnishing the Mind

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262264112
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (641 download)

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Book Synopsis Furnishing the Mind by : Jesse J. Prinz

Download or read book Furnishing the Mind written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A central issue in the debate is the nature of concepts, the internal representations we use to think about the world. The traditional empiricist thesis that concepts are built up from sensory input has fallen out of favor. Mainstream cognitive science tends to echo the rationalist tradition, with its emphasis on innateness. In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism. Prinz provides a critical survey of leading theories of concepts, including imagism, definitionism, prototype theory, exemplar theory, the theory theory, and informational atomism. He sets forth a new defense of concept empiricism that draws on philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology and introduces a new version of concept empiricism called proxytype theory. He also provides accounts of abstract concepts, intentionality, narrow content, and concept combination. In an extended discussion of innateness, he covers Noam Chomsky's arguments for the innateness of grammar, developmental psychologists' arguments for innate cognitive domains, and Jerry Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism.

Efficient Cognition

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262546736
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Efficient Cognition by : Armin W. Schulz

Download or read book Efficient Cognition written by Armin W. Schulz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that representational decision making is more cognitively efficient, allowing an organism to adjust more easily to changes in the environment. Many organisms (including humans) make decisions by relying on mental representations. Not simply a reaction triggered by perception, representational decision making employs high-level, non-perceptual mental states with content to manage interactions with the environment. A person making a decision based on mental representations, for example, takes a step back from her perceptions at the time to assess the nature of the world she lives in. But why would organisms rely on representational decision making, and what evolutionary benefits does this reliance provide to the decision maker? In Efficient Cognition, Armin Schulz argues that representational decision making can be more cognitively efficient than non-representational decision making. Specifically, he shows that a key driver in the evolution of representational decision making is that mental representations can enable an organism to save cognitive resources and adjust more efficiently to changed environments. After laying out the foundations of his argument—clarifying the central questions, the characterization of representational decision making, and the relevance of an evidential form of evolutionary psychology—Schulz presents his account of the evolution of representational decision making and critically considers some of the existing accounts of the subject. He then applies his account to three open questions concerning the nature of representational decision making: the extendedness of decision making, and when we should expect cognition to extend into the environment; the specialization of decision making and the use of simple heuristics; and the psychological sources of altruistic behaviors.

Comptes Rendus Philosophiques

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Comptes Rendus Philosophiques by :

Download or read book Comptes Rendus Philosophiques written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: