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A new theory proposes that thinking is a learned action. In this remarkable monograph, Derek Melser argues that the core assumption of both folk psychology and cognitive science—that thinking goes on in the head—is mistaken. Melser argues that thinking is not an intracranial process of any kind, mental or neural, but is rather a learned action of the person. After an introduction in which he makes a prima facie case that thinking is an action, Melser reviews action-based theories of thinking advanced by Ryle, Vygotsky, Hampshire and others. He then presents his own theory of "token concerting," according to which thinking is a special kind of token performance, by the individual, of cert...
"An account of the life and times of ... Sir John Salmond ... [a] study of the career and work of this influential legal philosopher and man of state traces the development of Salmond's principal ideas about law and their application to social and political problems of New Zealand in the first quarter of the twentieth century ... [his] judicial record is analysed and some leading cases discussed in detail"--Jacket.
" Promoting critical and creative anachronism, Metaphors of Mind redefines the notion of an archive in the age of Amazon and Google Books.
The Escape of the Mind argues that, in developing techniques of self-control and social cooperation, it is useful to question the almost universally accepted belief that our minds exist inside our bodies. We should look for our minds neither in our introspections nor in our brains, but in our long-term behavioral patterns.
Information and Consciousness: An Exploration connects information and consciousness in ways that will open up potential inquiry into what information is, how it works, and its relationship to human consciousness. Information has been taken to mean many things in the past; the risk has been that, if it is taken to mean everything, it may mean nothing. In this book, information’s definition is restricted to the inclusion of meaning and truth in discursive action. Consciousness, for its part, has frequently been taken to refer to the material workings of the brain. Recent inquiry has led to a broadening to embrace the human body and the environment in extended consciousness. Using these two ...
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This book traces the influence of Hegel's theory of recognition on different literary representations of Chicano/a subjectivity, with the aim of demonstrating how the identity thinking characteristic of Hegel's theory is unwillingly reinforced even in subjects that are represented as rebelling against liberal-humanist ideologies.
Many aspects of research activity in science are opaque to outsiders and this opacity infects how connections are made between science and other disciplines. The aim of Culture, Curiosity and Communication in Scientific Discovery is to try to shine a light through the mist of scientific research by way of examples taken from the sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The book maintains that the foundations of science are built on sand because theories come and go and the search for truth is elusive. Knowledge acquisition appears to be an end in itself, as though knowledge is some sort of commodity or object that can be traded. Nigel Sanitt explains that we have created a mythical objective world, where we pretend that opinions and values are generated by data alone and not by human beings. Science is part of our culture and part of the understanding of science is bound up with recognizing the social, economic and political ramifications as they apply to science. Culture, Curiosity and Communication in Scientific Discovery is a radical interpretation of how science works and aims to change the way scientists and non-scientists think about science.
This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts – visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic – can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations – for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is ...
What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring...