You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What is it for something in the mind to represent something? Distinguished philosopher of mind Robert Cummins looks at the familiar problems of representation theory (what information is represented in the mind, what form mental representation takes, how representational schemes are implemented in the brain, what it is for one thing to represent another) from an unprecedented angle. Instead of following the usual procedure of defending a version of "indicator" semantics, Cummins begins with a theory of representational error and uses this theory to constrain the account of representational content. Thus, the problem of misrepresentation, which plagues all other accounts, is avoided at the st...
The World in the Head collects the best of Robert Cummins' papers on mental representation and psychological explanation. Running through these papers are a pair of themes: that explaining the mind requires functional analysis, not subsumption under "psychological laws", and that the propositional attitudes--belief, desire, intention--and their interactions, while real, are not the key to understanding the mind at a fundamental level. Taking these ideas seriously puts considerable strain on standard conceptions of rationality and reasoning, on truth-conditional semantics, and on our interpretation of experimental evidence concerning cognitive development, learning and the evolution of mental...
What is the nature of law and what is the best way to discover it? This book argues that law is best understood in terms of the social functions it performs wherever it is found in human society. In order to support this claim, law is explained as a kind of institution and as a kind of artefact. To say that it is an institution is to say that it is designed for creating and conferring special statuses to people so as to alter their rights and responsibilities toward each other. To say that it is an artefact is to say that it is a tool of human creation that is designed to signal its usability to people who interact with it. This picture of law's nature is marshalled to critique theories of l...
None