The world in the head / Robert Cummins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cummins, Robert, 1944- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mental representation.

Philosophy of mind.

Cognitive psychology.

Cognition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 328 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book collects the best of the author's papers on mental representation and psychological explanation. Running through the chapters 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 traits and processes. The temptation to read the structure of mental states and their interactions off the structure of human language is powerful and seductive, but has created a widening gap between what most philosophers and social scientists take for granted about the mind, and the framework we need to make sense of what an accelerating biology and neuroscience are telling us about brains. The challenge for the philosophy of mind is to devise a framework that accommodates these developments. This is the underlying motivation for this book.

Contents:

What is it like to be a computer?

The LOT of the causal theory of mental content

Systematicity

Systematicity and the cognition of structured domains / Robert Cummins, Jim Blackmon, David Byrd, Pierre Poirier, Martin Roth, and Georg Schwarz

Methodological reflections on belief

Inexplicit information

Representation and indication / Robert Cummins and Pierre Poirier

Representation and unexploited content / Robert Cummins, Jim Blackmon, David Byrd, Alexa Lee, and Martin Roth

Haugeland on representation and intentionality

Truth and meaning

Meaning and content in cognitive science / Robert Cummins and Martin Roth

Representational specialization : the synthetic a priori revisited

Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanation / Robert Cummins and Denise Dellarosa Cummins

Cognitive evolutionary psychology without representational nativism / Robert Cummins, Denise Dellarosa Cummins, and Pierre Poirier

Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanation

'How does it work?' vs. 'What are the laws?' : two conceptions of psychological explanation.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-19-160946-3

0-19-180983-7

1-282-46581-3

9786612465819

0-19-157291-8

OCLC:

536370649