Book reviews

Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness)

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Jackendoff Ray: SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION IN GENERATIVE GRAMMAR (MIT Press, 1972)
One of the milestone works in government and binding theory.
The author shows that theta roles determine to some extent the wellformedness of anaphoric relations. Theta roles form a hierarchy and binding must respect such hierarchy by placing the antecedent of an anaphor higher on the hierarchy than the anaphor itself.

Jackendoff Ray: X'SYNTAX (MIT Press, 1977)(MIT Press, 1972)
A monumental study of the phrase structure of the english language in the light of Chomsky's X-bar theory.

Jackendoff Ray: SEMANTICS AND COGNITION (MIT Press, 1983)
Jackendoff develops conceptual structures to explain language, in a fashion similar to Fodor's mentalese.
The structure of meaning ought to be pursued on the same first principles as phonology and syntax.
Meaning of verbs can be reduced to a few spacetime primitives, such as motion and location.
The "extended standard theory" enhances Chomsky's standard theory by using interpretation rules to extract the meaning of a sentence. Such rules apply to the intermediate syntactic structures used in the derivation of the phonetic representation.

Jackendoff Ray: CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE COMPUTATIONAL MIND (MIT Press, 1987)
Jackendoff believes in a hierarchy of levels of mental representation.
The book resumes Jackendoff's claim that phonology and syntax are key to the structure of meaning, then extends the framework developed for language to vision and music (hinting at a possible unification with Marr's theory of vision).
Each cognitive function exists at different levels of interpretations and cognitive functions generally interact at intermediary levels.
Jackndoff refines and extends Fodor's idea of the modularity of the mind.
Consciousness arises from a level of representation which is intermediate between the sense-data and the form of thought.
There are the physical brain, the computational mind (cognition) and the phenomenological mind (consciousness). The computational mind is the one that really "thinks", whereas the phenomenological mind only "feels" superficially a subset of the "thoughts". Most of "thinking" is actually unconscious. We are never conscious of the outer world, but only of the shadows of some of the processing that the computational mind does on the outer world.

Jackendoff Ray: SEMANTIC STRUCTURES (MIT Press, 1990)
Jackendoff's conceptual semantics is applied to lexical and syntactic expressions in English. Jackendoff proposes a formalism for describing lexical semantic facts and expressing semantic generalizations. He employs multi-dimensional representations analogous to those found in phonology.

Jackendoff Ray: LANGUAGES OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1992)
This collection of papers summarizes Jackendoff's formal theory on the nature of language and a modular approach to "mental anatomy", and applies the same concepts to learning and common sense reasoning.
There is a tight relationship between vision and language. A lexical item contains the stereotipical image of the object or concept. Knowing the meaning of a word implies knowing how the object or concept looks like.

Jackendoff Ray: PATTERNS IN THE MIND (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993)
Following Chomsky, Jackendoff thinks that the human brain contains innate linguistic knowledge and that the same argument can be extended to all facets of human experience: all experience is constructed by unconscious genetically determined principles that operate in the brain.
The experience of spoken language is constructed by the hearer's mental grammar: speech per se is only a meaningless sound wave, only a hearer equipped with the proper device can make sense of it.
These same conclusions can be applied to thought itself, i.e. to the task of building concepts. Concepts are constructed by using some innate, genetically determined, machinery, a sort of "universal grammar of concepts". Language is but one aspect of a broader characteristic of the human brain.

Jackson Frank: CONDITIONALS (Basil Blackwell, 1987)
A collection of articles by David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, Grice and Frank Jackson on the subject of conditionals. A theory of conditionals must offer an account of the truth conditions of a conditional (under which conditions "if A then B" is true or false, or acceptable to some degree). The traditional view that a conditional is true if and only if the antecedent is false or the consequent is true is too simplicistic and allows conditionals such as "if Jones lives in London, then he lives in Scotland" to be true (if he does not live in London or lives in Scotland) when it is obviously senseless.
Stalnaker and Lewis solve some of the problems of (subjective) conditionals ("if it were that A then it would be that B") by using possible-world semantics. Lewis also reviews Ernest Adams' thesis that the assertability of (indicative) conditionals ("if A then B") is measured by the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent.

Jackson Frank: PERCEPTION (Cambridge University Press, 1977)
The immediate objects of perception are mental. To perceive an object is to be in a perceptual state as a causal result of the action of that object.
On epiphenomenal qualia Jackson proposed a famous thought experiement: a blind neurophysiologist that knows everything of how the brain perceives colors still cannot know what it feels like to see a color.
Color is not a property of material things. Sense-data are not material, they are mental.

Jauregui Jose: THE EMOTIONAL COMPUTER (Blackwell, 1995)
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Jaynes Julian: THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
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Jeanerrod Marc: THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF ACTION (Blackwell, 1996)
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Jerison, Harry: THE EVOLUTION OF THE BRAIN AND INTELLIGENCE (1973)
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Johnson Mark: THE BODY IN THE MIND (Univ of Chicago Press, 1987)
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Johnson Mark: DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (Blackwell, 1996)
The author examines the plasticity and molding of the brain from the perspective of developmental psychologicy.

Johnson Mark: BRAIN DEVELOPMENT AND COGNITION (Blackwell, 1993)
A reader on the subject.

Johnson Mark: THE BODY IN THE MIND (University of Chicago Press, 1987)
Human thought is both grounded in our bodily experience. Johnson shows that experience is structured in a meaningful way prior to any concepts. Some preconceptual schemata are inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily experience.

Joseph Rhawn: The Naked Neuron: EVOLUTION AND THE LANGUAGES OF THE BODY AND BRAIN (Plenum Press, 1993)
Communication occurs at several levels, from chemical to linguistic.

Johnson-Laird Philip: HUMAN AND MACHINE THINKING (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993)
A theory of deduction, induction and creation.

Johnson-Laird Philip: THINKING (Cambridge Univ Press, 1977)
A collection of articles that reviews the study of thinking in the aftermath of the conceptual revolution that forced the transition from behaviorism to information-processing. Contributions range from philosophy (Popper, Kuhn) to artificial intelligence (Minsky, Schank).

Johnson-Laird Philip: MENTAL MODELS (Harvard Univ Press, 1983)
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Johnson-Laird Philip: THE COMPUTER AND THE MIND (Harvard Univ Press, 1988)
An introduction to the themes and methods of cognitive science, with a review of porduction and connectionist architectures. Speech, vision and language are devoted long chapters. Johnson-Laird also introduces his theory of mental models and resumes his theory of consciousness and emotions.

Johnson-Laird Philip & Byrne Ruth: DEDUCTION (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991)
The authors advance a comprehensive theory to explain all the main varieties of deduction: propositional reasoning (that uses the connectives "and", "or" and "not"), relational reasoning (that depends on relations between entities), quantificational reasoning (that uses quantifiers such as "any" and "some"). And justify it with a variety of psychological experiments.
In order to understand discourse, humans construct an internal representation of the state of affairs that is described in that discourse. These mental models have the same structure as human conceptions of the situations they represent. Deduction does not depend on formal rules of inference but rather on a search for alternative models of the premises that would refute a putative conclusion. Central to the theory is the principle that people use models that make explicit as little information as possible. The theory also make sense of how people deal with conditionals.
The theory explains phenomena such as: that modus ponens ("if p then q" and "p" then "q") is easier than modus tollens ("if p then q" and "not q" then "not p").

Jones Steven: LANGUAGE OF GENES (Harper Collins, 1993)
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Josephson John & Josephson Susan: ABDUCTIVE INFERENCE (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Abduction (inference to the best explanation, i.e. building the hypothesis that best accounts for the data) is ubiquitous in ordinary life as well as in scientific theory formation. The book presents a dynasty of systems that explored abduction. Intelligence is viewed as a cooperative community of knowledge-based specialists (performing "generic tasks"). Knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference.

Jolly Alison: LUCY's LEGACY (Harvard University Press, 1999)
The American zoologist Alison Jolly contends that altruism is a fundamental aspect of evolution. The very existence of sex as a means of reproduction is proof that cooperation is a crucial evolutionary force. Sex is a trade-off: a genome sacrifices part of its genes to team up with another genome and increase its chances of survival in the environment.

Joseph, Rhawn: NAKED NEURON (Plenum, 1993)
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Jouvet, Michel: THE PARADOX OF sLEEP: THE STORY OF DREAMING (MIT Press, 1999)
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Jouvet Michel: LE SOMMEIL ET LE REVE (Jacob, 1992)
Jouvet was the first to localize the trigger zone for REM sleep and dreaming in the brain stem. In this book he provides a neurobiological and psychological analysis of sleep and dreaming.
According to his findings, a dream is the vehicle employed by an organism to cancel or archive the day's experiences on the basis of a genetic program. Dreaming is a process that absorbs a lot of energy.
This theory would also solve the dualism between hereditary and acquired features. An hereditary component is activated daily to decide how new data must be acquired.

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