MacCormac Earl: A COGNITIVE THEORY OF METAPHOR (MIT Press, 1985)

A unified theory of metaphor, with implications for meaning and truth.
MacCormac rejects the tension theory (which locates the difference between metaphor and analogy in the emotional tension generated by the juxtaposition of anomalous referents), Monroe Beardsley's controversion theory (which locates that difference in the falsity produced by a literal reading of the identification of the two referents) and the deviance theory (which locates that difference in the ungrammaticality of the juxtaposition of two referents). He returns to the literal/metaphorical distinction (as opposed to Lakoff's view that all language is metaphorical), defining the literal as the ordinary use of language. A metaphor is a metaphor more by virtue of its apparent dissimilarities than its innovative similarities. Precisely, a metaphor is recognized as a metaphor on the basis of the semantic anomaly produced by the juxtaposition of referents.
MacCormac modifies Black's interactionist theory and adopts Wheelwright's classification of "epiphors" (metaphors that express the existence of something) and "diaphors" (metaphors that imply the possibility of something). Diaphor and epiphor measure the likeness and the dissimilarity of attribute of the referents. A diaphor can become an epiphor (when the object is found to really exist) and an epiphor can become a literal expression (when the term has been used for so long that people have forgotten its origin).
Metaphor is a process that exists at three levels: a language process (from ordinary language to diaphor to epiphor back to ordinary language); a semantic and syntactic process (its linguistic explanation); and a cognitive process (to acquire new knowledge). Therefore a theory of metaphor requires three levels: a surface or literal level, a semantic level and a cognitive level.
The semantics of metaphor is then formalized using mathematical tools. "Partial" truths of metaphorical language are represented by fuzzy values: the meaning of a sentence can belong to several concepts with different degrees of memberships. The paradigm is one of language as a hierarchical network in n-dimensional space with each of the nodes of the network a fuzzy set (defining a semantic marker). When unlikely markers are juxtaposed, the degrees of membership of one semantic marker in the fuzzy set representing the other semantic marker can be expressed in a four-valued logic (so that a metaphor is not only true or false).
MacCormac also sketches the theory that metaphors are speech acts in Austin's sense. Metaphors both possess meaning and carry out actions. An account of their meaning must include an account of their locutionary and perlocutionary forces.
Finally, the third component of a theory of meaning for metaphors (besides the semantic and speech act components) is the cultural context.
The meaning of metaphors results from the semantical aspects of communication, culture and cognition.
MacCormac claims that, as cognitive processes, metaphors mediate between culture and the mind, influencing both cultural and biological evolution.

MacLean Paul: THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press, 1990)

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MacNamara John & Reyes Gonzalo: THE LOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITION (Oxford University Press, 1994)

A collection of papers that try to bridge logic and cognition. The editors believe that the most basic properties of cognitive psychology show up as the universal properties of category theory. Category theory is better suited than set theory for representing basic intentional capabilities such as to refer, to count and to learn. Category theory generalizes set theory's notions of set and function into the "universal" properties of object and morphism. Logic becomes the study of what is universal.
The editors reach the conclusion that "there is no purely physiological explanation for the acquisition of intentional skills or the existence of intentional states." As a corollary, there must exist unlearned (innate) "logical resources" (e.g., membership, typed equality, reference to symbols), sort of universals of the human mind.
Most papers revolve around Reyes' seminal contribution to a semantic theory. Kinds are interpretations of common nouns. Reference to an individual by means of a proper noun involves a kind (e.g., reference to the name of a person involves the kind "person"). Therefore any reference to an individual involves a kind. Kinds are modally constant (don't decay in time), but predicates (properties) of kinds may change. All predicates are typed by kinds.

MacPhail Euan: THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford University Press, 1998)

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Maes Patti: DESIGNING AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (MIT Press, 1990)

A collection of articles on action-oriented systems (as opposed to knowledge-based systems), which are based on a tighter coupling between perception and action, a distributed architecture, dynamic interaction with the environment. Cognitive faculties are viewed as "emergent functionalities", properties that arise from the interaction of the system with the environment. The properties of the environment determine the behavior of the system as much as the system's own properties. A system is made of autonomous specialized subsystems and the overall behavior is the result of the intended behaviors of all the subsystems.
Rodney Brooks introduces his situated agents.
Mae models action selection through behavior networks, which exhibit planning capabilities halfway between traditional goal-oriented planning and situated action.

Mamdani E.H. & Gaines B.R.: FUZZY REASONING (Academic Press, 1981)

Each chapter is written by an authority in the field. Zadeh introduces PRUF, a meaning representation language for natural languages that considers the intrinsic imprecision of languages as possibilistic rather than probabilistic in nature. Goguen provides some mathematical foundations to the theory of fuzzy sets, that lead from a few axioms (in the language of category theory) to the definition of operations on fuzzy sets that are parallel to those for ordinary sets (which, on the other hand, cannot be categorical).
Some applications to linguistics, expert systems and controllers are also discussed.

Mandelbrot Benoit: THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (W.H.Freeman, 1982)

This is the book (a revision of 1977's "Fractals") that made fractals popular. Mandelbrot emphasizes the inhability of classical geometry to model the shapes of the real world, in particular the complexity of natural patterns. Natural patterns (such as coastlines) are of infinite length. In order to provide measures, Mandelbrot resorts to Felix Hausdorff's fractal dimension (a fraction that exceeds one, even if a curve's dimension should intuitively be one).
Scaling and nonscaling fractals, self-mapping fractals, Brown fractals, trema fractals are introduced along with their mathematical properties.
Mandelbrots describes applications to coastal lines, galaxy clusters, the physics of turbulence, the cosmological principle, and so forth, and discusses the relationship to artificial life (organic looking nonlinear fractals) and chaos theory (nonlinear fractals that play the role of attractors for dynamic systems).

Mandler George: MIND AND BODY (Norton, 1984)

An expanded and revised edition of "Mind and Emotion" (1975), which first analyzed the relationship between cognition and emotion.
After a generous history and survey of research on emotions in cognitive psychology, Mandler offers his view on mind and consciousness: the mind is a general information-processing system that employs schemas as basic cognitive structures. Schemas represent environmental regularities.
Mandler emphasizes the constructive nature of consciousness: "consciousness is a construction of phenomenal experience out of one or more of the available preconscious schemas," a process driven by the most abstract schema relevant to the current goals of the individual. One of the functions of consciousness is to enable the individual to evaluate environmental conditions and action alternatives.
Emotions are constructed out of autonomic arousal (arousal of a part of the nervous system called autonomic nervous system, which determines the intensity of the emotion) and evaluative cognition (meaning analysis, which determines the quality of the emotion). Therefore, emotion is a product of schemas, arousal and consciousness. The function of emotions is to provide the individual with an optimal sense of the world, with the most general picture of the world that is consistent with current needs, goals and situations.

Marcus Mitchell: A THEORY OF SYNTACTIC RECOGNITION FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE (MIT Press, 1980)

This book describes the famous Marcus parser.

Marek Wiktor & Truszczynski Miroslav: NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC (Springer Verlag, 1991)

A rigorous, monumental work on the foundations of nonmonotonic logic, based on nonmonotonic rules of proof (defaults), or context-dependent derivation (the context determines which derivation rule is valid). First-order default theories such as Reiter's and modal nonmonotonic logics such as Doyle's and McDermott's are given extensive treatments, while second-order logics such as McCarthy's circumscription are merely mentioned.

Marshall I.N. & Zohar Danah: QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow, 1994)

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Margalef Ramon: PERSPECTIVES IN ECOLOGICAL THEORY (Univ of Chicago Press, 1968)

In this study of the ecosystem as a cybernetic system a number of biological quantities are given mathematical definition.
A basic property of nature is that any exchange between two systems of information increases the difference of information between the two systems: the less organized system gives energy to the more organized one and in parallel information is destroyed in the less organized system and information is created in the more organized one. The less organized system feeds the more organized.
Margalef viewed an ecosystem as a cybernetic system driven by the second law of Thermodynamics.
Succession (the occupation of a territory by organisms) is then a self-organizing process, one whereby an element of the system is replaced with a new element so as to store more information at less energetic cost; a process that develops a biological system in which the production of entropy per unit of information is minimized. Such process consists in substituting biological components of the system with other biological components so as to preserve the same or more information at the same or less energetic cost. Paradoxically, the system seeks to gain information from the environment only to use such information to block any further assimilation of information. During succession there is trend towards increase in biomass, complexity stratification, and diversity. The more entropy/energy efficient systems are those that are best fit to survive. Therefore, succession is to ecology what evolution is to biology.
Margalef takes energy flow per unit of biomass as a measure for ecological or evolutionary efficiency. He argues that succession proceeds so that the ratio of biomass production to total biomass (per unit of time and area) will decrease with time.
A measure of ecological efficiency is given by the energy flow per unit biomass (the primary production of the system divided by the total biomass).

Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan: WHAT IS LIFE? ( Simon & Schuster, 1995)

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Margulis Lynn: SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (Freeman, 1981)

A technical introduction to Margulis' idea that eukaryotic cells evolved from bacterial ancestors by a series of symbioses. At least three classes of organelles in eukaryotic cells were once free-living bacteria (mitochondria, cilia, plastids). Margulis starts from the origins of life and then describes the presume chemistry that led to the formation of multicellular organisms.

Margulis Lynn: ENVIRONMENTAL EVOLUTION (MIT Press, 1992)

A collection of essays on the history of the environment from prebiotic times to the present, including the origins of life.

Marr David: VISION (MIT Press, 1982)

Marr thinks that the vision system employs innate information to decipher the ambigous signals that it perceives from the world.
Processing of perceptual data is performed by "modules", each specialized in some function, which are controlled by a central module. In a similar fashion to Chomsky and Fodor the brain contains semantic representations (in particular a grammar) which are innate and universal (of biological nature) in the form of modules that are automatically activated and all concepts can be decomposed in such semantic representations. The processing of such semantic representations is purely syntactic.
The physical signal sent to the world is received (in the form of physical energy) by transductors, which transform it into a symbol (in the form of a neural code) and pass it on to the input modules, which extract information and send it to the central module in charge of higher cognitive tasks.
Each module corresponds to neural subsystems in the brain. The central module exhibits the property of being "isotropic" (able to build hypotheses based on any other available function) and "quinian" (the degree of confirmation assigned to an hypothesis is conditioned by the entire system of beliefs).
The visual system is decomposed in a number of independent subsystems. Such subsystems provide a representation of the visual scene at three different levels of abstraction: the "primal sketch", which is a symbolic representation from the meaningful features of the image (anything causing sudden discontinuities in light intensity, such as boundaries, contours, textures); a 2 and a half dimensional sketch, which is a representation centered on the visual system of the observer (e.g., describes the surrounding surfaces and their properties, mainly distances and orientation) and computed by a set of modules specialized in parameters of motion, shape, color, etc; and finally the tri-dimensional representation, which is centered on the object and is computed by Ullman's correspondence rules.
Marr thinks that one can be at either at three levels of analysis: the computational level (which mathematical function the system must compute, i.e. an account of human competence), the algorithmic level (which algorithm must be used, i.e. an account of human performance) and the physical level (which mechanism must implement the algorithm). Cognitive science should investigate the mind at the computational level.

Martin James: A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF METAPHOR INTERPRETATION (Academic Press, 1990)

Martin does not believe that the process of comprehending a metaphor is a process of reasoning by analogy. A metaphor is simply a linguistic convention within a linguistic community, an "abbreviation" for a concept that would otherwise require too many words. There is no need for transfer of properties from one concept to another.
A number of Lakoff-style primitive classes of metaphors (metaphors that are part of the knowledge of language) are used to build all the others. A metaphor is therefore built and comprehended just like any other lexical entity.

Martin-Lof Per: INTUITIONISTIC TYPE THEORY (Bibliopolis, 1984)

The theory of types is an application of intuitionistic logic. It provides a framework in which to implement the tasks of program specification, program construction and program verification. Expressions are built up from variables and constants by application and functional abstraction. The meaning of an expression is provided by a rule of computation. The mechanical procedure of computing the value of an expression is its "evaluation". The statement "a is an element of A" can be understood as "a is a proof of proposition A" or "a is a program for the solution of A". The specification of a program is a type definition and the program itself can be derived formally as a proof.

Mason Stephen: CHEMICAL EVOLUTION (Clarendon Press, 1991)

Mason attempts an explanation of the origin of the elements, molecules and living systems. His theory is close to Julius Rebek and Stanley Miller, who are trying to create molecules that behave like living organisms.

Matthews Robert: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY (Kluwer Academics, 1989)

A collection of papers that cover the relations between learning theory and natural language from Gold's "identification in the limit" to Osherson's proof that the class of natural language is finite.

Maturana Humberto: AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel, 1980)

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Maturana Humberto & Varela Francisco: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (Shambhala, 1992)

A popular introduction to Maturana's biology of cognition, centered around the concept that action and cognition cannot be separated: "all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing". A living organism is defined by the fact that its organization makes it continually self-producing (autopoietic), i.e. not only autonomous but also self-referring ("the being and doing of an autopoietic system are inseparable"). Life's origins is not a mystery: at some point of its history the Earth presented conditions that made the formation of autopoietic systems almost inevitable. The whole process of life depends not on the components of a living organism, but on its organization. Autopoiesis is about organization, not about the nature of the components.
Basic concepts are defined: replication as a process that generates unities of the same class, copy as a process that generates an identical unity, reproduction as a process that generates two unities of the same class, ontogeny as the history of structural change in a unity that preserves its organization. Since ontogeny always happens in an environment, the organism has to use the environment as a medium to realize its autopoiesis. There occurs a "structural coupling" between a unity and its environment.
Evolution is a natural drift, a consequence of the conservation of autopoiesis and adaptation. There is no need for an external guiding force to direct evolution. All is needed is conservation of identity and capacity for reproduction.
The nervous system enables the living organism to expand the set of possible internal states ant to expand the possible ways of structural coupling.
When two or more living organisms interact recurrently, they generate a social coupling. Language emerges from such social coupling. Language is a necessary condition for self-consciousness. Consciousness therefore belongs to the realm of social coupling.

Mayr Ernst: POPULATION, SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (Harvard Univ Press, 1970)

Mayr surveys the history of evolutionary theories and current evolutionary research. The modern synthesis can be summarized as: evolution is due to "the production of variation and the sorting of variants by natural selection".
Mayr focuses on the biological properties of species and then deals with population variation and genetics ("phenotypes are produced by genotypes interacting with the environment", and genotypes are produced by the recombination of genes of a local population).
Mayr focuses on variation ("the study of variation is the study of populations"). All populations contain enough genetic variation to fuel evolutionary change. Variation in turn poses problems for adaptation and speciation. Mayr explain the genetics of speciation by downplaying the role of geographic isolation and emphasizing and emphasizing the genetic reconstruction of populations.
The species are the units of evolution. Speciation is the method by which evolution advances.
The structure of an organism necessarily reflects its evolutionary history.

Mayr Ernst: THE GROWTH OF BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT (Harvard Univ Press, 1982)

A monumental history of evolutionary biology, from Aristotle to Darwin, from Mendel to the DNA.

Mayr Ernst: TOWARDS A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY (Harvard Univ Press, 1988)

In this collection os essays Mayr tackles biological themes from a philosophical standpoint. Mayr debates extraterrestrial intelligent life, speciation, punctuated equilibria, etc.
Mayr reiterates that the genes are not the units of evolution.

McClelland James & Rumelhart David: PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING vol. 2 (MIT Press, 1986)

The second volume of the seminal collection of articles deals with psychological processes (thought, learning, reading, speech) and biological mechanisms (plausible models of neural behavior) in the light of connectionism.
Paul Smolensky attempts to bridge the symbolic level of cognitive science and the subsymbolic level of neurosciences.

McCulloch Warren: EMBODIMENTS OF MIND (M.I.T. Press, 1965)

A collection of papers written by McCulloch, including the celebrated "An logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity" (1943) and an influential paper written jointly with Maturana about the frog's vision (1959).
The former proved that a network of binary neurons (that can only be in one of two possible states, have a fixed threshold below which they never fire, can receive inputs from either inhibitory synapses and/or excitatory synapses, and integrate their input signals at discrete intervals of time) is fully equivalent to a universal Turing machine (i.e., that any finite logical proposition can be realized by such a network, i.e. every computer program can be implemented as a neural net).
The latter proved that the eye sends highly specific signals to the brain, which require minimal processing by the brain. In a sense, the eye already "knows" what to look for. In the case of a frog's eye, the frog is looking for food, and the brain doesn't need to do much processing to generate action following an eye's signal that a food-like pattern has been spotted.

McGinn, Colin: THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic, 1999)

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McGinn Colin: THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press, 1991)

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McGinn, Colin: CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS OBJECTS (Oxford University Press, 2004)

This book collects ten essays on consciousness, each of one presents a provocative viewpoint, such as that there are non-existent objects.

McGinn Colin: MINDSIGHT (2004)

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McGinn Colin: CHARACTER OF MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

Second edition of McGinn's introduction to philosophy of mind, with added chapters on consciousness and cognitive science.

McGinn Colin: MINDS AND BODIES (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)

This book is a collection of book reviews that McGinn published over the years. Since he mainly reviews philosophers like himself, the book ends up being an excellent introduction to contemporary philosophy of mind. It presents and analyzes the ideas of Fodor, Davidson, Quine, Chomsky, Dennett, etc.

McNeill David: HAND AND MIND (Univ of Chicago Press, 1992)

Following Adam Kenton, McNeill presents a unified theory of speech and gestures, according to which gestures are an integral part of language.
Gestures directly transfer mental images to visible forms, conveying ideas that language cannot always express. Gestures contribute directly to the semantics and pragmatics of language. Gestures transform mental images into visual form and therefore express more than spoken language can express; and, symmetrically, they build in the listener's mind mental images that spoken language alone could not build. Gestures complement words in that they represent the individual's personal context and words carry this context to the level of social conventions. Unlike words, gestures are synthetic, noncombinatorial and never hierarchical: they present meaning complexities without undergoing the kind of (linear and hierarchical) decomposition that spoken language undergoes. Gestures provide a holistic and imagistic kind of representation, while speech provides a analytic and linguistic representation. Speech and gesture arise from the interaction (dialectic) of imagistic and linguistic mental operations through a process of self-organization.
The book offers a classification of gestures (including metaphoric gestures) and a narrative theory of gestures.

McNeill David: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (Harper & Row, 1987)

The main thesis is that Saussure's linguistic paradigm (language as a system of static contrasts on the social level, i.e. langue vs parole, signifier vs signified, synchronic vs diachronic, syntagmatic vs paradigmatic, linguistic value vs intrinsic value) and Vygotsky's psychological paradigm (language as a dynamic process on the individual level) can be reconciled by positioning them at different points on the speech developmental time axis (the time it takes to think and build the sentence, not the time it takes to utter it).
The book contains a clear introduction to Saussure's linguistics. McNeill's methodology relies on gesture ("gestures are part of the sentence") as an additional source of evidence.
McNeill also offers his own theory of spontaneous speech generation: inner speech symbols self-activate in appropriate conceptual situations and generate speech. He recognizes two fundamental types of thinking, and assumes that during linguistic actions imagistic thinking is unpacked by syntactic thinking.
Linguistic actions create self-aware consciousness: an individual becomes self-conscious by mentally simulating social experience. Individual consciousness is social.

Mead, George Herbert: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press, 1938)

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Mead George Herbert: MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY (Univ of Chicago Press, 1934)

Mind and consciousness are products of socialization among biological organisms. Language provides the medium for their emergence. The mind is therefore socially constructed. Society constitutes an individual as much as the individual constitutes society.
The mind emerges through a process of internalization of the social process of communication: reflecting to oneself the reaction of other individuals to one's gestures. The minded organism is capable of being an object of communication to itself. Mead focuses on the role of gestures, which signal the existence of a symbol (and a meaning) that is being communicated (i.e., recalled in the other individual), and therefore constitute the building blocks of language. "A symbol is the stimulus whose response is given in advance". Meaning is defined by the relation between the gesture and the subsequent behavior of an organism as indicated to another organism by that gesture. The mechanism of meaning is therefore present in the social act before the consciousness of it emerges.
Consciousness is not in the brain, but in the world. It refers to both the organism and the environment, and cannot be located simply in either. What is in the brain is the process by which the self gains and loses consciousness (analogous to pulling down and raising a window shade).
Mead draws a distinction between the "me" (the self of which we are mostly aware) and the "I" (the self that is unpredictable).

Metzinger Thomas: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE (Springer Verlag, 1996)

A collection of papers on the problem of consciousness. Contributions by Michael Tye, William Lycan, Daniel Dennett.

Michalski Ryszard, Carbonell Jaime & Mitchell Tom: MACHINE LEARNING I (Morgan Kaufman, 1983)

A collection of seminal papers on machine learning, including Michalski's "A theory and methodology of inductive learning" (his "Star" methodology, i.e. learning as a heuristic search in a space of symbolic descriptions driven by a incremental process of specialization and generalization) and "Conceptual clustering", Carbonell's "Learning by analogy", Mitchell's "Learning by experimentation" (his "version spaces" technique, where a version space is the partially ordered set of all plausible descriptions of the heuristic and an incremental process of refinement narrows down the space to one description).
Doug Lenat surveys his projects of learning by discovery (AM, Eurisko), Langley reports on BACON.

Michalski Ryszard, Carbonell Jaime & Mitchell Tom: MACHINE LEARNING II (Morgan Kaufman, 1986)

A second set of articles on machine learning research. Includes reports from Patrick Winston, Thomas Dietterich, Paul Utgoff, Ross Quinlan, Michael Lebowitz, Yves Kodratoff, Gerald DeJong.
Included are contributions from cognitive architectures (Paul Rosenbloom, John Anderson), qualitative physics (Kenneth Forbus), genetic algorithms (John Holland).
Carbonell's analogical reasoning includes "trasformational" reasoning (that transfers properties from a situation to another situation) and "derivational" reasoning (that derives the properties of a situation from another situation).

Michalski Ryszard & Kodratoff Yves: MACHINE LEARNING III (Morgan Kaufman, 1990)

A third set of articles that reports on new developments from the main protagonists of the field.

Michalski Ryszard: MACHINE LEARNING IV (Morgan Kaufman, 1994)

New developments in machine learning, with a section on theory revision.

Miller, Geoffrey: THE MATING MIND (Doubleday, 2000)

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Miller George Armitage & Johnson-Laird Philip: LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION (Cambridge Univ Press, 1976)

This monumental book, from a wealth of psychological investigantions of a number of perceptual phenomena, attempts a psychological study of the lexical component of language.
"Sense" has two meanings, one perceptual and the other linguistic. The relation between perceptual and linguistic structures is mediated by a complex conceptual system: percepts and words are just channels to enter and exit this complex system. Labels are learned not by pure association, but through an attentional-judgmental abstraction of perception. We don't learn automatic links between percepts and words, we learn rules relating perceptual judgments to assertible utterances. The relation between perception and language consists in learning metalinguistic rules that specify how perceptual judgments can be used to verify or falsify sentences. The meaning of a sentence is the way of verifying it.
In Johnson-Laird's procedural semantics, a word's meaning is the set of conceptual elements that can contribute to build a mental procedure necessary to comprehend any sentence including that word. Those elements depend on the relations between the entity referred by that word and any other entity it can be related to. Rather than atoms of meanings, we are faced with "fields" of meaning, each including a number of concepts that are related to each other. The representation of the mental lexicon handles the intensional relations between words and their being organized into semantic fields.
Along the way, the authors review hundreds of cognitive theories about memory, perception and language.

Millikan Ruth: LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL CATEGORIES (MIT Press, 1987)

Millikan aims for a general theory of "proper functions" that can be applied to body organs, instinctive behaviors and language devices (all elements used in verbal communication, from words to intonation). Such proper functions explain the survival of those entities, in particular of language devices, and therefore elucidate what they "do". Proper functions are related with the history of a thing, with what it was designed to do. Language devices survive because they establish a symbiotic relationship between speakers and hearers. A proper function is a function that stabilizes the realtionship between a speaker and a hearer with respect to a language device.
Speaker meaning and sentence meaning are related, but neither can be used as a base for defining the other.
Millikan then develops a general theory of signs and thoughts. Intentionality is a natural phenomenon: intentions are members of proper-function categories (i.e., biological categories) that have been acquired through an evolutionary process for their survival value. The intentionality of language can be described without reference to the speaker's intentions. Representations are a special class of intentional devices, which include sentences and thoughts: when they perform their proper function, their referents are identified. Beliefs are representations.
Meaning has three parts: the proper function, Fregean sense and intension.

Millikan Ruth: WHAT IS BEHAVIOR? (MIT Press, 1991)

Millikan, inspired by Dawkins, believes that, when determining the function of a biological "system", the "system" must include more than just the organism, something that extends beyond its skin. Furthermore, the system often needs the cooperation of other systems: the immune system can only operate if it is attacked by viruses.

Milner, David & Goodale, Melvyn: THE vISUAL BRAIN IN ACTION (Oxford University Press, 1995)

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Milner Peter: THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)

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Mithen Steven: THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson, 1996)

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Mines Robert: ADULT COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT (Praeger, 1986)

A collection of essays on the subject, including Patricia Arlin's seminal "Problem finding" and Karen Kitchener's "Reflexive judgement model".
Arlin studies the cognitive developmental process that enables creativity in art and science, or the emergence of postformal operational thinking that follows Piaget's traditional stages in the young adult.
Kitchener assumes that an adult keeps developing his or her cognitive faculties and therefore refining the way decisions are taken in complex situations. Cognitive development continues for the entire lifetime.

Minsky Marvin: SEMANTIC INFORMATION PROCESSING (MIT Press, 1968)

A collection of articles about seminal, historical artificial intelligence systems, including Bertram Raphael's SIR for natural language understanding and Daniel Bobrow's STUDENT. Also includes John McCarthy's 1958 article on "Programs with common sense" and Ross Quillian's 1966 paper on "Semantic memory".
McCarthy proposes to build a program that reasons deductively from a body of knowledge until it concludes that some actions ought to be performed; then it adds the results of the actions to its body of knowledge; and repeats its cycle. McCarthy also sketches for the first time his situation calculus to represent temporally limited events as "situations".
Quillian defines of a semantic network as a relational direct acyclical graph in which nodes represent entities and arcs represent binary relations between entities.

Minsky Marvin: THE SOCIETY OF MIND (Simon & Schuster, 1985)

The book summarizes all of the cognitive ideas of Minsky, from frames to K-lines.
In a similar vein to Dennett's homunculi, the cognitive architecture of the society of mind assumes that intelligent behavior is due to the non-intelligent behavior of a very high number of agents organized in a bureaucratic hierarchy. The set of their elementary actions and their communications can produce more and more complex behavior.
Minsky assumes that a data structure called "K-Line" (Knowledge Line) records the current activity (all the agents currently active) when a perception or problem solving task takes place and that the memory of that event or problem is a process of rebuilding what was active (the agents that were active) in the mind at that time. Agents are not all attached the same way to K-lines. Strong connections are made at a certain level of detail, the "level-band", weaker connections are made at higher and lower levels. Weakly activated features correspond to assumptions by default, which stay active only as long as there are no conflicts. K-lines connect to K-lines and eventually form societies of their own.
Minsky defines a frame as a packet of information that help recognize and understand a scene, represent sterotypical situations and find shortcuts to ordinary problems.
Memory is a network of frames, one relative to each known concept. Each perception selects a frame (i.e., classifies the current situation in a category) which then must be adapted to that perception; and that is equivalent to interpret the situation and decide which action must be performed. Reasoning is adpating a frame to a situation. Knowledge imposes coherence to experience.
The frame offers computational advantages (because it focuses reasoning on the information that is relevant to the situation), is biologically plausible (it does not separate cognitive phenomena such as perception, recognition, reasoning, understanding and memory).
A frame is the description of a category by means of a prototypical member (i.e., its properties) and a list of actions that can be performed on any member of the category. Any other member of the category can be described by a similar frame that customizes some properties of the prototype. A prototype is simply a set of default properties. Default values express a lack of information, which can be remedied by new information (unlike with classical logic, which is monotonic).
A frame provides multiple representations of an object: taxonomic (conjuctions of classification rules), descriptive (conjunction of propositions of the default values) and functional (a proposition on the admissible predicates).

Minsky Marvin: PERCEPTRONS; AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL GEOMETRY (MIT Press, 1969)

The book that virtually delivered a near-fatal blow to research on neural networks by exposing mathematically the limitations of perceptrons.

Minksy Marvin: COMPUTATION (Prentice-Hall, 1967)

Minsky built a computational connectionist theory on top of McCulloch's and Pitts' binary neuron.

Mitchell Melanie: ANALOGY-MAKING AS PERCEPTION (MIT Press, 1993)

The book describes the program built by the author and Douglas Hofstadter, COPYCAT.
Analogy making is viewed as a perceptual process, rather than a purely reasoning process. The interaction of perceptions and concepts gives rise to analogies.
The computer model entails a large number of parallel processors, halfway between connectionist and symbolic systems. Concepts and perceptions are not well defined entities, but dymanic processes that arise from such a configuration. The system employs an innovative stochastic search to find solutions.

Mitchell Melanie: INTRODUCTION TO GENETIC ALGORITHMS (MIT Press, 1996)

A brief survey of the field.

Monod Jacques: CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf, 1971)

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Montague Richard: FORMAL PHILOSOPHY (Yale University Press, 1974)

Montague developed an intensional logic that employs a type hierarchy, higher-order quantification, lambda abstraction for all types, tenses and modal operators. Its model theory is based on coordinate semantics.
Reality consists of two truth values, a set of entities, a set of possible worlds and a set of points in time. A function space is constructed inductively from these elementary objects.
The sense of an expression is supposed to determine its reference. The intensional logic makes explicit the mechanism by which this can happen. The logic determines the possible sorts of functions from possible indices (sets of worlds, times, speakers, etc) to their denotations (or extensions). These functions represent the sense of the expression.
In other words sentences denote extensions in the real world. The denotation is compositional, meaning that a subpart of the intension extends or delimits the extension denotated by another.
A name denotes the infinite set of properties of its reference. Common nouns, adjectives and intransitive verbs denote sets of individual concepts and their intensions are the properties necessarily shared by all those individuals.
Montague's semantics is truth conditional (to know the meaning of a sentence is to know what the world must be for the sentence to be true, the meaning of a sentence is the set of its truth conditions), model theoretic (a way to carry out the program of truth-conditional semantics that involves building models of the world which yield interpretations of the language) and uses possible worlds (the meaning of a sentence depends not just on the world as it is but on the world as it might be, i.e. on other possible worlds).
Montague used his intensional logic to derive a semantic, model-theoretic interpretation of a fragment of the english language: through a rigorously mechanical process, a sentence of natural language is translated into an expression of the intensional logic and the model-theoretic interpretation of this expression serves as the interpretation of the sentence.
Montague relalized that categorial grammars provide a unity of syntactic and semantic analyses.
Rather than proving a semantic interpretation directly on syntactic structures, Montague provides the semantic interpretation of a sentence by showing how to translate it into formulas of intensional logic and how to interpret semantically all formulas of that logic. Montague assigns a set of basic expressions to each category and then defines 17 syntactic rules to combine them to form complex phrases. An analysis tree shows graphically how a meaningful expression is constructed from basic expressions. The tree shows all applications of syntactic rules down to the level of basic expressions. The translation from natural language to intensional logic is then performed by employing a set of 17 translation rules that correspond to the syntactic rules. Syntactic structure determines semantic interpretation. The semantics of the intensional logic is given as a possible-world semantics relative to moments of time: "points of reference" (pairs of worlds and moments) determine the extensions of expressions whose meanings are intensions.
Montague believes there should be no theoretical difference between natural languages and artificial languages of logicians.
A universal grammar is a mathematical framework capable of subsuming a description of any system that might be considered as a language.

Moore A.W.: MEANING AND REFERENCE (Oxford Univ Press, 1993)

A collection of historical papers on meaning and reference, including Frege, Russell, Quine, Kripke, Davidson, Putnam.

Moore Robert: LOGIC AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION (CSLI, 1995)

Collects Moore's writings on "knowledge and action", belief theory and autoepistemic logic.

Morowitz Harold: ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (Academic Press, 1968)

The thesis of the book is that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize the system. The apparent paradox between the second law of thermodynamics (the universe tends towards increasing disorder) and biological evolution (life tends towards increasing organization) is solved by realizing that thermodynamics applies to systems that are approaching equilibrium (either adiabatic, i.e. isolated, or isothermal), whereas natural systems are usually subject to flows of energy/matter to or from other systems. Steady-state systems (where the inflow and the outflow balance each other) are particular cases of nonequilibrium systems.
Schrodinger's vision that "living organisms feed upon negative entropy" (they attract negative entropy in order to compensate for the entropy increase they create by living) can be restated as: the existence of a living organism depends on increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe.

Mora Francisco: THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press, 2000)

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Morowitz Harold: FOUNDATIONS OF BIOENERGETICS (Academic Press, 1978)

A classic textbook that introduces thermodynamic concepts (energy, temperature, entropy and information) and the laws of statistical mechanics and then applies them to biological structures such as the solar radiation. Nonequilibrium (irreversible) thermodynamics is introduced.
Morowitz's theorem states that the flow of energy through a system leads to cycling in that system. The flux of energy is the organizing factor in a dissipative system. When energy flows in a system from a higher kinetic temperature, the upper energy levels of the system become occupied and take a finite time to decay into thermal modes. During this period energy is stored at a higher free energy than at equilibrium state. Systems of complex structures can store large amounts of energy and achieve a high amount of internal order.
Therefore, a dissipative system develops an internal order with a stored free energy that is stable, has a lower internal entropy and resides some distance from thermostatic equilibrium. Furthermore, a dissipative system selects stable states with the largest possible stored energy.
The cyclic nature of dissipative systems can be seen in the periodic attractors. Their cyclic nature allows them to develop stability and structure within themselves.

Morowitz Harold: BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press, 1992)

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Morowitz Harold: ENTROPY AND THE MAGIC FLUTE (Oxford University Press, 1993)

A collection of short and very entertaining essays on intriguing topics.

Morris C.W.: FOUNDATIONS OF THE THEORY OF SIGNS (University Of Chicago Press, 1938)

Morris revised Peirce's theory of signs and introduced the modern terminology.

Murchie Guy: SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin, 1978)

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Murray James Dickson: MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY (Springer-Verlag, 1993)

An introductory manual on mathematical modeling of ecology (formal study of the relation between species and their environment). For example, how to build models for geographic spreads of epidemics.

Myers Terry: REASONING AND DISCOURSE PROCESSING (Academic Press, 1986)

A collection of papers on discourse structure and analysis.
Includes Johnson-Laird's "Reasoning without logic", a critique of mental logic, and Wilson's and Sperber's "Inference and implicature in utterance interpretation", on their theory of relevance.