Following John Ross, who first proposed the performative analysis of a sentence (i.e., explicitly identifying the performative formula definining the illocutionary force of a sentence), the abstract-performative theory posits that the highest semantic clause of the semantic representation of a sentence provides: a subject referring to the speaker, an indirect object referring to the addressee and a verb referring to a performative verb. Illocutionary force is then that aspect of a sentence's meaning that corresponds to the highest clause in its semantic representation, i.e. a performative formula.
Sadock distinguishes semantic sense from interpreted sense (meaning from use) on the basis of three groups of formal properties (cooccurrence properties, paraphrase properties, grammatical properties)
Illocutionary force is part of the pragmatic meaning of a sentence. Sadock suggests that illocutionary acts are special cases of perlocutionary acts, because they to have an effect that is posterior to the speech act.
A novel take (from a philosophical perspective) at traditional issues of evolutionary theory. By combining the metaphysics of Justus Buchler and Michael Conrad's "statistical state model" of the evolutionary process, Salthe develops an ontology of the world, a formal theory of hierarchies and a model of the evolution of the world.
The world is viewed as a determinate machine of unlimited complexity. Within complexity discontinuities arise. The basic structure of this world must allow for complexity that is spontaneously stable and that can be broken down in things separated by boundaries. A possible solution is a hierarchical structure, which is also implied by Buchler's principle of ordinality: nature (i.e., our representation of the world) is a hierarchy of entities existing at different levels of organization. Hierarchical structure is a consequence of complexity. Entities are defined by four criteria: boundaries, scale, integration, continuity: an entity has size, is limited by boundaries, and consists of an integrated system which varies continously in time.
Salthe develops a formal theory of hierarchical structures. Entities at different levels interact through mutual constraints, each constraint carrying information for the level it operates upon. A process can be described by a triad of contigous levels: the one it occurs at, its context (Bunge's environment) and its causes (Bunge's structure). In general, a lower level provides initiating conditions for a process and an upper level provides boundary conditions. Representing a dynamical system hierarchically requires a triadic structure.
Aggregation occurs consequent upon differentiation. Differentiation interpolates levels between the original two and the new entities aggregate in such a way that affects the structure of the upper levels: every time a new level emerges, the entire hierarchy must reorganize itself.
Salthe also recalls Pattee's view of complexity as the result of interactions between physical and symbolic systems, where a physical system is dependent on the rates at which processes occur and a symbolic system is not. Symbolic systems frequently serve as constraints within which physical systems operate, and frequently appear as products of the activity of physical systems (e.g., the genome in a cell). A physical system is complex when a part of it functions as a symbolic system (as a representation, and therefore as an observer) for another part of it.
These abstract principles are then applied to organic evolution.
Over time nature generates entities of gradually more limited scope and more precise form and behavior. This process populates the hierarchy of intermediate levels of organization as the hierarchy spontaneously reorganizes itself. This model applies to all open systems, whether organisms or ecosystems or planets.
By applying principles of complex systems to biological and social phenomena, Salthe attempts to reformulate biology on development rather than on evolution. Salthe's postmodernist strategy is to foster the deconstruction of the rationalist tradition in science and show that an alternative exists based on Aristotle's and Hegel's thinking. Salthe makes use of theoretical tools from semiotics and information science.
His approach is non-darwinian to the extent that development, and not evolution, is the fundamental process in self-organization. Evolution is merely the result of a margin of error. His theory rests on a bold fusion of hierarchy theory, information theory and semiotics. Salthe is looking for a grand theory of nature, which turns out to be essentially a theory of change, which turns out to be essentially a theory of emergence.
Savage was a subjectivist, thinking that probability of an event is not merely the frequency with which that event occurs, but a measure of the degree to which someone believes it will happen. Savage devised a set of rational axioms for a person's preferences
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A collection of essays. The editors provide a history of memory theories and survey the contemporary field. They also offer new criteria for defining a memory system and identify five major systems: a procedural system (nondeclarative, implicit), a perceptual system (ditto), a semantic system (declarative, implicit), the episodic system (explicit) and the working memory (also explicit).
Alan Baddeley describes working memory as the interface between memory and cognition.
A few essays deal with the role of the hippocampus.
A comprehensive survey of studies on memory in Psychology.
A number of primitive actions can be used to form all complex actions. Each action entails roles which are common to all languages. Therefore a verb can be represented in terms of more primitive concepts. Schanks' "conceptual dipendency" draws ideas from Fillmore and Katz.
Conceptual dependency parsing reveals things that are not explicit in the surface form of the utterance: additional roles and additional relations. They are filled in throught the system's knowledge of lexical semantics and domain heuristics that help infer what is true in the domain. Any two sentences that share the same meaning will have exactly the same representation in conceptual dependency, regardless of how much is left implicit by each one.
Dynamic memory is a type of memory that can grow of its own, based on experience. A script is a generalization of a class of situations. If a situation falls into the context of a script, then an expectation is created by the script, based on what happened in all previous situations. If the expectation fails to materialize, then a new memory must be created. This memory is structured according to an "explanation" of the failure. Generalizations are created from two identical expectation failures. Memories are driven by expectation failures, by the attempt to explain each failure and learning from that experience. New experiences are stored only if they fail to conform to the expectations. Remembering is closely related to understanding and learning.
A scene is a general description of a setting and a goal in that setting. A script is a particular instantiation of a scene (many scripts can be attached to one scene). A "memory organization packet" is a structure that keeps information about how memories are linked in frequently occuring combinations. A MOP is both a storing structure and a processing structure. A MOP is basically an ordered set of scenes directed towards a goal. A MOP is more general than a script in that it can contain information about many settings (including many scripts). A "thematic organization packet" is an even higher-level structure that stores information independent of any setting.
A script is a social variant of Minsky's frame. A script represents stereotypical knowledge of situations as a sequence of actions and a set of roles. Once the situation is recognized, the script prescribes the actions that are sensible and the roles that are likely to be played. The script helps understand the situation and predicts what will happen. A script performs anticipatory reasoning.
Scripts originate as units in the "event memory". The comprehension of an event contributes to reorganize the abstractions of past events so that their scripts be more and more efficient in recognizing that type of event. This type of gradual learning depends on similarities between events. From the similarities scripts and roles are abstracted.
Memory is syntactic (episodic) and dymanic (adaptive). Memory has the passive function of remembering and the active function of predicting. The comprehension of the world and its categorization proceed together.
Ultimately, knowledge (and intelligence itself) is stories. Cognitive skills emerge from discourse-related functions: conversation is reminding and storytelling is understanding (and in particular generalizing). The stories that are told differ from the stories that are in memory: in the process of being told, a story undergoes changes to reflect the intentions of the speaker. The mechanism is similar to script-driven reasoning: understanding a story entails finding a story in memory that matches the new story and enhancing the old story with details from the new one. Underlying the mechanism is a process of "indexing" based on identifying five factors: theme, goal, plan, result and lesson. Memory actually contains only "gists" of stories, that can be turned into stories by a number of operations (distillation, combination, elaboration, creation, captioning, adaptation). Knowledge is embodied in stories and cognition is carried out in terms of stories that are already known.
An accessible introduction to Schank's theory of natural language understanding, conceptual dependency, scripts, and some of the early programs of his school (MARGIE, SAM, POLITICS, FRUMP, IPP, BORIS, CYRUS).
This is the book that popularized the idea that biological organization is created and maintained at the expense of thermodynamic order, thereby promoting the development of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
Life displays two fundamental process: creating order from order (the progeny has the same order as the parent) and creating order from disorder (as every living system does at every metabolic step). Living systems seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics. In reality they live in a world of energy flux that does not confomr to the closed-world assumptions of thermodynamics. An organism stays alive in its highly organized state by absorbing energy from the environment and processing it to produce a lower entropy state within itself.
By reviewing a wealtch of biological data, Schmalhausen advanced the theory that evolution is a process of hierarchical construction: differentiation yields increasing specialization and diversification of parts, while integration yields the creation of more stable and integrated forms of organization (specifically, the formation of new aggregates in which the structure and fuction of parts are subordinated to and regulated by the structure and function of the whole). For this to happen, genetic variation cannot be completely random but must be regulated by a genetic system of genetic systems (analogous to Waddington's "canalization" process).
The forces of natural selection can be divided into mobile and stabilizing. The former reshapes the individual to continously cope with the environment. The latter preserves the structure and function of organization by producing new forms of ontogenesis which are less vulnerable to the action of the environment. At the beginning, life was at the mercy of accidental environmental changes. Over evolutionary time, organisms became more and more independent of their environment, controlling their own function and structure (emergence of internal regulating mechanisms counteracting the action of the environment). Finally, organisms became able to determine their relationship with the environment. This progression is due to the growing importance of the role of stabilizing selection.
Classical conditioning explained through the mathematical models of neural networks. Experimental data on animal cognition and brain physiology are used to validate the theory.
A collection of papers on the subject.
Scott provides an interdisciplinary overview of consciousness-related topics and advances his own thesis, which is neither materialistic nor dualistic.
Scott recalls that Einstein was unhappy with Quantum Theory and thought of it as incomplete. He also argues that it may be an approximation to a not yet discovered nonlinear theory, which would remove Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (which is implied by the linearity of Schrodinger's equation).
Cells contain a structure called cytoskeleton, which is made of a protein called "tibulin", which forms cylinders called "microtubules".
Scott applies Eigen's model of "hypercycles" to consciousness: consciousness originates from a procedure which is analogous to the one that originates life. Simple cells originate complex cells which originate hypercomplex cells.
Scott examines in detail the neurophysiology of the neuron and concludes that the nerve impulse is an entity of its own, and can be viewed as the "atomic spark of thought". The dynamics of nerve impulse is governed by nonlinear equations.
Under closer scrutiny, it appears that, far from being a simple and neutral unit of transmission, a neuron has a mind of its own.
Scott relies also on the mathematical discipline of neural networks.
Scott reviews the philosophy of William James, George Santayana, behaviorism, Alan Turing, Popper & Eccles, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Erich Harth, Henry Stapp.
A hierarchical view of mental organization (a "stairway" of steps, each one emerging from the previous one) is used to propose a new theory of consciousness. Underlying the account is a fundamental reliance on nonlinear dynamics to explain the nature of biological organisms and the brain. In this model materialism and dualism can coexist.
A theory of the conditions that preside to the genesis of speech acts. Searle classifies such acts in several categories, including "directive acts", "assertive acts", "permissive acts" and "prohibitive acts". Only assertive acts can be treated with classical logic.
Illocutionary acts, acts performed by a speaker when she utters a sentence with certain intentions (e.g., statements, questions, commands, promises), are the minimal units of human communication. An illocutionary act consists of an illocutionary force (e.g., statement, question, command, promise) and a propositional content. There is no major difference between locutionary acts and illocutionary acts.
The meaning of some sentences rests in the set of social conventions (analogous to Grice's conversational maxims) that made the speaker choose those sentences to achieve its goal.
The illocutionary force of sentences is what determines the semantics of language.
Searle attempts to explain intentionality within his theory of speech acts. The causal relationship between a mental state and the world is due to a speech act or a perception. Language does not have true intentionality, it inherits it from the underlying mental states. Intentionality is a biological property.
Searle grounds the notion of meaning of a speech act in a general theory of the mind and action.Intentionality can only be relative to a contextual "network" of other intentional states and to a "backgroud" of preintentional stances. The background is necessary for the network to function. In other words, in order to perform a mental act, one must have a network of mental acts and they must be grounded in the real world. For example, I can "desire to see a film" only if I believe that the film exists and is showing. Thus the "network". And i can go and see the film only if I know how to drive the car and how to find the address. Thus the "background".
Searle is an outspoken critic of the functionalist view of the mind. After the invention of the computer a number of thinkers from various disciplines (Herbert Simon, Alan Newell, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor) have adopted a cognitive model based on the relationship between the hardware and the software of a computer. Thinking is reduced to the execution of an algorithm in the brain.
Searle objects to the "chinese room" thought experiment (originally published in 1980): a conscious person who, without knowing chinese, was told all the rules on how to manipulate chinese characters in order to put together sentences intelligible to chinese-speaking people would yet not "know" chinese, no matter how well that person performed. Programs are syntactical, minds have a semantics, syntax is not the same as semantics.
Searle's Chinese room argument can be summarized as follows: computer programs are syntactical; minds have a semantics; syntax is not by itself sufficient for semantics.
A formal presentation of the logical foundations of speech acts.
Illocutionary logic is the formal theory of illocutionary acts that attempts to formalize the logical properties of illocutionary forces. Illocutionary force is defined by seven properties: illocutionary point (what the point is of performing that type of illocutionary act), degree of strength of the point, mode of achievement (set of conditions under which the point has to be achieved), propositional content conditions, preparatory conditions,, sincerity conditions and degree of strength of sincerity conditions. Two illocutionary forces are identical if they have identical properties.
Notions such as illocutionary commitment (by performing an illocutionary act the speaker commits herself to another illocution) and illocutionary compatibility are introduced.
Five primitive illocutionary forces are recognized (assertive, commissive, directive, declarative, expressive) and a set of operations on the properties of a force are defined to obtain all other illocutionary forces from the primitive ones: adding conditions (whether propositional content, preparatory or sincerity), increasing or decreasing the degrees of strength, restricting the mode of achievement.
An axiomatical propositional illocutionary logic and its general laws (of transitivity, identity, foundation) are defined.
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Basically, Searle discusses how minds create new meaning for objects. First comes collective intentionality: a group of rational agents share beliefs and intentions. Secondly, the agents treat some objects as if they had purposes (printed paper has the purpose of exchanging goods). Finally, constitutive rules create new reality.
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An introduction to Semiotics.
Sebeok views semiotics as a branch of communication theory that studies messages, whether emitted by objects (such as machines) or animals or humans. The first chapters provide a survey of Semiotics, its scope and its history. In agreement with Rene Thom, Sebeok thinks that human sign behavior has nothing special that can distinguish it from animal sign behavior or even from inanimated matter. Sebeok analyzes the relation between the signifier and the signified components of signs and advances a new classification of signs.
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Intentional states are physical states. Physical states have semantic properties, similar to those owned by linguistic terms: an individual thinks P if there is a state in his brain that carries the semantic content P. There is an analogy between the functional roles that the physical states of the brain play in the behavior of the individual and the inferential roles that corresponding linguistic terms play in linguistic inferences. The semantics of intentionality is related to the language's semantics.
Among nature's ultimate constituents must be the senses, which account for the quality of things. Each property of an object must be present in its constituents, and that includes the sensations that the object creates in us.
To solve a problem means to recognize that the situation represented by the problem is described by a schema and fill the gaps in the schema. Given a problem, the cognitive system searches the long-term memory for a schema that can represent it. Given the right schema, information in excess contains the solution.
A schema is a network of concepts that organize past experience. Representation of present experience is a partially complete scheme. By comparing the two representations one can infer something relative to the present situation.
Thanks to the schema's anticipatory nature, to solve a problem is equivalent to comprehend it, and comprehending ultimately means reducing the current situation to a past situation.
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A theory of possibility, as an improvement over probabilities.
This book summarizes Dempster-Shafer's theory of evidence that refines Bayes' theory of probabilities. The theory of belief functions relies on two principles: the principle of inferring degrees of belief for one question from subjective probabilities for a related question; and Dempster's rule on how to combine degrees of belief which are based on independent evidence.
In 1968 Arthur Dempster and Glenn Shafer ("A generalization of Bayesian inference") extended Bayes' theory of probabilities by introducing a "belief function" which operates on all subsets of events (not just the single events). In the throwing of a dice, the possible events are only six, but the number of all subsets is 64 (all the combination of two sides, three sides, four sides and five sides). The sum of the probabilities of all subsets is one, but the sum of the probabilities of all the single events is generally less than one.
Therefore, Dempster-Shafer's theory allows one to assign a probability to a group of events, even if the probability of each single event is not known. Indirectly, Dempster-Shafer's theory also allows one to represent "ignorance", as the state in which the belief of an event is not known (while the belief of a set it belongs to is known). Dempster-Shafer's theory does not require a complete probabilistic model of the domain.
An advantage of evidence over probabilities if that its ability to narrow the hypothesis set with the accumulation of evidence.
Shafer, in accordance with Tversky's experiments, thinks that the way we assign probabilities to an event is a mental experiment to build an imaginary situation and the result we obtain depends on the process of construction. People do not have preferences, people build them.
Collects seminal papers by Shafer, Pearl, Leonard Savage, Amos Tversky, Richard Cox, David Touretzky, Amos Tversky probabilities are degrees of belief
A section is devoted to Decision Analysis: a historical overview by Shafer, an introduction by Warner North, an article on influence diagrams by Ross Shachter.
A section is devoted to Artificial Intelligence techniques for reasoning under uncertainty, with articles by Paul Cohen and Rodney Brooks, and, fo course, articles on MYCIN.
A section deals with belief functions (Dempster-Shafer's theory). Only one article touches on fuzzy logic.
Shannon freed Boltzmann's definition of entropy from its thermodynamic context and applied it to information theory.
The quality of a message as it is transformed from the source to the destination is a function of channel capacity and noise. Noise is a random process that can be described in terms of statistical probabilities.
Entropy is the statistical state of knowledge about a question: the entropy of a question is related to the probability assigned to all the possible answers to that question. Information is the difference between two entropies.
The new edition of the most comprehensive book on the subject. Each section provides comprehensive, detailed information on an artificial intelligence topic.
Shastri's connectionist semantic memory relates concepts of a semantic network to neurons of a neural network.
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A collection of articles on cognitive models of vision.
Shepard thinks that species survived natural selection by developing innate structures to operate in their environment.
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Mainly a textbook on temporal logics.
Shoham's preference logic, based on conditional logic, prescribes how to select the best interpretation from a partially ordered set of interpretations according to a criterion of minimality (minimize changes that may occur). Preference logic's expressive power is higher than any other non-monotonic logic.
Articles from the beginning of artificial intelligence, including Edward Feigenbaum's Sixties work.
Both the computer and the mind belong to the category of physical symbol systems. These systems process symbols to achieve a goal. Simon states the principle that a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent behavior. A physical symbol system is quite simple: the complexity of its behavior is due to the complexity of the environment it has to cope with. Adaptation to the environment is the very reason and purpose of their existence.
No complex system can survive unless it is organized as a hierarchy of subsystems. The entire universe must be hierarchical, otherwise it would not exist.
A short, but nonetheless very technical, introduction to neural networks that covers all the main learning algorithms.
Each agent which is limited and intelligent and must act in a complex environment, in which an infinite number of resources should be needed to take decisions, must be endowed with mechanisms that cause emotions. Emotions are therefore the result of constraints by the environment on the action of the intelligent being.
Sloman explores the relation between emotional states and cognitive states.
In Medin Douglas' "A two-stage model of category construction" the mind builds categories based on a primary feature, from a simple and efficient criterion to divide the universe in objects that satisfy and objects that do not satisfy.
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The British biologist provides an accessible introduction to modern biology, explaining the principles of Darwinism and genetics. Smith shows that the concept of "species" is rapidly becoming obsolete, as it is not clear what is a species, since no two individuals of the same species are exactly alike, and species change over time. Discusses how species are born, from geographic isolation and then what mechanisms (the origins of hybrid infertility and the origins of fertile diploids) can account for the birth of a new species. Altruism, social behavior, sexual behavior.
A textbook on the mechanisms of evolution. Mathematical models of population growth, genetic drift, mutation, etc. Quantitative genetics. Shows how sex accelerates evolution.
A collection of articles (mainly reviews of books) on several subjects.
An agile tutorial on theory of games for use by biologists in modelling evolution. built around the concept of Maynard Smith defines "evolutionary stable strategy" as a behavior by a given phenotype that, if adopted by all invidividuals of the populations, would avoid any mutant strategy.
Snyder was the first one (in the 1960s) to advance the notion that, from an evolutionary perspective, REM sleep came first and dreams came later. First bodies developed the brain state of REM sleep, which was retained because it had a useful function for survival (for example, because it kept the brain alert and ready to react to emergencies even during sleep), and then dreams were engrafted upon REM sleep. REM sleep was available and was used to host dreams. Dreaming evolved after a physical feature made them possible, just like language evolved after an anatomical apparatus that was born for whatever other reason. Dreaming, just like language, is an "epiphenomenon".
This collection of essays on emotions by contemporary Anglo-saxon philosophers is truly embarrassing. It shows how little familiar these philosophers are with the science of their time.
A collection of essays from leading psychologists, including Lakoff, Sternberg, Sperry, Kosslyn.
A number of different logics for common sense reasoning are surveyed: nonmonotonic logics, probabilistic logic, fuzzy logic, analogical reasoning, revision theory.
Sowa surveys a number of philosophical and psychological theories (in particular, Selz's schemata) to justify his idea that the process of perception generates a structure called a "conceptual graph", describing the way percepts are assembled together. Conceptual relations describe the role that each percept plays.
Conceptual graphs, based on Peirce's existential graphs (a graph notation for logic), are a system of logic for representing natural language semantics.
Conceptual graphs are finite, connected, bipartite graphs (bipartite because they contain both concepts and conceptual relations, boxes and circles). Some concepts (concrete concepts) are associated with percepts for experiencing the world and with motor mechanisms for acting upon it. Some concepts are associated with the items of language. A concept has both a type and a referent.
A hierarchy of concept types defines the relationships between concepts at different levels of generality. The type hierarchy includes both natural types (e.g., "gold") and role types (e.g., "precious stone"), forms a lattice and represents intensions (senses).
Formation rules ("copy", "restrict", "join" and "simplify") constitute a generative grammar for conceptual structures just like production rules constitute a generative grammar for syntactic structures. All deductions on conceptual graphs involve a combination of them.
Sowa defines generalization and specialization, abstraction and definition (through lambda abstraction), aggregation (for plurals) and individuation.
Conceptual graphs can be translated to predicate calculus formulas, except those that have context-dependent features.
Schemata incorporate domain-specific knowledge. A concept type may be linked to any number of schemata, each schema representing a perspective on one way its concept type may be used. A concept type may also be linked to a prototype.
A discourse context is represented by a concept with one or more conceptual graphs nested inside the referent field. There is an isomorphism between Peirce's contexts, Kamp's contexts and Sowa's contexts, Kamp's rules for resolving discourse referents can be used in conceptual graphs as well.
Conceptual graphs can distinguish extensional models of the world from intensional propositions on the world. The interpretation function relates the graphs of the formulas to the graphs of the models.
Tarski's model theory can be adapted to graphical representations by seeing each node as an object and each arc as a relation.
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A collection of six articles on semantic networks. William Woods discusses subsumption and taxonomy. Lenhart Schubert sees semantic networks as a notational variant of logic. Stuart Shapiro believes that semantic networks go beyond logic in that they can also deal with "subconscious" reasoning through the implicit links between nodes. Brachman presents a successor to the KL-ONE language
The second edition of the classic 1986 text.
Relevance constraints discourse's coherence and enables its understanding.
Relevance is a relation between a proposition and a set of contextual assumptions: a proposition is relevant in a context if and only if it has at least one contextual implication in that context. The contextual implications of a proposition in a context are all the propositions that can be deduced from the union of the proposition with the context.
Relevance is achieved when the addition of a sentence to a discourse modifies the context in a manner which is not trivial, i.e. which is not only the sum of the context plus the new sentence plus all its implications. A universal goal in communication is that the hearer is out to acquire relevant information. Another universal goal is that the speaker tries to make his utterance as relevant as possible. Understanding an utterance consists then in finding an interpretation which is consistent with the principle of relevance. The principle of relevance holds that any act of ostensive communication also includes a guarantee of its own optimal relevance. This principle is proven to subsume Grice's maxims.
Relevance can arise in three ways: interaction with assumptions which yields new assumptions, contradiction of an assumption which removes it, additional evidence for an assumption which strengthens the confidence in it.
Implicatures are either contextual assumptions or contextual implications that the hearer must grasp to recognize the speaker as observing the principle of relevance. Utterance comprehension is reduced to a process of hypothesis formation and confirmation: the best hypothesis about the speaker's intentions and expectations is the one that best satisfies the principle of relevance.
The nondemonstrative inference processes involved in the derivation of implicatures consist in 1. detecting the implicated premises (through a nondeductive process of hypothesis formation and confirmation), and 2. in deducting the implicated conclusions from the implicated premises and the proposition expressed by the utterance.
A study on the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world.
Stalnaker believes that possible worlds are not concrete worlds, but simply ways the world might be. A proposition is a function from possible worlds to truth-values. Each world provides a truth value for a proposition.
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Monumental, but not particularly innovative.
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The book defends the functionalist theory of the mind, and specifically the Fodor's "language of thought" hypothesis. Marr's theory of vision and Fodor's modular model of the mind are explained. Eliminativism and connectionism are also examined.
A colossal reference book compiled by experts in various psychological and biological fields. Hundreds of cognitive models, experiments and studies are surveyed.
A collection of psychological essays on the subject of wisdom.
A survey of psychological theories of intelligence, from Galton and Binet to Spearman and Thorndike. Cognitive science is briefly mentioned, as well as the biological perspective (Luria, Sperry, Gazzaniga). A chapter is devoted to Piaget's genetic epistemology and its successors.
Stevens tries to reconcile Jung's theory of innate archetypes (that some archetypes are universal and genetic) with John Bowlby's theory of attachment (that archetypes are imprinted in the early stages of development): archetypes are transmitted from generation to generation and they reveal themselves when a releasing mechanism occurs. For example, the archetype of the mother is innate, but it takes exposure to an individual behaving like a mother to release the behavior of a mother's child.
First, Stevens tries to reconcile Jung's theory of archetypes and Gerald Edelman's neural darwinism. Then Stevens tries to reconcile Jung's division of the mind into a conscious, un unconscious and a collective unconscious with Paul MacLean's findings that the brain contains three brains: a neomammalian brain located in the cortex, a paleomammalian brain located in the midbrain and a reptilian brain located in the cortex. Innate archetypes evolved into myths to encode instructions for individual behavior. The collective unconscious expressed itself through myhts. Dreams and myths are similar in structure and origin: dreams are private myths, and they affect behavior just like myths do.
Stich's theory of commonsense reasoning is based on a purely syntactic approach. But, unlike Fodor, Stich does not require the objects upon which these syntactic operations are performed to be representations (endowed with content).
Stich assumes that cognitive states correspond to syntactic states in such a way that causal relationships between syntactic states (or between syntactic states and stimuli and actions) correspond to syntactic relationships of corresponding syntactic objects. Stich's "autonomy principle" states that differences between organisms that cannot be reduced to differences in their internal states are not relevant for a psychological theory. The only environmental factors that should be taken into account are those that cause differences in the internal states.
Further thoughts on Stich's theory of commonsense reasoning.
A collection of technical essays (Fodor, Black, Millikan) supporting the view expounded in the eponymous one: folk psychology may be wrong, but that does not imply that mental states should be abandoned by science.
These are essays against eliminativism, the idea that there is a folk psychology (a theory of mind implied in our ordinary language) and that such folk psycholody is plain wrong and that it is wrong in assuming the existence of such things as beliefs and desires and other intentional states. Stich object to each of the three parts of eliminativism.
Stich points out that naive physics and many other commonsense theories work perfectly well to account for the world. Folk psychology provides a similar frame of reference, based on causal-historical chains. It is useful as description, explanation and prediction of people's behavior, as "mental simulation".
The second edition of the comprehensive textbook on cognitive theories of the mind adds new sections on connectionist models.
The British philosopher Strawson is a monist and materialist of sorts. This is a book on the method that philosophers of the mind should follow in studying the mind. Strawson rejects "neobehaviorism", the view that mental life is linked to behavior in such a way that behavior is essential to the explanation of mental life. Strawson argues that philosophy of mind has no need for non-mental, publicly observed and/or behavioral phenomena. He contrasts neo-behaviorism with his own "naturalized Cartesianism", which rests on two assumptions: the mind is physical; the only mental phenomena are the ones that make up our conscious experience (the experiential phenomena). Therefore, representations and intentionality are downgraded to side effects.
Since the current notions of the physical and the mental are incompatible, one set ought to be changed. Eliminativists believe that the terminology of the mental is wrong and should be abandoned, but he thinks that it's the terminology of the physical which is inadequate and outdated.
Sweetser argues that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is refuted by studies on color perception. The directionality of metaphor is largely from the physical to the mental.