Realism and psychology : collected essays /
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This book is a collection of new, published and revised essays on the place and value of scientific realism in psychology. Through critical analyses of contemporary psychology, essays argue that the realist requirements of a properly scientific psychology are often misunderstood even in the discipline's putatively scientific heart, with profound conceptual and empirical consequences. Against this, and in answer to recent calls to demonstrate the relevance of realism, the essays sketch the elements of a realist program: they discuss the recent history, development and principal features of a distinctive, thoroughgoing, realism for psychology: its theories, concepts, methods and applications. It thus aims to extend realism from philosophy to psychology, articulate a realist metatheory, clarify realism's relevance, and promote its discussion.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004194878 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Natural language and possible minds : how language uncovers the cognitive landscape of nature /
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In Natural Language and Possible Minds: How Language Uncovers the Cognitive Landscape of Nature Prakash Mondal attempts to demonstrate that language can reveal the hidden logical texture of diverse types of mentality in non-humans, contrary to popular belief. The widely held assumption in mainstream cognitive science is that language being humanly unique introduces an anthropomorphic bias in investigations into the nature of other possible minds. This book turns this around by formulating a lattice of mental structures distilled from linguistic structures constituting the cognitive building blocks of an ensemble of biological entities/beings. This turns out to have surprising consequences for machine cognition as well. Challenging mainstream views, this book will appeal to cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, linguists and also cognitive ethologists.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004344204 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Evolution and human culture : texts and contexts /
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Evolution and Human Culture argues that values, beliefs, and practices are expressions of individual and shared moral sentiments. Much of our cultural production stems from what in early hominins was a caring tendency, both the care to share and a self-care to challenge others. Topics cover prehistory, mind, biology, morality, comparative primatology, art, and aesthetics. The book is valuable to students and scholars in the arts, including moral philosophers, who would benefit from reading about scientific developments that impact their fields. For biologists and social scientists the book provides a window into how scientific research contributes to understanding the arts and humanities. The take-home point is that culture does not transcend nature; rather, culture is an evolved moral behavior.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004319486 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The sequential imperative : general cognitive principles and the structure of behaviour /
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In The Sequential Imperative William Edmondson explains how deep study of linguistics - from phonetics to pragmatics - can be the basis for understanding the organization of behaviour in any organism with a brain. The work demonstrates that Cognitive Science needs to be anchored in a linguistic setting. Only then can Cognitive Scientists reach out to reconsider the nature of consciousness and to appreciate the functionality of all brains. The core functionality of the brain - any brain, any species, any time - is delivery and management of the unavoidable bi-directional transformation between brain states and activity - the Sequential Imperative. Making it all work requires some general cognitive principles and close attention to detail. The book sets out the case in broad terms but also incorporates significant detail where necessary.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004342996 :
0929-8436 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Evolution, cognition, and the history of religion : a new synthesis : festschrift in honour of Armin W. Geertz /
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Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis comprises 41 chapters that push for a new way of conducting the study of religion, thereby, transforming the discipline into a genuine science of religion. The recent resurgence of evolutionary approaches on culture and the increasing acknowledgement in the natural and social sciences of culture's and religion's evolutionary importance calls for a novel epistemological and theoretical framework for studying these two areas. The chapters explore how a new scholarly synthesis, founded on the triadic space constituted by evolution, cognition, cultural and ecological environment, may develop. Different perspectives and themes relating to this overarching topic are taken up with a main focus on either evolution, cognition, and/or the history of religion.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004385375 :
2214-3270 ;
Social brain matters : stances on the neurobiology of social cognition /
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This book examines philosophical and scientific implications of Neodarwinism relative to recent empirical data. It develops explanations of social behavior and cognition through analysis of mental capabilities and consideration of ethical issues. It includes debate within cognitive science among explanations of social and moral phenomena from philosophy, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and computer science. The series Cognitive Science provides an original corpus of scholarly work that makes explicit the import of cognitive-science research for philosophical analysis. Topics include the nature, structure, and justification of knowledge, cognitive architectures and development, brain-mind theories, and consciousness.
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1 online resource (xv, 299 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789401204491 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Language, Culture and Cognition from Descartes to Lewes /
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"This volume describes how the significance of language and culture in forming human cognition has been understood from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century"--
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004507241
9789004507234
The search for a theory of cognition : early mechanisms and new ideas /
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The book brings into relief the variety of approaches and disciplines that have informed the quest for a theory of cognition. The center of interest are the historical, geographical, and theoretical peripheries of classic AI's mainstream research program. The twelve chapters bring back into focus the variety of strategies and theoretical questions that researchers explored while working toward a scientific theory of cognition and pre-cognition. The volume is organized in four parts, each one including three essays. The first one deals with cybernetics, the approach that may be considered as the most important periphery of classic AI research. The second part focuses on the geographical periphery of AI research. It examines how the theories and techniques developed on AI's home ground were translated into countries with different cultures and traditions: Italy, France, and the Soviet Union. The third part focuses on AI's periphery understood in the cultural and historical meaning of the term. It contains essays that locate some of the central concepts of AI, like representation and computability, within a broader philosophical (Descartes, Aristotle, Leibniz) and technical background (programming theory and practice). The fourth and final part of the volume is focused directly on the limitation of Turing's classic computability theory and its possible alternatives, some of which were studied in the early years of AI's research (e.g. Ashby's re-entrant information model), while others have been intensely studied in recent times (quantum automata).
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1 online resource (xxvii, 375 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-351) and index. :
9789401207157 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Los verbos reduplicados de doble consonante en la lengua copta. : Un estudio morfológico, dialectal, lexicográfico y etimológico /
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Head of title: Tesis doctoral.
Revised version on the author's doctoral dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2008. :
ii, 516 p. : ill. ; 30 cm. :
Incl. bibliographical references and index.
Metaphor and ideology : liber antiquitatum biblicarum and literary methods through a cognitive lens /
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Contemporary scholars have sharply disagreed over the importance of the loquacious women of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum . Using the methods of contemporary Cognitive Linguistics, Ideology and Metaphor develops a systematic, replicable reading of the text and its characters, showing how Pseudo-Philo uses these women's stories to articulate the text's theology and ideology. The analysis also explores how the author redefines the term «mother» in order to sanction the female authority to interpret and instruct. The conceptual blends that compose the text's distinctive and sometimes dissonant metaphors are analyzed in detail. This monograph also explores how a re-written Bible establishes its authority and awards authority to specific characters and how rhetorical and narrative methodologies fit within cognitive linguistics.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [349]-356) and indexes. :
9789047421863 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.