Product Description: Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy of mind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, attempts to explain consciousness in neurophysiological, or even cognitive, terms are often met with great resistance...read more

Product Description: The classical view of concepts in psychology was challenged in the 1970s when experimental evidence showed that concept categories are graded and thus cannot be represented adequately by classical sets...read more

Product Description: First published in 1983, this book examines the problems of concept formation in the social sciences, and in particular sociology, from the standpoint of a realistic philsophy of science. Beginning with a discussion of positivistic, hermeneutic, rationalist and realistic philsophies of science, Dr Outhwaite argues that realism is best able to furnish rational criteria for the choice and specification of social scientific concepts...read more

Product Description: Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts...read more

Product Description: Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially...read more

Product Description: The fourteenth-century thinker Thomas Bradwardine is well known in both the history of science and the history of theology. The first of the Merton Calculators (mathematical physicists) and passionate defender of the Augustinian doctrine of salvation through grace alone, he was briefly archbishop of Canterbury before succumbing to the Black Death in 1349...read more

Product Description: Human adults appear different from other animals in their ability to form abstract mental representations that go beyond perceptual similarity. In short, they can conceptualize the world. This apparent uniqueness leads to an immediate puzzle: WHEN and HOW does this abstract system come into being? To answer this question we need to explore the origins of adult concepts, both developmentally and phylogenetically; When does the developing child acquire the ability to use abstract concepts?; does the transition occur around 2 years, with the onset of symbolic representation and language? Or, is it independent of the emergence of language?; when in evolutionary history did an abstract representational system emerge?; is there something unique about the human brain? How would a computational system operating on the basis of perceptual associations develop into a system operating on the basis of abstract relations?; is this ability present in other species, but masked by their inability to verbalise abstractions? Perhaps the very notion of concepts is empty and should be done away with altogether...read more

Product Description: This book studies the important issue of the possibility of conceptual change--a possibility traditionally denied by logicians--from the perspective of philosophy of mathematics. The author also looks at aspects of language, and his conclusions have implications for a theory of concepts, truth and thought...read more

Product Description: Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought, and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor, a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques...read more

Product Description: In Contemporary Metaphor Theory (CMT), research has predominantly focused on the English language with few studies of others and even less systematic comparative work. This volume focuses on the discourse domain of learning (formal, technical and informal aspects) and brings together a variety of language perspectives, some specifically comparative, on aspects of learning from historical transformations in metaphoric language use through contemporary social values and classroom discourse to planning for the future in educational policy to see how conceptual metaphoric patterns and conventional metaphors with related figurative language impact on social values and culturally conditioned perspectives in learning...read more

Product Description: Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. He combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from a large variety of fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics...read more

Product Description: Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. Words such as color, shape, solidity exemplify the commonplace conceptual tools we employ to describe and order the world around us...read more

Product Description: Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals...read more

Product Description: Current progress in linguistic theorizing is more and more informed by cross-linguistic (including cross-modal) investigation. Comparison of languages relies crucially on the concepts that can be coded with similar effort in all languages...read more

Product Description: Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending...read more

Focussing on both theoretical and descriptive, this book contains a reference to the semantics of Chinese. It aims at how human beings construe their experience of the world. It offers an interpretation that is complementary to this, treating experience not as knowing but as meaning; and hence as something that is construed in language.

Product Description: Have you ever wondered why students too often have only a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, why even rich and exciting hands-on learning does not always result in "real" learning of new concepts? The answer lies in whether students have actually learned mathematical concepts, rather than merely memorizing facts and formulas...read more

Product Description: John McDowell's "Mind and World" has, since its publication in 1994, become a seminal text, putting forward many new ideas on the manner in which concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world. Yet McDowell's ideas are not easy to comprehend...read more

Product Description: One of the central issues, or indeed the central issue in Plato's philosophy is the question of how to account for the stability and unity of the seemingly unstable and ever changing world. How could we attain knowledge if there were no stable object? And how could the world be what it is, if it were not grounded on stable principles? It is common knowledge that Plato answers both these questions, an epistemological and an ontological one, by his theory of the Forms...read more

Product Description: William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) is known to be one of the major figures of the late Middle Ages. The scope and significance of his doctrine of human thought, however, has been a controversial issue among scholars in the last decade, and this book presents a full discussion of recent developments...read more

Product Description: Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A central issue in the debate is the nature of concepts, the internal representations we use to think about the world...read more

Product Description: Concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world. Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to recognize and understand new objects and events...read more

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Product Description: In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition --the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind...read more