Authors: David Johnson (Editor), Christina Erneling
ISBN-13: 9780195103342, ISBN-10: 0195103343
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: April 1997
Edition: 1st Edition
York University
Umea University
The basic idea of the particular way of understanding mental phenomena that has inspired the "cognitive revolution" is that, as a result of certain relatively recent intellectual and technological innovations, informed theorists now possess a more powerfully insightful comparison or model for mind than was available to any thinkers in the past. The model in question is that of software, or the list of rules for input, output, and internal transformations by which we determine and control the workings of a computing machine's hardware. Although this comparison and its many implications have dominated work in the philosophy, psychology, and neurobiology of mind since the end of the Second World War, it now shows increasing signs of losing its once virtually unquestioned preeminence. Thus we now face the question of whether it is possible to repair and save this model by means of relatively inessential "tinkering", or whether we must reconceive it fundamentally and replace it with something different. In this book, twenty-eight leading scholars from diverse fields of "cognitive science"-linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, and philosophy- present their latest, carefully considered judgements about what they think will be the future course of this intellectual movement, that in many respects has been a watershed in our contemporary struggles to comprehend that which is crucially significant about human beings. Jerome Bruner, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Boden, Ulric Neisser, Rom Harre, Merlin Donald, among others, have all written chapters in a non-technical style that can be enjoyed and understood by an inter-disciplinary audience of psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists alike.
Introduction: What Is the Purpoted Discipline of Cognitive Science and Why Does It Need to Be Reassessed at the Present Moment? The Search for "Cognitive Glue" | 3 | |
Pt. 1 | Good Old-Fashioned Cognitive Science: Does It Have a Future? | 13 |
1 | Language and Cognition | 15 |
2 | Functionalism: Cognitive Science or Science Fiction? | 32 |
3 | Reassessing the Cognitive Revolution | 45 |
4 | Promise and Achievement in Cognitive Science | 55 |
5 | Boden's Middle Way: Viable or Not? | 68 |
6 | Metasubjective Processes: The Missing Lingua Franca of Cognitive Science | 75 |
7 | Is Cognitive Science a Discipline? | 102 |
8 | Anatomy of a Revolution | 109 |
Pt. 2 | Cognitive Science and the Study of Language | 115 |
9 | Language from an Internalist Perspective | 118 |
10 | The Novelty of Chomsky's Theories | 136 |
11 | But What Have You Done for Us Lately? Some Recent Perspectives on Linguistic Nativism | 149 |
Pt. 3 | Connectionism: A Non-Rule-Following Rival, or Supplement to the Traditional Approach? | 165 |
12 | From Text to Process: Connectionism's Contribution to the Future of Cognitive Science | 169 |
13 | Embodied Connectionism | 187 |
14 | Neural Networks and Neuroscience: What Are Connectionist Simulations Good for? | 209 |
15 | Can Wittgenstein Help Free the Mind from Rules? The Philosophical Foundations of Connectionism | 217 |
16 | The Dynamical Alternative | 227 |
Pt. 4 | The Ecological Alternative: Knowledge as Sensitivity to Objectively Existing Facts | 245 |
17 | The Future of Cognitive Science: An Ecological Analysis | 247 |
18 | The Cognitive Revolution from an Ecological Point of View | 261 |
Pt. 5 | Challenges to Cognitive Science: The Cultural Approach | 275 |
19 | Will Cognitive Revolutions Ever Stop? | 279 |
20 | Neural Cartesianism: Comments on the Epistemology of the Cognitive Sciences | 293 |
21 | Language, Action, and Mind | 302 |
22 | Cognition as a Social Practice: From Computer Power to Word Power | 317 |
23 | "Berkeleyan" Arguments and the Ontology of Cognitive Science | 335 |
Pt. 6 | Historical Approaches | 353 |
24 | The Mind Considered from a Historical Perspective: Human Cognitive Phylogenesis and the Possibility of Continuing Cognitive Evolution | 355 |
25 | Taking the Past Seriously: How History Shows That Eliminativists' Account of Folk Psychology Is Partly Right and Partly Wrong | 366 |
Afterword: Cognitive Science and the Future of Psychology - Challenges and Opportunities | 376 | |
Citation Index | 383 | |
Subject Index | 391 |