In this richly detailed analysis, Barbara Von Eckardt lays the foundations for understanding what it means to be a cognitive scientist. She characterizes the basic assumptions that define the cognitive science approach and systematically sorts out a host of recent and the controversies surrounding them. Von Eckardt takes issue with those who argue that there is no agreed-upon research paradigm and agreed-upon set of assumptions or methods in cognitive science, and with those who believe that the field should not be so committed. She argues that there is indeed a framework of shared commitments that includes basic questions guiding research, substantive assumptions constraining how those questions are to be answered, and methodological assumptions about how to find those answers.
Ways of seeing is a book about human vision. It results from the collaboration between a world famous cognitive neuroscientist and an eminent philosopher. In the past forty years, cognitive neuroscience has made many startling discoveries about the human brain, and about the human visual system in particular. This book brings many recent empirical findings, from electrophysiological recordings in animals, the neuropsychological examination of human patients, psychophysics, and developmental cognitive psychology, to bear on questions traditionally addressed by philosophers. What is the meaning of the English verb 'to see'? How does visual perception yield knowledge of the world? How does visual perception relate to thought? What is the role of conscious visual experience in visually guided actions? How does seeing actions relate to seeing objects? In the process the book provides a new assessment of the 'two visual systems' hypothesis, according to which the human visual system comprises two anatomical pathways with separable visual functions. The first truly interdisciplinary book about human vision, it will be of interest to students and researchers in many areas of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.
The Proper Treatment of Events offers a novel approach to the semantics of tense and aspect motivated by cognitive considerations.
offers a new theory of the semantics of tense aspect and nominalizations that combines formal semantics and cognitive approaches written accessibly for students and scholars in theoretical linguists, as well as in philosophy of language, logic, cognitive science, and computer science accompanied by a website at (http://staff.science.uva.nl/~michiell/) that provides slides for instructors and background material for students. It seems fair to say that there is no definite theory of the semantics of tense and aspect yet. In their book "The Proper Treatment of Events", Michiel van Lambalgen, a philosopher and cognitive scientist, and Fritz Hamm, a linguist, propose a new theory that, as far as I can tell, does remarkably well.
The notion `construction' has become indispensable in present-day linguistics and in language studies in general. This volume extends the traditional domain of Construction Grammar (CxG) in several directions, all with a cognitive basis. Addressing a number of issues (such as coercion, discourse patterning, language change), the contributions show how CxG must be part and parcel of cognitively oriented studies of language, including language universals. The volume also gives informative accounts of how the notion `construction' is developed in approaches that are conceptually close to, and relatively compatible with, CxG: Conceptual Semantics, Word Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, Embodied Construction Grammar, and Radical Construction Grammar.
This anthology is based on the assumption that cognitive psychology is at heart empirical philosophy. Many of the core questions about thought, language, perception, memory, and knowledge of other people's minds were for centuries the domain of philosophy. The book begins with the philosophical foundations of inquiry into the nature of mind and thought, in particular the writings of Descartes, and then covers the principal topics of cognitive psychology including memory, attention, and decision making.
