This book treats memory and understanding on two levels, on the phenomenological level of experience, on which a theory of dynamic conceptual semantics is built, and on the neuro-connectionist level, which supports the capacities of concept formation, remembering, and understanding. A neuro-connectionist circuit architecture of a constructive memory is developed in which understanding and remembering are modelled in accordance with the constituent structures of a dynamic conceptual semantics. Consciousness emerges by circuit activation between conceptual indicators and episodic indices with the sensory-motor, emotional, and proprioceptual areas.
The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way. The papers in Part I of this volume deal with aspects of motivation, the ways in which the linguistic form is a diagram of conceptual structure, and homologous with it in interesting ways.
Investigating Astronomy. A Conceptual View of the Universe
Tim Slater and Roger Freedman have worked to improve astronomy and overall science education for many years. Now, they've partnered to create a new textbook, a re-envisioning of the course, focused on conceptual understanding and inquiry-based learning. Investigating Astronomy: A Conceptual Approach to the Universe is a brief, 15-chapter text that employs a variety of activities and experiences to encourage students to think like a scientist. The authors engaged the help of hundreds of instructors to determine not only which concepts should be taught but how much depth in which to explain them.
Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy's turn away from metaphysics and what Churchland calls the "phony precision" of conceptual analysis.
[This] is a compelling study of the intimate, complex, and often unexpected aspects of the relationship between philosophy and myth ... This is an eloquent, forceful, and altogether timely contribution in a world in which new myths purport to be unquestionable, while philosophy bides its time in self-absorbed conceptual retreat. Its publication marks a new step in deconstructive thinking, after which deconstruction will never again be the same.'
