One of the most important and influential philosophers of the last 30 years, John Searle has been concerned throughout his career with a single overarching question: how can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world? In other words, how can we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, mindful, rational agents in a world that we believe includes brute, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force?
From the author of the bestselling Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, comes a breakthrough book on the future of learning. The new sciences of brain and mind are revealing that everyone has the capacity to become a powerful, lifelong learner. We can all learn how to learn; it has little to do with conventional intelligenec or educational success. Guy Claxton teaches us how to raise children who are curious and confident explorers, and how we ourselves can learn to pair problem-solving with creativity. Wis Up is essential and compelling reading for parents, educators and managers alike.
The words people use in their daily lives can reveal important aspects of their social and psychological worlds. With advances in computer technology, text analysis allows researchers to reliably and quickly assess features of what people say as well as subtleties in their linguistic styles. Following a brief review of several text analysis programs, we summarize some of the evidence that links natural word use to personality, social and situational fluctuations, and psychological interventions.
Scientific American Mind - Memory upgrade (№4/2005)
Added by: Kyla | Karma: 209.07 | Periodicals | 29 January 2009
23
Get the Picture You and I haven’t met, but I feel as if I already know you. You’re pretty smart.
Above average, in fact. And when you have a goal in front of you—whether it’s completing a work project by the deadline, writing that term paper or getting all the dinner-party details just right—you’re sure you’ll rise to the occasion. Me, too. Trouble is, we’re often so very wrong about our overconfi dent selfassessments—and we are blind to that ignorance because we can’t get a complete view of ourselves, as psychologists David Dunning, Chip Heath and Jerry M. Suls explain in their article “Picture Imperfect.” ...
We are inescapably confronted by ‘consumer society’ and ‘consumer culture’: the inexhaustible world of goods and the declarations that we are born to consume and are defined by our consumption. But do we know what this really means – and is it so simple? Showing the cultural and institutional processes that have brought the notion of the ‘consumer’ to life, this book guides the reader on a comprehensive journey through the history of how we have come to understand ourselves as consumers in a consumer society and reveals the profound ambiguities and ambivalences inherent within.
