Meaning and Mental Representations


Book Description

..". an excellent collection... " -- Journal of Language Social Psychology An important collection of original essays by well-known scholars debating the questions of logical versus psychologically-based interpretations of language.




Representation in Mind


Book Description

'Representation in Mind' is the first book in the new series 'Perspectives on Cognitive Science' and includes well known contributors in the areas of philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science.The papers in this volume offer new ideas, fresh approaches and new criticisms of old ideas. The papers deal in new ways with fundamental questions concerning the problem of mental representation that one contributor, Robert Cummins, has described as "THE problem in philosophy of mind for some time now". The editors' introductory overview considers the problem for which mental representation has been seen as an answer, sketching an influential framework, outlining some of the issues addressed and then providing an overview of the papers. Issues include: the relation between mental representation and public, non-mental representation; misrepresentation; the role of mental representations in intelligent action; the relation between representation and consciousness; the relation between folk psychology and explanations invoking mental representations




Representation in Cognitive Science


Book Description

Our thoughts are meaningful. We think about things in the outside world; how can that be so? This is one of the deepest questions in contemporary philosophy. Ever since the 'cognitive revolution', states with meaning-mental representations-have been the key explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences. But there is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. Powerful new methods in cognitive neuroscience can now reveal information processing in the brain in unprecedented detail. They show how the brain performs complex calculations on neural representations. Drawing on this cutting-edge research, Nicholas Shea uses a series of case studies from the cognitive sciences to develop a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation. His approach is distinctive in focusing firmly on the 'subpersonal' representations that pervade so much of cognitive science. The diversity and depth of the case studies, illustrated by numerous figures, make this book unlike any previous treatment. It is important reading for philosophers of psychology and philosophers of mind, and of considerable interest to researchers throughout the cognitive sciences.




The Construction of Mental Representations During Reading


Book Description

This volume presents in-depth investigations of the processes of meaning-making during reading at both local (discourse) and global (general knowledge) levels. It considerably extends our knowledge of how mental representations are constructed and updated during reading. The book also provides insight into the process of representation construction by using online measures and relating this process with final memory representations; provides detailed models of these processes; pays attention to the coordination of multiple representations constructed; focuses on the monitoring and updating of mental representations; and applies all this knowledge to richer and more complicated texts than are often used in laboratories.




Representation and Behavior


Book Description

Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT), the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. Representation is a fundamental concept within cognitive science. Most often, representations are interpreted as mental representations, theoretical entities that are the bearers of meaning and the source of intentionality. This approach views representation as the internal reflection of external circumstances—that is, as the end station of sensory processes that translate the environmental state of affairs into a set of mental representations. Fred Keijzer stresses, however, that representations are also the starting point for a set of processes that lead back to the external environment. They are used as theoretical components within an explanation of a person's outwardly visible behavior. In this book Keijzer investigates the usefulness of representation for behavioral explanation, irrespective of mental issues. Viewing representation solely in terms of its contribution to explaining behavior allows him to build a serious case for a nonrepresentational approach and to evaluate representation's role in cognitive science. Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT). AT is the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. He proposes an alternative to AT called Behavioral Systems Theory (BST), which explains behavior as the result of interactions between an organism and its environment. Keijzer compares BST to related work in the biology of cognition, in the building of animal-like robots, and in dynamical systems theory. Most important, he extends BST to the difficult issue of anticipatory behavior through an analogy between behavior and morphogenesis, the process by which a multicellular body develops.




Mental Representation


Book Description

This volume is a collection of new and previously published essays focusing on one of the most exciting and actively discussed topics in contemporary philosophy: naturalistic theories of mental content. The volume brings together important papers written by some of the most distinguished theorists working in the field today. Authors contributing to the volume include Jerry Fodor, Rugh Millikan, Fred Dretske, Ned Block, Robert Cummins, and Daniel Dennett.




Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences


Book Description

Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences explains how the individual’s conceptualization of reality is dependent on the development of their brain, body structure, and the experiences that are physiologically confronted, acted, or observed via learning and/or simulation, occurring in family or community settings. The book offers support for Jean Knox’s reinterpretation of Jung's archetypal hypothesis, exposing the fundamentality of the body – in its neurophysiological development, bodily-felt sensations, non-verbal interactions, affects, emotions, and actions – in the process of meaning-making. Using information from disciplines such as Affective Neuroscience, Embodied Cognition, Attachment Theory, and Cognitive Linguistics, it clarifies how the most refined experiences of symbolic imagination are rooted in somatopsychic patterns. This book will be of great interest for academics and researchers in the fields of Analytical Psychology, Affective Neuroscience, Linguistics, Anthropology of Consciousness, Art-therapy, and Mystical Experiences, as well as Jungian and post-Jungian scholars, philosophers, and teachers.




Perspectives on Mental Representation


Book Description

Originally published in 1982, the editors felt that their field was clearly in need of explanatory accounts for many different areas. This volume presents statements of the status of research in several areas by scholars at the forefront of the discipline. It tries at the same time to juxtapose theoretical and experimental perspectives in order to display some of the major lines of tension in the field. Divided into 5 parts it covers: Theoretical Perspectives; Experimental Studies in Processing; Neuropsychological Studies in Processing; Studies in Development; followed by Commentary on some specific chapters.




What are Mental Representations?


Book Description

The topic of this book is mental representation, a theoretical concept that lies at the core of cognitive science. Together with the idea that thinking is analogous to computational processing, this concept is responsible for the "cognitive turn" in the sciences of the mind and brain since the 1950s. Conceiving of cognitive processes (such as perception, reasoning, and motor control) as consisting of the manipulation of contentful vehicles that represent the world has led to tremendous empirical advancements in our explanations of behaviour. Perhaps the most famous discovery that explains behavior by appealing to the notion of mental representations was the discovery of 'place' cells that underlie spatial navigation and positioning, which earned researchers John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard I. Moser a joint Nobel Prize in 2014. And yet, despite the empirical importance of the concept, there is no agreed definition or theoretical understanding of mental representation. This book constitutes a state-of-the-art overview on the topic of mental representation, assembling some of the leading experts in the field and allowing them to engage in meaningful exchanges over some of the most contentious questions. The collection gathers both proponents and critics of the notion, making room for debates dealing with the theoretical and ontological status of representations, the possibility of formulating a general account of mental representation which would fit our best explanatory practices, and the possibility of delivering such an account in fully naturalistic terms. Some contributors explore the relation between mutually incompatible notions of mental representation, stemming from the different disciplines composing the cognitive sciences (such as neuroscience, psychology, and computer science). Others question the ontological status and explanatory usefulness of the notion. And finally, some try to sketch a general theory of mental representations that could face the challenges outlined in the more critical chapters of the volume.




On Meaning and Mental Representation


Book Description

This book is about language in STEM research and about how it is thought about: as something that somehow refers to something else not directly accessible, often «meaning», «mental representation», or «conception». Using the analyses of real data and analyses of the way certain concepts are used in the scientifi c literature, such as “meaning,” this book reframes the discussion about «meaning», «mental representation», and «conceptions» consistent with the pragmatic approaches that we have become familiar with through the works of K. Marx, L. S. Vygotsky, M. M. Bakhtin, V. N. Vološinov, L. Wittgenstein, F. Mikhailov, R. Rorty, and J. Derrida, to name but a few. All of these scholars, in one or another way, articulate a critique of a view of language that has been developed in a metaphysical approach from Plato through Kant and modern constructivism; this view of language, which already for Wittgenstein was an outmoded view in the middle of the last century, continuous to be alive today and dominating the way language is thought about and theorized.