This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

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This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular ...

Noam Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is a serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction ...

A compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a (...) Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...

This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will.

Thoughts and other mental states are defined by their role in a functional system. Since it is easier to determine when we have knowledge than when reasoning has occurred, Gilbert Harman attempts to answer the latter question by seeing what assumptions about reasoning would best account for when we have knowledge and when not. He describes induction as inference to the best explanation, or more precisely as a modification of beliefs that seeks to minimize change and maximize explanatory coherence. Originally (...) published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this 1958 book, Professor Hanson turns to an equally important but comparatively neglected subject, the philosophical aspects of research and discovery.

The representation of physics problems in relation to the organization of physics knowledge is investigated in experts and novices. Four experiments examine the existence of problem categories as a basis for representation; differences in the categories used by experts and novices; differences in the knowledge associated with the categories; and features in the problems that contribute to problem categorization and representation. Results from sorting tasks and protocols reveal that experts and novices begin their problem representations with specifiably different problem categories, (...) and completion of the representations depends on the knowledge associated with the categories. For, the experts initially abstract physics principles to approach and solve a problem representation, whereas novices base their representation and approaches on the problem's literal features. (shrink)

A theory of analogy must describe how the meaning of an analogy is derived from the meanings of its parts. In the structure‐mapping theory, the interpretation rules are characterized as implicit rules for mapping knowledge about a base domain into a target domain. Two important features of the theory are (a) the rules depend only on syntactic properties of the knowledge representation, and not on the specific content of the domains; and (b) the theoretical framework allows analogies to be distinguished (...) cleanly from literal similarity statements, applications of abstractions, and other kinds of comparisons.Two mapping principles are described: (a) Relations between objects, rather than attributes of objects, are mapped from base to target; and (b) The particular relations mapped are determined by systematicity, as defined by the existence of higher‐order relations. (shrink)

A provisional model is presented in which categorical perception (CP) provides our basic or elementary categories. In acquiring a category we learn to label or identify positive and negative instances from a sample of confusable alternatives. Two kinds of internal representation are built up in this learning by "acquaintance": (1) an iconic representation that subserves our similarity judgments and (2) an analog/digital feature-filter that picks out the invariant information allowing us to categorize the instances correctly. This second, categorical representation is (...) associated with the category name. Category names then serve as the atomic symbols for a third representational system, the (3) symbolic representations that underlie language and that make it possible for us to learn by "description." Connectionism is one possible mechainsm for learning the sensory invariants underlying categorization and naming. Among the implications of the model are (a) the "cognitive identity of (current) indiscriminables": Categories and their representations can only be provisional and approximate, relative to the alternatives encountered to date, rather than "exact." There is also (b) no such thing as an absolute "feature," only those features that are invariant within a particular context of confusable alternatives. Contrary to prevailing "prototype" views, however, (c) such provisionally invariant features must underlie successful categorization, and must be "sufficient" (at least in the "satisficing" sense) to subserve reliable performance with all-or-none, bounded categories, as in CP. Finally, the model brings out some basic limitations of the "symbol-manipulative" approach to modeling cognition, showing how (d) symbol meanings must be functionally grounded in nonsymbolic, "shape-preserving" representations -- iconic and categorical ones. Otherwise, all symbol interpretations are ungrounded and indeterminate. This amounts to a principled call for a psychophysical (rather than a neural) "bottom-up" approach to cognition. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Received by the IRE, October 24, 1960. The author's work summarized here—which was done at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a center for research operated by MIT at Lexington, Mass., with the joint Support of the U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force under Air Force Contract AF 19-5200; and at the Res. Lab. of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., which is supported in part by the U. S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the ONR—is based (...) on earlier work done by the author as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. (shrink)