Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science.... Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist.

Social theory and organization theory often exist in mutual isolation: social theory analyzes the individual actor and the grand social structure, while organization theory focuses on the dynamics of business enterprises and effective organizational forms. Drawing insights from both perspectives, G[um]oran Ahrne explores agency - individuals' actions - and organization within their social context. From this fruitful approach emerges the outline of an organizational theory of society. Working with a broad definition of organization - not only capitalist enterprises but also (...) nation states, families and voluntary associations - the author investigates the role of organizations in regulating the everyday life of the individual. Equally he relates the organization to its context, the social landscape' made up of social and cultural phenomena as well as other organizations. Both market competition and political action are analyzed as forms of interaction between organizational sectors. Assessing the existing literature on the social theory of bureaucracy and organizations and pointing to new directions in long-running debates on action and structure, this book will command a wide readership among lecturers and students of social and organizational theory. (shrink)

In this article we propose a theoretical framework of distributed representations and a methodology of representational analysis for the study of distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the processing of information distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. The basic principle of distributed representations Is that the representational system of a distributed cognitive task is a set of internal and external representations, which together represent the abstract structure of the task. The basic strategy of representational analysis is to decompose (...) the representation of a hierarchical task into its component levels so that the representational properties at each level can be independently examined. The theoretical framework and the methodology are used to analyze the hierarchical structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Based on this analysis, four experiments are designed to examine the representational properties of the Tower of Hanoi. Finally, the nature of external representations is discussed. (shrink)

Standard models of concept learning generally focus on deriving statistical properties of a category based on data (i.e., category members and the features that describe them) but fail to give appropriate weight to the contact between people's intuitive theories and these data. Two experiments explored the role of people's prior knowledge or intuitive theories on category learning by manipulating the labels associated with the category. Learning differed dramatically when categories of children's drawings were meaningfully labeled (e.g., “done by creative children”) (...) compared to when they were labeled in a neutral manner. When categories are meaningfully labeled, people bring intuitive theories to the learning context. Learning then involves a process in which people search for evidence in the data that supports abstract features or hypotheses that have been activated by the intuitive theories. In contrast, when categories are labeled in a neutral manner, people search for simple features that distinguish one category from another. Importantly, the final study suggests that learning involves an interaction of people's intuitive theories with data, in which theories and data mutually influence each other. The results strongly suggest that straight‐forward, relatively modular ways of incorporating prior knowledge into models of category learning are inadequate. More telling, the results suggest that standard models may have fundamental limitations. We outline a speculative model of learning in which the interaction of theory and data is tightly coupled. The article concludes by comparing the results to recent artificial intelligence systems that use prior knowledge during learning. (shrink)

In this book, Newell makes the case for unified theories by setting forth a candidate.

Four criteria are discussed as important conditions of successful applications in Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW). They are equality, mutual influence, new competence, and double-level language. The criteria originate in the experience of the International Co-operative Movement. They are examined and illustrated withreference to eight contemporary CSCW applications: meeting scheduling and support; bargaining; co-authoring; co-ordination; planning; design support and collaborative design.

This original and illuminating study uses the tools of social psychology and analytic philosophy to examine familiar emotions and behavior patterns and the pressures they exert on personal relationships and social conditions. Topics range from flirtation and gossip to the Holocaust. "Provocative.... Social psychologists would benefit from reading [this] book, not just for its stimulating ideas but also for a method -- that of analytical philosophy -- that is worth appreciating." --Contemporary Psychology.