The story is told of a physicist who is invited by a dairy farmers’ association to tell them how to get more milk from cows. The physicist begins: ‘First we start with a spherical cow.’ That is told as a joke! Yet far more strange is what cognitivism has done to what is supposed to be the study of human thought and human life. This chapter is about concepts, the central building blocks of cognitivist theory. I will first show how (...) cognitivism necessarily cannot give an adequate treatment of concepts and will then, more importantly , outline the foundations for a new nonrepresentational view of concepts which should place the study of concepts on a real basis. (shrink)

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. -/- Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within (...) it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the "ratchet effect" of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. -/- Lucid, erudite, and passionate, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology. (from the HUP website). (shrink)

Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including an (...) essay on the philosophy of logic first published in 1971. (shrink)

How do we come to give names to things? Why do some things have names while others do not? What is the nature of the relationship between the reality we perceive and the language we use? How do we establish the meaning of words, and how can we be sure that we are sharing the same meanings with others? These and other related problems have been discussed in linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, and psychology for a long time. In (...) Meaning and Experience, Patrizia Violi reviews the most salient issues and themes in this complex debate, taking an interdisciplinary approach. In addition to citing empirical data from research in linguistics and the philosophy of language, she considers the most recent studies in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, especially in relation to the problem of categorization and its relevance for the construal of linguistic meaning. Moving from the analysis of lexical meaning, Violi addresses some general issues in semantics, including the role of perception in the structuring of language, text comprehension, and text interpretation. She suggests an original model of analysis based on an experiential and phenomenological approach. This model leads to a blending of lexical analysis with that of textual interpretation. All the theoretical discussions and models presented are richly illustrated with concrete examples. (shrink)