Why do human beings move? In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior. Biological science investigates what makes our bodies move in the way they do. Psychology is interested in why persons -- agents with reasons -- move in the way they do. Dretske attempts to reconcile these different points of view by showing how reasons operate in a world of causes. He reveals in detail how the character of our inner states -- what we believe, desire, and intend -- determines what we do.

Consciousness emerges as the key topic in this second edition of Owen Flanagan's popular introduction to cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology. in a new chapter Flanagan develops a neurophilosophical theory of subjective mental life. He brings recent developments in the theory of neuronal group selection and connectionism to bear on the problems of the evolution of consciousness, qualia, the unique first-personal aspects of consciousness, the causal role of consciousness, and the function and development of the sense of personal identity. He has also substantially revised the...

Stephen Grossberg and his colleagues at Boston University's Center for Adaptive Systems are producing some of the most exciting research in the neural network approach to making computers "think." Packed with real-time computer simulations and rigorous demonstrations of these phenomena, this book includes results on vision, speech, cognitive information processing; adaptive pattern recognition, adaptive robotics, conditioning and attention, cognitive-emotional interactions, and decision making under risk.

Over the past two decades, Ray Jackendoff has persistently tackled difficult issues in the theory of mind and related theories of cognitive processing. Chief among his contributions is a formal theory that elaborates the nature of language and its relationship to a broad set of other domains.

Languages of the Mind provides convenient access to Jackendoff's work over the past five years on the nature of mental representations in a variety of cognitive domains, in the context of a detailed theory of the level of conceptual structure developed in his earlier books Semantics and...

This groundbreaking monograph offers a mechanistic theory of the representation and use of semantic knowledge, integrating the strengths and overcoming many of the weaknesses of hierarchical, categorization-based approaches, similarity-based approaches, and the approach often called "theory theory." Building on earlier models by Geoffrey Hinton in the 1980s and David Rumelhart in the early 1990s, the authors propose that performance in semantic tasks arises through the propagation of graded signals in a system of interconnected processing units. The representations used in performing these...

Neurophysiology has told us a lot about how neurons work; neural network theory is about how neurons work together to process information. In this highly readable book, Manfred Spitzer provides a basic, nonmathematical introduction to neural networks and their clinical applications. Part I explains the fundamental theory of neural networks and how neural network models work. Part II covers the principles of network functioning and how computer simulations of neural networks have profound consequences for our understanding of how the brain works. Part III covers applications of network...

Connectionist approaches, Andy Clark argues, are driving cognitive science toward a radical reconception of its explanatory endeavor. At the heart of this reconception lies a shift toward a new and more deeply developmental vision of the mind -- a vision that has important implications for the philosophical and psychological understanding of the nature of concepts, of mental causation, and of representational change.

Combining philosophical argument, empirical results, and interdisciplinary speculations, Clark charts a fundamental shift from a static, inner-code-oriented conception...

In this provocative book, Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.

Rips argues that certain inference principles are so central to our notion of intelligence and rationality that they deserve serious psychological investigation to determine their role in individuals' beliefs and conjectures. Asserting that cognitive scientists should consider deductive reasoning as a basis for thinking, Rips develops a theory of natural...

Industry veteran Raymond Nickerson provides an extensive introduction to the information technology revolution that is transforming industrial society. He focuses particularly on the study of person-computer interaction, noting how computers are affecting their users and society as a whole, and describes a variety of ways in which information technology is expected to develop in the forseeable future.Nickerson summarizes the development of information technology and discusses many of its applications - in farming, research, education and training, manufacturing, general management,...

Metacognition offers an up-to-date compendium of major scientific issues involved in metacognition. The twelve original contributions provide a concise statement of theoretical and empirical research on self-reflective processes or knowing about what we know.

Self-reflective processes are often thought to be central to what we mean by consciousness and the personal self. Without such processes, one would presumably respond to stimuli in an automatized and environmentally bound manner -- that is, without the characteristic patterns of behavior and introspection that are...