Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

For the uninitiated, there are two major tendencies in the modeling of human cognition. The older, tradtional school believes, in essence, that full human cognition can be modeled by dividing the world up into distinct entities -- called __symbol s__-- such as “dog”, “cat”, “run”, “bite”, “happy”, “tumbleweed”, and so on, and then manipulating this vast set of symbols by a very complex and very subtle set of rules. The opposing school claims that this system, while it might be good (...) at concluding that Paris is the capital of France or that there must be blood flowing in the left-rear leg of a cow, can never capture the full measure -- indeed, the essence -- of human cognition. For them, the essential features of cognition emerge from the combined effects of myriad, tiny actions far below the surface of consciousness. This is the camp to which Paul Churchland belongs. (shrink)

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

The author demonstrates that certain forms of irrationality - incontinent action and self-deception - which many philosophers have rejected as being logically or psychologically impossible, are indeed possible.

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

For Wittgenstein, as Cora Diamond interprets him in the essays collected in her recent The Realistic Spirit , there are no logical truths, and a host of other linguistic constructions, such as ‘A is an object’ are, contrary to appearances, nonsensical. In what follows, after outlining Diamond's account I argue that the position she ascribes to Wittgenstein is incoherent. I also reject some possible responses to this charge, among them an appeal to the distinction between what can be said and (...) what can only be shown. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and (...) connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization plays an (...) important role in the emergence of life itself and may play as fundamental a role in shaping life's subsequent evolution as does the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt remain poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biologicalscience itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences. (shrink)

This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not (...) only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1996. In hundreds of articles by experts from around the world, and in overviews and "road maps" prepared by the editor, The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networkscharts the immense progress made in recent years in many specific areas related to two great questions: How does the brain work? and How can we build intelligent machines? While many books have appeared on limited aspects of one subfield or another of brain theory and neural networks, the (...) Handbookcovers the entire sweep of topics—from detailed models of single neurons, analyses of a wide variety of biological neural networks, and connectionist studies of psychology and language, to mathematical analyses of a variety of abstract neural networks, and technological applications of adaptive, artificial neural networks. The excitement, and the frustration, of these topics is that they span such a broad range of disciplines including mathematics, statistical physics and chemistry, neurology and neurobiology, and computer science and electrical engineering as well as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy. Thus, much effort has gone into making the Handbookaccessible to readers with varied backgrounds while still providing a clear view of much of the recent, specialized research in specific topics. The heart of the book, part III, comprises of 267 original articles by leaders in the various fields, arranged alphabetically by title. Parts I and II, written by the editor, are designed to help readers orient themselves to this vast range of material. Part I, Background, introduces several basic neural models, explains how the present study of brain theory and neural networks integrates brain theory, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology, and provides a tutorial on the concepts essential for understanding neural networks as dynamic, adaptive systems. Part II, Road Maps, provides entry into the many articles of part III through an introductory "Meta-Map" and twenty-three road maps, each of which tours all the Part III articles on the chosen theme. (shrink)

1. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? One of the fascinating aspects of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is that the precise nature of its subject ..

This collection of 24 readings is the first comprehensive treatment of important topics by leading figures in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of...

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We are building an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think" by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to (...) fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience. (shrink)