
The World in the Head
Robert Cummins(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 25. April 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
340 pages
978-0-19-954804-0 (ISBN)
Description
The World in the Head collects the best of Robert Cummins' papers on mental representation and psychological explanation. Running through these papers are a pair of themes: that explaining the mind requires functional analysis, not subsumption under "psychological laws", and that the propositional attitudes--belief, desire, intention--and their interactions, while real, are not the key to understanding the mind at a fundamental level. Taking these ideas seriously puts considerable strain on standard conceptions of rationality and reasoning, on truth-conditional semantics, and on our interpretation of experimental evidence concerning cognitive development, learning and the evolution of mental traits and processes. The temptation to read the structure of mental states and their interactions off the structure of human language is powerful and seductive, but has created a widening gap between what most philosophers and social scientists take for granted about the mind, and the framework we need to make sense what an accelerating biology and neuroscience are telling us about brains. The challenge for the philosophy of mind is to devise a framework that accommodates these developments. This is the underlying motivation for the papers in this collection.
Reviews / Votes
The papers in this collection constitute an important and stimulating contribution to these debates ... Researchers working on these and related issues will greatly benefit from the lucid and thought-provoking discussions gathered here. * Mind *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
518 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-954804-0 (9780199548040)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Robert Cummins
The World in the Head
Book
01/2010
Oxford University Press
€123.80
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Robert Cummins is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Content
Acknowledgements ; Preface ; 1. What it is like to be a computer ; 2. The LOT of the causal theory of mental content ; 3. Systematicity ; 4. Systematicity and the cognition of the structured domains with Jim Blackmon, David Byrd, Pierre Poirier, Martin Roth, and Georg Schwarz ; 5. Methodological reflections on belief ; 6. Inexplicit information ; 7. Representation and indication with Pierre Poirier ; 8. Representation and unexploited content with Jim Blackmon, David Byrd, Alexa Lee, and Martin Roth ; 9. Haugeland on representation and intentionality ; 10. Truth and meaning ; 11. Meaning and content in cognitive science with Martin Roth ; 12. Representational specialization: the synthetic a priori revisited ; 13. Biological preparedness and evolutionary explanation with Denise Dellarosa Cummins ; 14. Cognitive evolutionary psychology without representational nativism ; 15. Connectionism and the rationale constraint on cognitive explanation ; 16. 'How does it work?' vs. 'What are the laws?': Two conceptions of psychological explanation