Minds, Brains, and Computers An Historical Introduction to the Foundations of Cognitive Science

by Cummins, Robert; Cummins, Denise D.

• ISBN13: 9781557868770
• ISBN10: 1557868778
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-02-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• More Book Details
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Summary

This book presents a vital resource -- a comprehensive interdisciplinary selection of seminal papers in the foundations of cognitive science, from leading figures in artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. The collection is organized around three broad conceptions of the mind: the mind as computer program, the mind as a neural network, and the mind as brain. Each category includes papers that articulate the conception in question, papers that illustrate it, papers that interpret or criticize it, and papers that provide necessary technical background. Finally, there is a section of classic papers on four broad questions which have shaped contemporary thinking in cognitive science: What is innate in the mind? Is the mind a seamless whole, or is it made up of independent modules that differ significantly from each other? Are our ordinary mental concepts, such as belief, desire, and intention, a good starting place for a scientific understanding of the mind, or are they artifacts of a pre-scientific conception that should be discarded? How should biology generally, and the evolution of animals in particular, constrain our theories about mental phenomena? Taken together, these papers give a sense of the history of the field as well as its contents by presenting the argumnets, models, data, and experiments that most crucially influence theory and practice in cognitive science.

Author Biography

Robert Cummins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Nature of Psychological Explanation (1983), Meaning and Mental Representation (1987), and Representations, Targets and Attitudes (1996), as well as many articles and several edited volumes. He specializes in the foundations of cognitive science and the nature of mental representation.

Denise D. Cummins is Associate Research Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Other Side of Psychology (1995), The Evolution of Mind (ed. with Colin Allen), and Human Reasoning: an Evolutionary Perspective as well as numerous articles and reviews. She specializes in higher cognition from an evolutionary perspective.

Table of Contents

Preface	viii
Part I The Mind as Computer	1	(168)
Introduction	3	(5)
A History of Thinking	8	(12)
D. Dellarosa Cummins
Minds and Machines	20	(14)
H. Putnam
Semantic Engines: An Introduction to Mind Design	34	(17)
J. Haugeland
The Language of Thought: First Approximations	51	(18)
J. A. Fodor
Vision	69	(15)
D. Marr
GPS, a Program that Simulates Human Thought	84	(11)
A. Newell
H. A. Simon
A Procedural Model of Language Understanding	95	(19)
T. Winograd
A General Learning Theory and its Application to Schema Abstraction	114	(26)
J. R. Anderson
P. J. Kline
C. M. Beasley, Jr
Minds, Brains, and Programs	140	(13)
J. R. Searle
Computing Machinery and Intelligence	153	(16)
A. M. Turing
Part II The Mind as Neural Network	169	(150)
Introduction	171	(8)
The Perceptron : A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain	179	(19)
F. Rosenblatt
Cognitive Activity in Artificial Neural Networks	198	(19)
P. M. Churchland
Cooperative Computation of Stereo Disparity	217	(8)
D. Marr
T. Poggio
On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs	225	(34)
D. E.Rumelhart
J. L.McClelland
Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text	259	(14)
T. J. Sejnowski
C. R. Rosenberg
Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity : Why Smolensky's Solution Doesn't Work	273	(13)
J. A. Fodor
B. P. McLaughlin
Connectionism, Constituency, and the Language of Thought	286	(21)
P. Smolensky
Rules and Connections in Human Language	307	(12)
S. Pinker
A. Prince
Part III The Mind as Brain	319	(126)
Introduction	321	(2)
The Organization of Behavior	323	(10)
D. O. Hebb
In Search of the Engram	333	(18)
K. S. Lashley
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity	351	(10)
W. S. McCulloch
W. H. Pitts
Is Consciousness a Brain Process?	361	(6)
U. T. Place
The Computational Brain : Anatomical and Physiological Techniques	367	(15)
P. S. Churchland
T. J. Sejnowski
What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain	382	(15)
J. Y. Lettvin
H. R. Maturana
W. S. McCulloch
W. H. Pitts
Positron Emission Tomographic Studies of the Cortical Anatomy of Single-word Processing	397	(8)
S. E. Petersen
P. T. Fox
M. I. Posner
M. Mintun
M. E. Raichle
Computational Neuroscience	405	(15)
T. J. Sejnowski
C. Koch
P. S. Churchland
Two Cortical Visual Systems	420	(25)
L. G. Ungerleider
M. Mishkin
Part IV Special Topics	445	(99)
Introduction	447	(5)
Recent Contributions to the Theory of Innate Ideas	452	(6)
N. Chomsky
The ``Innateness Hypothesis'' and Explanatory Models in Linguistics	458	(6)
H. Putnam
Linguistics and Philosophy	464	(20)
N. Chomsky
Initial Knowledge : Six Suggestions	484	(9)
E.Spelke
Precis of The Modularity of Mind	493	(7)
J. A. Fodor
Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes	500	(13)
P. M. Churchland
The Social Function of Intellect	513	(10)
N. K. Humphrey
Origins of Domain Specificity : The Evolution of Functional Organization	523	(21)
L. Cosmides
J. Tooby
Index	544