Mind In Action

Author : Barbara Tversky
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2019-05-21
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780465093076

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Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky Pdf

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Author : Alan Garnham
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 125 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0415008492

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The Mind in Action by Alan Garnham Pdf

Author : David A. Rosenbaum
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2022-02-08
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780262368735

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Action, Mind, and Brain by David A. Rosenbaum Pdf

An engaging and accessible introduction to the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. This engaging and accessible book offers the first introductory text on the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. Written by a leading researcher in the field, it covers the interplay of action, mind, and brain, showing that many core concepts in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and technology grew out of questions about the control of everyday physical actions. It explains action not as a “one-way street from stimuli to response” but as a continual perception-action cycle. The informal writing style invites students to think through the evidence step by step, helping them develop general thinking stills as well as learn specific facts. Special emphasis is placed on the role of underrepresented groups. The book discusses the intellectual background of the field, from Plato to Kant, Dewey, and others; applications and methods; and the physical substrates of action—bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and nerves. It considers the control of actions in space; learning, and the roles of nature and nurture; feedback; feedforward, or anticipated feedback; and degrees of freedom—the multiple ways of getting things done and three methods for narrowing the alternatives. The book is generously illustrated, including many images of thinkers who contributed to the field.

Author : James V. Wertsch
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1998-01-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780199761562

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Mind As Action by James V. Wertsch Pdf

Contemporary social problems typically involve many complex, interrelated dimensions--psychological, cultural, and institutional, among others. But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa. In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.

Author : Barbara Gail Montero
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199596775

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Thought in Action by Barbara Gail Montero Pdf

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view--both in academia and in the popular press--that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, it is believed that reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Experts, accordingly, don't need to try to do it; they just do it. But is this true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea that highly accomplished skills are automatic and effortless, Barbara Gail Montero develops a theory of expertise that emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. Along the way, she dispels various mythical accounts of experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action and analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control impedes well practiced skills. She also explores real-life examples of optimal performance--culled from sports, the performing arts, chess, nursing, medicine, the military and elsewhere--and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to create a picture of expertise according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective.

Author : Jeff Coulter
Publisher : Humanity Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 1989-06
Category : Psychiatry
ISBN : 1573924814

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The Mind in Action by Jeff Coulter Pdf

No Marketing Blurb

Author : Pentti Määttänen
Publisher : Springer
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3319369601

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Mind in Action by Pentti Määttänen Pdf

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms’ interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.

Author : Amélie Rorty
Publisher : Beacon Press (MA)
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UOM:39015015161923

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Mind in Action by Amélie Rorty Pdf

Author : Fenwicke L. Holmes
Publisher : Jazzybee Verlag
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2014-06-10
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9783849644673

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The Law Of Mind In Action by Fenwicke L. Holmes Pdf

There is a law of healing so plain that even a child can understand it, so fundamental that the ablest mind has never yet thought through all the facts and phenomena of life that rest upon it. It is the purpose of this book to make this law plain. The greatest power in the world is the power of thought, for it is Creative Mind in action. Nothing exists that did not first exist in thought from the first sun that blazed only in the Mind of the Creator, to the last doll-dress fashioned by a childish hand. Science supports the fact that the first movement in nature can have come only from the application of an immaterial force or Will to the primary etheric particles otherwise in a perfect state of equilibrium. It must leave to metaphysics not only an explanation of the Will that moves but also the substance that is moved. This, then, it is the province of this book to show with all that it entails. Since an act of Will is an act of mind, we concern ourselves with the activity of a Creative Mind. Again since Mind acts creatively, there is a way in which it acts. We must also, therefore, teach the way. It is to teach this way that the Bible was written, that Jesus lived and taught. This way has been known for many centuries but has always been taught in terms of the understanding of the day in which the teacher lived. The Great Metaphysician taught largely in parables and oriental figures of speech. But He taught "the Way" and his followers were called the People of the Way.

Author : Eric Berne
Publisher : Grigson Press
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1447425731

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The Mind in Action by Eric Berne Pdf

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Author : Sarah Lane Ritchie
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2019-07-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781108476515

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Divine Action and the Human Mind by Sarah Lane Ritchie Pdf

Challenges theological models of divine action that locate God's activity in human mind. Emphasizes God's relationship with all of nature.

Author : Andy Clark
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2010-12-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0199831041

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Supersizing the Mind by Andy Clark Pdf

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Author : E. J. Lowe
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2008-09-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191550904

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Personal Agency by E. J. Lowe Pdf

Personal Agency consists of two parts. In Part II, a radically libertarian theory of action is defended which combines aspects of agent causalism and volitionism. This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will—a 'two-way' power which rational agents can freely exercise in the light of reason. Lowe contends that substances, not events, are the causal source of all change in the world—with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. And he defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents. Part I prepares the ground for this theory by undermining the threat presented to it by physicalism. It does this by challenging the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms and by showing that a dualistic philosophy of mind—one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively—is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts.

Author : Julian Wuerth
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199587629

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Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics by Julian Wuerth Pdf

Julian Wuerth offers a radically new interpretation of Kant's theories of mind, action, and ethics. As the author of a Copernican turn in philosophy, Kant places the mind at the center of his philosophy, and yet his theory of the mind remains an enigma. Wuerth begins with a revolutionary new interpretation of this theory of mind. This new interpretation considers a far wider range of Kant's recorded thought from across his philosophical corpus than previous interpretations and advances in tandem with an interpretation of the foundations of Kant's transcendental idealism and his metaphysics of substance. Against traditional empiricist approaches, Wuerth demonstrates that Kant argues that we are conscious of our own noumenal substantiality and simplicity. But against rational psychologists, Kant draws on the teachings of his transcendental idealism to strip the conclusions of our noumenal substantiality and simplicity of their "usefulness." In the Paralogisms and elsewhere, Kant thus argues that we are not licensed to conclude our substantiality and simplicity in a sense that entails our permanence, our incorruptibility, or our immortality. Wuerth goes on to undertake a ground-breaking study of Kant's notoriously vast, complex, and opaque account of the mind's powers, and argues that Kant structures his system of philosophy on this system of the mind's powers. He next confronts the persisting stumbling block of interpretations of Kant's ethics--Kant's theory of action--and shows that Kant rejects intellectualist theories of action that reduce practical agents to pure reason. He argues that Kant's practical agent is shown to exercise a power of choice, or Willkur, subject to two irreducible conative currencies: moral motives and sensible incentives. While our intellectual nature provides us with insight into morality and in turn with moral motives, our sensible nature provides us with distinct-in-kind sensible incentives. Immoral choices at odds with the former can thus nonetheless be coherent choices in harmony with the latter. Finally, Wuerth applies these new findings about Kant's theory of mind and action to an analysis of the foundations of Kant's ethics. He rejects the dominant constructivist interpretation in favor of a moral realist one. At the heart of Kant's Enlightenment ethics is his insistence that the authority of a moral law rests in our recognition of its truth, not in an alleged commitment unfettered by truth. Kant guides us to clarity regarding the moral law, across his writings and across his various formulations of the moral law, using a single elimination of sensibility process that rejects the pretences of sensibility to isolate reason and its insights into moral right and wrong. Because moral authority issues from the cognition of pure practical reason and because sensibility can present coherent alternatives to moral choice, moral virtue requires more than mere clarity in cognition. Kant instead recognizes the centrality to moral living of the ongoing cultivation of our capacities more broadly, including our capacities for cognition, feeling, desire, and character.

Author : John Bengson,Marc A. Moffett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2012-01-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190452834

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Knowing How by John Bengson,Marc A. Moffett Pdf

Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This volume contains fifteen state of the art essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and "anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how--an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action.