[PDF] The Cognitive Life Of Things eBook

Author : Lambros Malafouris
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 34,39 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Material culture
ISBN : 9781902937519

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"Things have a social life. They also lead cognitive lives, working subtly in our minds. But just how is it that human thought has become so deeply involved in and expressed through material things? There is today a wide recognition that material culture regulates and shapes the ways in which people perceive, think and act. But just how does that work? This is one of the most challenging research topics for the archaeology and anthropology of human cognition. The understanding of the working of past and present material culture - its cognitive efficacy - is becoming a key issue in the cognitive and social sciences more widely. This volume, with innovative case studies ranging from prehistory to the present, seeks to establish a cross-disciplinary framework and to set out future directions for research. Its aim is to redress the balance of the cognitive equation by at last bringing materiality firmly into the cognitive fold. But how can we integrate artefacts - material culture - into existing theories of human cognition? How do we understand the significant role of the human use of the things we have ourselves created in the development of human intelligence? The distinguished contributors here argue that the boundaries of the mind must now be understood as extending beyond the individual and to include the world of the artefact if we are fully to grasp how interactions among people, things, space and time have come, over thousands of years, to shape the transformations in human cognition that have made us what we are."--Publisher's description.

Author : Lambros Malafouris
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 49,37 MB
Release : 2016-02-12
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0262528924

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An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present. An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.

Author : Paco Calvo
Publisher : Elsevier
Page : 515 pages
File Size : 50,51 MB
Release : 2008-08-15
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0080466168

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The Handbook of Cognitive Science provides an overview of recent developments in cognition research, relying upon non-classical approaches. Cognition is explained as the continuous interplay between brain, body, and environment, without relying on classical notions of computations and representation to explain cognition. The handbook serves as a valuable companion for readers interested in foundational aspects of cognitive science, and neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. The handbook begins with an introduction to embodied cognitive science, and then breaks up the chapters into separate sections on conceptual issues, formal approaches, embodiment in perception and action, embodiment from an artificial perspective, embodied meaning, and emotion and consciousness. Contributors to the book represent research overviews from around the globe including the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Author : Roberto Casati
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 33,93 MB
Release : 2024-05-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 0262547082

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The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work—their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts—clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps—to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.

Author : Evan Thompson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 561 pages
File Size : 41,37 MB
Release : 2010-09-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0674736885

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How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life. Thompson draws upon sources as diverse as molecular biology, evolutionary theory, artificial life, complex systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, Continental Phenomenology, and analytic philosophy to argue that mind and life are more continuous than has previously been accepted, and that current explanations do not adequately address the myriad facets of the biology and phenomenology of mind. Where there is life, Thompson argues, there is mind: life and mind share common principles of self-organization, and the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life. Rather than trying to close the explanatory gap, Thompson marshals philosophical and scientific analyses to bring unprecedented insight to the nature of life and consciousness. This synthesis of phenomenology and biology helps make Mind in Life a vital and long-awaited addition to his landmark volume The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (coauthored with Eleanor Rosch and Francisco Varela). Endlessly interesting and accessible, Mind in Life is a groundbreaking addition to the fields of the theory of the mind, life science, and phenomenology.

Author : Carl Knappett
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 17,34 MB
Release : 2008-12-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 0387747117

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Thus far an ‘agent’ in the social sciences has always meant someone whose actions bring about change. In this volume, the editors challenge this position and examine the possibility that agency is not a solely human property. Instead, this collection of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists explores the symbiotic relationships between humans and material entities (a key opening a door, a speed bump raising a car) as they engage with one another.

Author : Albert Newen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 952 pages
File Size : 11,36 MB
Release : 2018-08-23
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0191054364

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4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments. With essays from leading scholars and researchers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition investigates this recent paradigm. It addresses the central issues of embodied cognition by focusing on recent trends, such as Bayesian inference and predictive coding, and presenting new insights, such as the development of false belief understanding. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition also introduces new theoretical paradigms for understanding emotion and conceptualizing the interactions between cognition, language, and culture. With an entire section dedicated to the application of 4E cognition in disciplines such as psychiatry and robotics, and critical notes aimed at stimulating discussion, this Oxford handbook is the definitive guide to 4E cognition. Aimed at neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this young and thriving field.

Author : Peter Meineck
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 10,26 MB
Release : 2017-07-14
Category : Art
ISBN : 1315466562

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This book examines classical Greek theatre, asking how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural and political force. Meineck approaches Greek theatre from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as an embodied live enacted event, and analyses how different performative elements acted upon audiences to create absorbing narrative action, emotional intensity, intellectual reflection and empathy. This was the key to the transformative artistic and social power that enabled Greek drama to advance alternate viewpoints. He also explores what the model of Greek drama can reveal about live theatre's value in cultural, social and political discourse today.

Author : Andrej Radman
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 45,17 MB
Release : 2017-02-03
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 147442113X

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Critical and Clinical Cartographies rethinks medical and design pedagogies in the context of both the Affective and Digital Turns that are occurring under the umbrella of New Materialism. This collection is framed through Deleuze's symptomalogical approach which creates the ideal terrain for architecture and medical technologies of care to meet with robotics, alongside the newly emerging 'materialist landscape'.

Author : Karenleigh A. Overmann
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 41,39 MB
Release : 2019-04-04
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0190854626

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Cognitive archaeology is a relatively new interdisciplinary science that uses cognitive and psychological models to explain archeological artifacts like stone tools, figurines, and art. Squeezing Minds From Stones is a collection of essays from early pioneers in the field, like archaeologists Thomas Wynn and Iain Davidson, and evolutionary primatologist William McGrew, to 'up and coming' newcomers like Shelby Putt, Ceri Shipton, Mark Moore, James Cole, Natalie Uomini, and Lana Ruck. Their essays address a wide variety of cognitive archaeology topics, including the value of experimental archaeology, primate archaeology, the intent of ancient tool makers, and how they may have lived and thought.