Customer Reviews

Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science, , 2nd Edition

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Unlike the other review I just read -
This TEXTBOOK is clear, concise, and logically organized.

The book provides relevant, in-line definitions for all terms and concepts used. The book teaches you the concepts, principles, and methods of cognitive science, gently in an interesting way as you read the text. The author's writes in everyday language and creates his examples and situations in the "everyday" world to illustrate specific concepts and/or methods.

This is the best, most comprehesive, easy-to-understand, introductory overview of cognitive science I have ever read. All of this is packed into a slim, 5" by 8" volume consisting of 230 pages of text & exercises by a knowledgable author with great writing skills.

A great text from beginner to practioner.

You don't need a masters degree in some specific subject to understand what the author is presenting. This book applies the standards and elements of critical thinking unself-consciously and transparently. Every student should be required to read this text because it teaches critical thinking skills in both content AND message. Delightful!!

I have not (yet) read any of Paul Thagard's other textbooks but you can be SURE that I will.

Very good book regarding the Computational Representational Understanding of Mind (CRUM). Althought only focusing on one theory to explain the fucntioning of our mind it has concise and easy to understand explanations, going from the most basic representations to the most complex.

The linguistic-analysis tradition in philosophy had achieved ascendancy in twentieth-century philosophy of science. But it has been characterized by a nominalist view, which admits a two-level semantics consisting of only (1) the linguistic symbol, such as word, and (2) the objects or individual entities the symbol references. Nominalism recognizes no mediating third level consisting of the idea, concept, "intension", proposition, or any other mental reality between linguistic signs and nonlinguistic objects.

The two-level semantics is also the view typically held by the Positivist philosophers, who rejected mentalism in psychology, and who like B.F. Skinner prefer behaviorism. However Thagard, like Herbert Simon, explicitly rejects the behavioristic approach in psychology and advocates cognitive psychology, which recognizes mediating mental realities.

The two-level semantics is also characteristic of philosophers such as Quine who accept the Russellian predicate calculus. This calculus of symbolic logic contains a notational convention that uses quantification to express existence claims. It therefore fabricates an Orwellian-like nominalist newspeak in which predicate terms are semantically vacuous, unless they are placed in the range of quantifiers, such that they reference some kind of entities called either "mental entities" or Platonic "abstract entities." The philosopher Nelson Goodman for example therefore divides all philosophers into nominalists and Platonists. Not surprisingly the Russellian symbolic logic was adopted by the Logical Positivists. Oddly Thagard does not reject the Russellian symbolic logic, although it is not clear that he recognizes the ontological implications of its notational conventions.

In this book, Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science (1996), intended as an undergraduate textbook, Thagard states that the central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms both of representational structures in the mind and of computational procedures that operate on those structures. He labels this central hypothesis with the acronym "CRUM", by which he means "Computational Representational Understanding of Mind." This hypothesis assumes that the mind has mental representations analogous to data structures and computational procedures analogous to algorithms, such that computer programs using algorithms applied to data structures can model the mind and its processes.

Readers interested in more commentary on Thagard are invited to read my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci with free downloads. See especially BOOK VIII.

Thomas J. Hickey