The Cognitive Representation Of Behavior

The Cognitive Representation of Behavior

Ten Lectures on Cognition, Mental Representation, and the Self

These ten lectures articulate a distinctive vision of the structure and workings of the human mind, drawing from research on embodied cognition as well as from historically more entrenched approaches to the study of human thought. On the author’s view, multifarious materials co-contribute to the production of virtually all forms of human behavior, rendering implausible the idea that human action is best explained by processes taking place in an autonomous mental arena – those in the conscious mind or occurring at the so-called personal level. Rather, human behavior issues from a widely varied, though nevertheless integrated, collection of states and mechanisms, the integrated nature of which is determined by a form of clustering in the components’ contributions to the production of intelligent behavior. This package of resources, the cognitive system, is the human self. Among its elements, the cognitive system includes a vast number of representations, many subsets of which share their content. On the author’s view, redundancy of content itself constitutes an important explanatory quantity; the greater the extent of content-redundancy among representations that co-contribute to the production of an instance of behavior, the more fluid the behavior. In the course of developing and applying these views, the author addresses questions about the content of mental representations, extended cognition, the value of knowledge, and group minds.

Understanding Representation in the Cognitive Sciences

urrently a paradigm shift is occurring in for the conventional understanding of represen- which the traditional view of the brain as tions. The paper also summarizes the rationale for C representing the "things of the world" is the selection of contributions to this volume, which challenged in several respects. The present volume will roughly proceed from relatively "realist" c- is placed at the edge of this transition. Based on the ceptions of representation to more "constructivist" 1997 conference "New Trends in Cognitive Sci- interpretations. The final chapter of discussions, ence" in Vienna, Austria, it tries to collect and in- taped during and at the end of the conference, p- grate evidence from various disciplines such as p- vides the reader with the possibility to reflect upon losophy of science, neuroscience, computational the different approaches and thus contributes to b- approaches, psychology, semiotics, evolutionary ter and more integrative understanding of their biology, social psychology etc. , to foster a new thoughts and ideas. understanding of representation. The subjective experience of an outside world This book has a truly interdisciplinary character. It seems to suggest a mapping process where environ- is presented in a form that is readily accessible to mental entities are projected into our mind via some professionals and students alike across the cognitive kind of transmission. While a profound critique of sciences such as neuroscience, computer science, this idea is nearly as old as philosophy, it has gained philosophy, psychology, and sociology.