Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness
compiled by Piero Scaruffi
My book on Consciousness
| My essays
| Cognitive Science news
| Contact
My seminar on Mind/Consciousness
| My seminar on History of Knowledge
(Copyright © 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions )
Farthing William: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Prentice Hall, 1992)Fauconnier Gilles: MENTAL SPACES (MIT Press, 1994)Mental spaces are domains that are built by the hearer as she listens to a speech. They are interconnected and consist of elements, roles, strategies and relations between them. Fauconnier applies the theory to presuppositions and counterfactuals. The mind creates multiple cognitive spaces to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. Mental spaces are constructed based on a number of principles, such as to avoid contradictions within a space. Mental spaces are similar to Kripke's possible worlds in that they represent "possible" situations and two mental spaces can represent two alternative situations. Mental spaces can account for referential opacity and propositional attitudes. Fauconnier Gilles & Eve Sweetser: SPACES, WORLDS, AND GRAMMAR (Univ of Chicago Press, 1996)Fauconnier's focus is the interaction between grammar and cognition, which translated into the interaction between syntax/semantics and mental spaces. emphasize the importance of context, which can yield "meaning for free". The mind is capable of making connections between domains and Fauconnier investigates the kinds of cognitive connections that are possible: pragmatic functions (such as that between an author and her book), metonymy, metaphor, analogy, etc. Some domains are therefore cognitively accessible from others. They reflect in primis the organization of thought itself. A basic tenet of Fauconnier's theory is that linguistic structure reflects not the structure of the world but the structure of our cognitive life. His theory studies the regularities in the relationship between semantics and cognition. The idea is that, as the speaker utters one sentence after the other, she is in fact constructing mental spaces and the links among them, resulting in a network of mental spaces. Fauconnier's theory provides the abstract tools ("accessing", "spreading" and "viewpoint") for the dynamics of mental space construction and linking. Mental spaces, in particular, facilitate reasoning: while logic-based semantics (logical form, Montague's, situation semantics) assume that language provides a meaning that can be used for reasoning, Fauconnier assumes that language builds the same kind of mental spaces from the most basic level of meaning construction all the way up to discourse and reasoning. Fauconnier Gilles: MAPPINGS IN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE (Cambridge Univ Press, 1997)Mental spaces proliferate as we think or talk. Fauconnier emphasizes the central role played by the mappings that link mental spaces, in particular analogical mappings. "Conceptual blending" is a cognitive process which can be recognized in many different cognitive, cultural and social activities. By merging different inputs, it creates a blended mental space whose emergent structure can be used creatively. Fauconnier finds that the same principles that operate at the level of meaning construction operate also at the level of scientific and artistic action. Lakoff has given mental spaces an internal structure with his theory of "cognitive models". Feigenbaum Edward: COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT (MIT Press, 1995)Feigl Herbert: THE MENTAL AND THE PHYSICAL (Univ of Minnesota Press, 1967)In the postscript to the second edition Feigl rejected his original theory and opted for eliminativism: there is no evidence of a relation between mental and physical states, and only the physical (neuroscientific) language should be employed in discussing people's feelings. Fetzer James: ASPECTS Of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Kluwer, 1988)Fetzer James: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (Kluwer, 1990)Fernyhough, Charles: "The Voices Within" (2016)Fetzer James: EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION (Kluwer, 1991)Fillmore, Charles: Form and Meaning in Language (Univ Press Chicago, 2002)Finke Ronald: PRINCIPLES OF MENTAL IMAGERY (MIT Press, 1989)Finke Ronald: CREATIVE IMAGERY (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990)Finke Ronald: CREATIVE COGNITION (MIT Press, 1992)Gary Fireman, Ted McVay and Owen Flanagan: NARRATIVE AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press, 2003)Fisher Ronald Aylmer: THE GENETICAL THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION (Dover, 1929)Fisher erred in thinking about the evolution of the single gene, neglecting the influence of all the other genes, and in assuming that evolution was a process of achieving stable equilibrium. But Fisher showed that Darwinian natural selection requires Mendelian inheritance in order to be effective. Flanagan Owen: DREAMING SOULS (Oxford Univ Press, 2000)Flanagan Owen: CONSCIOUSNESS RECONSIDERED (MIT Press, 1992)Flanagan Owen: THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1991)Consciousness is an heterogeneous set of processes which have in common the property of being felt. Flanagan does not believe in "one" consciousness, but in a group of "conscious" phenomena. Some of the processes of our body are unconscious and non perceived (the heartbeat), some are unconscious but perceived by other processes (sensors), and some are conscious, perceived by themselves. Flanagan Owen: CONSCIOUSNESS RECONSIDERED (MIT Press, 1992)Flood Raymond & Lockwood Michael: NATURE OF TIME (Basil Blackwell, 1986)Penrose's "Big bangs, black holes and time's arrow" deals with the apparent contradiction of increasing entropy in an universe that started in a state of maximum entropy (thermal equilibrium before the big bang) and in an universe whose fundamental laws are all symmetric. Paul Davies relates the direction of time to the quantum collapse of the wave function. Davies also suggests that the mind-body problem may be related to quantum mechanics' dualism between waves and particles, as the mind's role (of information encoding and processing) is similar to the wave's role. Dummett's "Causal loops" refutes all arguments against the possibility that we can influence our past. Fodor Jerry: CONCEPTS (Oxford Univ Press, 1998)Claiming that concepts are not definitions, Fodor attacks the popular view that the concepts in the definition of a concept are the constituents of that concept. He then attacks both the compositional theory of concepts and the prototype theory of concepts. Fodor is convinced that inferential role semantics is a dead end, and only reluctantly accepts informational atomism. Fodor, Jerry: THE MIND DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY (MIT Press, 2000)Fodor Jerry: LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT (Crowell, 1975)Evidence of an internal language in the mind comes from rational behavior (the ability to compute the consequences of an action), concept learning (the ability to form and verify hypotheses) and perception (the ability to recognize an object or an event). These phenomena would not be possible if the agent was not able to represent to itself the elements of the problem. Such language cannot be one of the languages we speak because the very ability to speak requires the existence of an internal language of representation. But the language of thought exhibits features that are shared by human languages: productivity (ability of understanding and producing propositions from an infinite set by using recursive operations over finite resources), systematicity (a physical relation between mental representations so that one can yield others), coherence (ability to make syntactically and semantically plausible inferences). The mind processes symbols without knowing what those symbols mean, in a purely syntactic fashion. Behavior is due only to the internal structures of the mind. All knowledge is represented syntactically. Fodor Jerry: REPRESENTATIONS (MIT Press, 1981)Fodor looks for an explanation of how propositional attitudes can have semantic properties. Propositional attitudes are relations (between an agent and a state of the world). Among the relata are mental representations. Mental representations are symbols, endowed with both syntactic and semantic properties. They possess their causal role in virtue of their syntactic properties. Propositional attitudes inherit their semantic properties from the mental representations that function as their objects. Fodor Jerry: MODULARITY OF THE MIND (MIT Press, 1983)Fodor Jerry: A THEORY OF CONTENT (MIT Press, 1990)Fodor speculates that there exist two types of meaning. Fodor discriminates between "narrow content" and "broad content" of a mental representation: the former is a semantic representation, is purely mental and does not depend on anything else; the latter is a function that yields the referent in every possible world, and depends on the external world. Meaning is the ordered set of narrow and broad contents. Narrow content is a conceptual role. As in Sellars, a role is a purely syntactic property, as they occur in formal systems. Fodor claims that there is no type identity but only instance identity. Mental instances that constitute a mental class can be used by neural events which do not form a neural class. Fodor Jerry & Lepore Ernest: HOLISM (Basil Blackwell, 1992)Fodor's "rational fixation" of beliefs is a non-demonstrative process that employs analogy and induction. Fodor Jerry: THE ELM AND THE EXPERT (MIT Press, 1994)Forbus Kenneth & DeKleer Johan: BUILDING PROBLEM SOLVERS (MIT Press, 1993)Forrest Stephanie: EMERGENT COMPUTATION (MIT Press, 1991)Emergent computation is to standard computation what nonlinear systems are to linear systems: it deals with systems whose parts interact in a nontrivial way. Chris Langton presents his theory of computation ad the edge of chaos: physical systems achieve the prerequisites for the emergence of computation (i.e., transmission, storage, modification) in the vicinity of a phase transition. Specifically, information becomes an important factor in the dynamics of cellular automata in the vicinity of the phase transition between periodic and chaotic behavior. In that neighborhood, information can propagate over long distances without decaying appreciably, thereby allowing for long-range correlation in behavior (ordered configurations do not allow for information to propagate at all, and disordered configurations cause information to quickly decay into random noise). This conclusion is consistent with Von Neumann's findings. A fundamental connection is therefore displayed between computation and phase transition. Kauffman debates orderly dynamics and frozen components as requirements for the evolvability of complex systems. He also notes how nonlinear dynamical systems which interact with the external world classify and know their world through their attractors. Holland, as well as Forrest, looks at emergent computation in classifier systems. Hillis proves that co-evolving parasites help improve evolution. A number of papers deal with connectionism. Daniel Greening surveys a variety of parallel simulated annealing techniques. Churchland views explanatory understanding, perceptual recognition and abductive inference as different instances of prototype activation. Fox Ronald: ENERGY AND THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE (John Wiley, 1982)Click here for the full review Franklin Stan: ARTIFICIAL MINDS (MIT Press, 1995)Freeman Walter: MASS ACTION IN THE NERVOUS SYSTEM (Academic Press, 1975)Freeman Walter: SOCIETIES OF BRAINS (Erlbaum, 1995)Frith, Chris & Wolpert, Daniel: THE NEUROSCIENCE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION (Oxford University Press, 2003)Frost Richard: INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS (MacMillan, 1986)Frost covers many-sorted logics, non-monotonic logic, many-valued logics (including fuzzy logic), modal logics (alethic, deontic, epistemic), the main variants of temporal logic, the theory of types, Montague's intensional logic and theories of uncertainty (probability, possibility, plausibility) Then Frost delves into knowledge representation techniques: production rules, semantic networks, frames, scripts and formalizes the types of inference that they enable. Functional language is described, with emphasis on the Lambda calculus, Throughout the book a rigorous mathematical notation is employed. Fuller Buckminster: COSMOGRAPHY ( Macmillan, 1992)Fuller Richard Buckminster: SYNERGETICS: EXPLORATIONS IN THE GEOMETRY OF THINKING (Macmillan, 1975)Synergetics rediscovers most of traditional science, but mainly through topological considerations (with traditional topology (extended to "omnitopology"). For example, synergetics proves that the universe is finite and expanding, and that Planck's constant is a "cosmic relationship". Reality is not made of "things", but of angle and frequency events. All experience can be reduced to only angles and frequencies. "Universe" is the collection of all experiences of all individuals. All systems contained in the universe are polyhedra. Synergetics operates with new quantities such as "tensegrity". Fascinated by the almost mystical qualities of the tetrahedron, which is at the same time both convex and concave, Fuller uses it as a metaphor for just about everything, from life to mind. Every now and then geometric considerations leads to observations about life. The universe for him is the set of all human experiences, whether communicated to self or to others. In that universe, there are no things, only events. Synergetic models the universe using only frequency and angle. The book concludes with a chapter on "numerology" whose introduction is written in verses. Fuller Buckminster: COSMOGRAPHY (Macmillan, 1992) |
| Home | The whole bibliography | My book on Consciousness |
(Copyright © 2000 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions - Termini d'uso )