Additions to the Bibliography on Mind and Consciousness
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MacCormac Earl: A COGNITIVE THEORY OF METAPHOR (MIT Press, 1985)MacCormac rejects the tension theory (which locates the difference between metaphor and analogy in the emotional tension generated by the juxtaposition of anomalous referents), Monroe Beardsley's controversion theory (which locates that difference in the falsity produced by a literal reading of the identification of the two referents) and the deviance theory (which locates that difference in the ungrammaticality of the juxtaposition of two referents). He returns to the literal/metaphorical distinction (as opposed to Lakoff's view that all language is metaphorical), defining the literal as the ordinary use of language. A metaphor is a metaphor more by virtue of its apparent dissimilarities than its innovative similarities. Precisely, a metaphor is recognized as a metaphor on the basis of the semantic anomaly produced by the juxtaposition of referents. MacCormac modifies Black's interactionist theory and adopts Wheelwright's classification of "epiphors" (metaphors that express the existence of something) and "diaphors" (metaphors that imply the possibility of something). Diaphor and epiphor measure the likeness and the dissimilarity of attribute of the referents. A diaphor can become an epiphor (when the object is found to really exist) and an epiphor can become a literal expression (when the term has been used for so long that people have forgotten its origin). Metaphor is a process that exists at three levels: a language process (from ordinary language to diaphor to epiphor back to ordinary language); a semantic and syntactic process (its linguistic explanation); and a cognitive process (to acquire new knowledge). Therefore a theory of metaphor requires three levels: a surface or literal level, a semantic level and a cognitive level. The semantics of metaphor is then formalized using mathematical tools. "Partial" truths of metaphorical language are represented by fuzzy values: the meaning of a sentence can belong to several concepts with different degrees of memberships. The paradigm is one of language as a hierarchical network in n-dimensional space with each of the nodes of the network a fuzzy set (defining a semantic marker). When unlikely markers are juxtaposed, the degrees of membership of one semantic marker in the fuzzy set representing the other semantic marker can be expressed in a four-valued logic (so that a metaphor is not only true or false). MacCormac also sketches the theory that metaphors are speech acts in Austin's sense. Metaphors both possess meaning and carry out actions. An account of their meaning must include an account of their locutionary and perlocutionary forces. Finally, the third component of a theory of meaning for metaphors (besides the semantic and speech act components) is the cultural context. The meaning of metaphors results from the semantical aspects of communication, culture and cognition. MacCormac claims that, as cognitive processes, metaphors mediate between culture and the mind, influencing both cultural and biological evolution. MacLean Paul: THE TRIUNE BRAIN IN EVOLUTION (Plenum Press, 1990)MacNamara John & Reyes Gonzalo: THE LOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITION (Oxford University Press, 1994)The editors reach the conclusion that "there is no purely physiological explanation for the acquisition of intentional skills or the existence of intentional states." As a corollary, there must exist unlearned (innate) "logical resources" (e.g., membership, typed equality, reference to symbols), sort of universals of the human mind. Most papers revolve around Reyes' seminal contribution to a semantic theory. Kinds are interpretations of common nouns. Reference to an individual by means of a proper noun involves a kind (e.g., reference to the name of a person involves the kind "person"). Therefore any reference to an individual involves a kind. Kinds are modally constant (don't decay in time), but predicates (properties) of kinds may change. All predicates are typed by kinds. MacPhail Euan: THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford University Press, 1998)Maes Patti: DESIGNING AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (MIT Press, 1990)Rodney Brooks introduces his situated agents. Mae models action selection through behavior networks, which exhibit planning capabilities halfway between traditional goal-oriented planning and situated action. Mamdani E.H. & Gaines B.R.: FUZZY REASONING (Academic Press, 1981)Some applications to linguistics, expert systems and controllers are also discussed. Mandelbrot Benoit: THE FRACTAL GEOMETRY OF NATURE (W.H.Freeman, 1982)Scaling and nonscaling fractals, self-mapping fractals, Brown fractals, trema fractals are introduced along with their mathematical properties. Mandelbrots describes applications to coastal lines, galaxy clusters, the physics of turbulence, the cosmological principle, and so forth, and discusses the relationship to artificial life (organic looking nonlinear fractals) and chaos theory (nonlinear fractals that play the role of attractors for dynamic systems). Mandler George: MIND AND BODY (Norton, 1984)After a generous history and survey of research on emotions in cognitive psychology, Mandler offers his view on mind and consciousness: the mind is a general information-processing system that employs schemas as basic cognitive structures. Schemas represent environmental regularities. Mandler emphasizes the constructive nature of consciousness: "consciousness is a construction of phenomenal experience out of one or more of the available preconscious schemas," a process driven by the most abstract schema relevant to the current goals of the individual. One of the functions of consciousness is to enable the individual to evaluate environmental conditions and action alternatives. Emotions are constructed out of autonomic arousal (arousal of a part of the nervous system called autonomic nervous system, which determines the intensity of the emotion) and evaluative cognition (meaning analysis, which determines the quality of the emotion). Therefore, emotion is a product of schemas, arousal and consciousness. The function of emotions is to provide the individual with an optimal sense of the world, with the most general picture of the world that is consistent with current needs, goals and situations. Marcus Mitchell: A THEORY OF SYNTACTIC RECOGNITION FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE (MIT Press, 1980)Marek Wiktor & Truszczynski Miroslav: NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC (Springer Verlag, 1991)Marshall I.N. & Zohar Danah: QUANTUM SOCIETY (William Morrow, 1994)Margalef Ramon: PERSPECTIVES IN ECOLOGICAL THEORY (Univ of Chicago Press, 1968)A basic property of nature is that any exchange between two systems of information increases the difference of information between the two systems: the less organized system gives energy to the more organized one and in parallel information is destroyed in the less organized system and information is created in the more organized one. The less organized system feeds the more organized. Margalef viewed an ecosystem as a cybernetic system driven by the second law of Thermodynamics. Succession (the occupation of a territory by organisms) is then a self-organizing process, one whereby an element of the system is replaced with a new element so as to store more information at less energetic cost; a process that develops a biological system in which the production of entropy per unit of information is minimized. Such process consists in substituting biological components of the system with other biological components so as to preserve the same or more information at the same or less energetic cost. Paradoxically, the system seeks to gain information from the environment only to use such information to block any further assimilation of information. During succession there is trend towards increase in biomass, complexity stratification, and diversity. The more entropy/energy efficient systems are those that are best fit to survive. Therefore, succession is to ecology what evolution is to biology. Margalef takes energy flow per unit of biomass as a measure for ecological or evolutionary efficiency. He argues that succession proceeds so that the ratio of biomass production to total biomass (per unit of time and area) will decrease with time. A measure of ecological efficiency is given by the energy flow per unit biomass (the primary production of the system divided by the total biomass). Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan: WHAT IS LIFE? ( Simon & Schuster, 1995)Margulis Lynn: SYMBIOSIS AND CELL EVOLUTION (Freeman, 1981)Margulis Lynn: ENVIRONMENTAL EVOLUTION (MIT Press, 1992)Marr David: VISION (MIT Press, 1982)Martin James: A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF METAPHOR INTERPRETATION (Academic Press, 1990)A number of Lakoff-style primitive classes of metaphors (metaphors that are part of the knowledge of language) are used to build all the others. A metaphor is therefore built and comprehended just like any other lexical entity. Martin-Lof Per: INTUITIONISTIC TYPE THEORY (Bibliopolis, 1984)Mason Stephen: CHEMICAL EVOLUTION (Clarendon Press, 1991)Matthews Robert: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY (Kluwer Academics, 1989)Maturana Humberto: AUTOPOIESIS AND COGNITION (Reidel, 1980)Maturana Humberto & Varela Francisco: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (Shambhala, 1992)Mayr Ernst: POPULATION, SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (Harvard Univ Press, 1970)Mayr focuses on the biological properties of species and then deals with population variation and genetics ("phenotypes are produced by genotypes interacting with the environment", and genotypes are produced by the recombination of genes of a local population). Mayr focuses on variation ("the study of variation is the study of populations"). All populations contain enough genetic variation to fuel evolutionary change. Variation in turn poses problems for adaptation and speciation. Mayr explain the genetics of speciation by downplaying the role of geographic isolation and emphasizing and emphasizing the genetic reconstruction of populations. The species are the units of evolution. Speciation is the method by which evolution advances. The structure of an organism necessarily reflects its evolutionary history. Mayr Ernst: THE GROWTH OF BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT (Harvard Univ Press, 1982)Mayr Ernst: TOWARDS A NEW PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY (Harvard Univ Press, 1988)Mayr reiterates that the genes are not the units of evolution. McClelland, James & Rumelhart, David: PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING vol. 2 (MIT Press, 1986)Paul Smolensky attempts to bridge the symbolic level of cognitive science and the subsymbolic level of neurosciences. McCulloch Warren: EMBODIMENTS OF MIND (M.I.T. Press, 1965)The former proved that a network of binary neurons (that can only be in one of two possible states, have a fixed threshold below which they never fire, can receive inputs from either inhibitory synapses and/or excitatory synapses, and integrate their input signals at discrete intervals of time) is fully equivalent to a universal Turing machine (i.e., that any finite logical proposition can be realized by such a network, i.e. every computer program can be implemented as a neural net). The latter proved that the eye sends highly specific signals to the brain, which require minimal processing by the brain. In a sense, the eye already "knows" what to look for. In the case of a frog's eye, the frog is looking for food, and the brain doesn't need to do much processing to generate action following an eye's signal that a food-like pattern has been spotted. McGinn, Colin: THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME (Basic, 1999)McGinn Colin: THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford Univ Press, 1991)McGinn, Colin: CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS OBJECTS (Oxford University Press, 2004)McGinn Colin: MINDSIGHT (2004)McGinn Colin: CHARACTER OF MIND (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)McGinn Colin: MINDS AND BODIES (Oxford Univ Press, 1997)McManus, Chris: "The Origin of Asymmetry" (2002)McNeill David: HAND AND MIND (Univ of Chicago Press, 1992)McNeill David: PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (Harper & Row, 1987)Mead, George Herbert: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT (Univ of Chicago Press, 1938)Mead, George Herbert: MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY (Univ of Chicago Press, 1934)Metzinger Thomas: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE (Springer Verlag, 1996)Michalski Ryszard, Carbonell Jaime & Mitchell Tom: MACHINE LEARNING I (Morgan Kaufman, 1983)Doug Lenat surveys his projects of learning by discovery (AM, Eurisko), Langley reports on BACON. Michalski Ryszard, Carbonell Jaime & Mitchell Tom: MACHINE LEARNING II (Morgan Kaufman, 1986)Included are contributions from cognitive architectures (Paul Rosenbloom, John Anderson), qualitative physics (Kenneth Forbus), genetic algorithms (John Holland). Carbonell's analogical reasoning includes "trasformational" reasoning (that transfers properties from a situation to another situation) and "derivational" reasoning (that derives the properties of a situation from another situation). Michalski Ryszard & Kodratoff Yves: MACHINE LEARNING III (Morgan Kaufman, 1990)Michalski Ryszard: MACHINE LEARNING IV (Morgan Kaufman, 1994)Miller, Geoffrey: THE MATING MIND (Doubleday, 2000)Miller George Armitage & Johnson-Laird Philip: LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION (Cambridge Univ Press, 1976)"Sense" has two meanings, one perceptual and the other linguistic. The relation between perceptual and linguistic structures is mediated by a complex conceptual system: percepts and words are just channels to enter and exit this complex system. Labels are learned not by pure association, but through an attentional-judgmental abstraction of perception. We don't learn automatic links between percepts and words, we learn rules relating perceptual judgments to assertible utterances. The relation between perception and language consists in learning metalinguistic rules that specify how perceptual judgments can be used to verify or falsify sentences. The meaning of a sentence is the way of verifying it. In Johnson-Laird's procedural semantics, a word's meaning is the set of conceptual elements that can contribute to build a mental procedure necessary to comprehend any sentence including that word. Those elements depend on the relations between the entity referred by that word and any other entity it can be related to. Rather than atoms of meanings, we are faced with "fields" of meaning, each including a number of concepts that are related to each other. The representation of the mental lexicon handles the intensional relations between words and their being organized into semantic fields. Along the way, the authors review hundreds of cognitive theories about memory, perception and language. Millikan Ruth: LANGUAGE, THOUGHT AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL CATEGORIES (MIT Press, 1987)Speaker meaning and sentence meaning are related, but neither can be used as a base for defining the other. Millikan then develops a general theory of signs and thoughts. Intentionality is a natural phenomenon: intentions are members of proper-function categories (i.e., biological categories) that have been acquired through an evolutionary process for their survival value. The intentionality of language can be described without reference to the speaker's intentions. Representations are a special class of intentional devices, which include sentences and thoughts: when they perform their proper function, their referents are identified. Beliefs are representations. Meaning has three parts: the proper function, Fregean sense and intension. Millikan Ruth: WHAT IS BEHAVIOR? (MIT Press, 1991)Milner, David & Goodale, Melvyn: THE vISUAL BRAIN IN ACTION (Oxford University Press, 1995)Milner Peter: THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)Mithen Steven: THE PREHISTORY OF THE MIND (Thames and Hudson, 1996)Mines Robert: ADULT COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT (Praeger, 1986)Arlin studies the cognitive developmental process that enables creativity in art and science, or the emergence of postformal operational thinking that follows Piaget's traditional stages in the young adult. Kitchener assumes that an adult keeps developing his or her cognitive faculties and therefore refining the way decisions are taken in complex situations. Cognitive development continues for the entire lifetime. Minsky Marvin: SEMANTIC INFORMATION PROCESSING (MIT Press, 1968)McCarthy proposes to build a program that reasons deductively from a body of knowledge until it concludes that some actions ought to be performed; then it adds the results of the actions to its body of knowledge; and repeats its cycle. McCarthy also sketches for the first time his situation calculus to represent temporally limited events as "situations". Quillian defines a semantic network as a relational direct acyclical graph in which nodes represent entities and arcs represent binary relations between entities. Minsky Marvin: THE SOCIETY OF MIND (Simon & Schuster, 1985)Minsky Marvin: "The Emotion Machine" (Simon & Schuster, 2006)Minsky Marvin: PERCEPTRONS; AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTATIONAL GEOMETRY (MIT Press, 1969)Minksy Marvin: COMPUTATION (Prentice-Hall, 1967)Mitchell Melanie: ANALOGY-MAKING AS PERCEPTION (MIT Press, 1993)Analogy making is viewed as a perceptual process, rather than a purely reasoning process. The interaction of perceptions and concepts gives rise to analogies. The computer model entails a large number of parallel processors, halfway between connectionist and symbolic systems. Concepts and perceptions are not well defined entities, but dymanic processes that arise from such a configuration. The system employs an innovative stochastic search to find solutions. Mitchell, Melanie: INTRODUCTION TO GENETIC ALGORITHMS (MIT Press, 1996)Moelling, Karin: "Viruses - More Friends Than Foes" (2017)Monod, Jacques: CHANCE AND NECESSITY (Knopf, 1971)Montague, Richard: FORMAL PHILOSOPHY (Yale University Press, 1974)Reality consists of two truth values, a set of entities, a set of possible worlds and a set of points in time. A function space is constructed inductively from these elementary objects. The sense of an expression is supposed to determine its reference. The intensional logic makes explicit the mechanism by which this can happen. The logic determines the possible sorts of functions from possible indices (sets of worlds, times, speakers, etc) to their denotations (or extensions). These functions represent the sense of the expression. In other words sentences denote extensions in the real world. The denotation is compositional, meaning that a subpart of the intension extends or delimits the extension denotated by another. A name denotes the infinite set of properties of its reference. Common nouns, adjectives and intransitive verbs denote sets of individual concepts and their intensions are the properties necessarily shared by all those individuals. Montague's semantics is truth conditional (to know the meaning of a sentence is to know what the world must be for the sentence to be true, the meaning of a sentence is the set of its truth conditions), model theoretic (a way to carry out the program of truth-conditional semantics that involves building models of the world which yield interpretations of the language) and uses possible worlds (the meaning of a sentence depends not just on the world as it is but on the world as it might be, i.e. on other possible worlds). Montague used his intensional logic to derive a semantic, model-theoretic interpretation of a fragment of the english language: through a rigorously mechanical process, a sentence of natural language is translated into an expression of the intensional logic and the model-theoretic interpretation of this expression serves as the interpretation of the sentence. Montague relalized that categorial grammars provide a unity of syntactic and semantic analyses. Rather than proving a semantic interpretation directly on syntactic structures, Montague provides the semantic interpretation of a sentence by showing how to translate it into formulas of intensional logic and how to interpret semantically all formulas of that logic. Montague assigns a set of basic expressions to each category and then defines 17 syntactic rules to combine them to form complex phrases. An analysis tree shows graphically how a meaningful expression is constructed from basic expressions. The tree shows all applications of syntactic rules down to the level of basic expressions. The translation from natural language to intensional logic is then performed by employing a set of 17 translation rules that correspond to the syntactic rules. Syntactic structure determines semantic interpretation. The semantics of the intensional logic is given as a possible-world semantics relative to moments of time: "points of reference" (pairs of worlds and moments) determine the extensions of expressions whose meanings are intensions. Montague believes there should be no theoretical difference between natural languages and artificial languages of logicians. A universal grammar is a mathematical framework capable of subsuming a description of any system that might be considered as a language. Moore A.W.: MEANING AND REFERENCE (Oxford Univ Press, 1993)Moore Robert: LOGIC AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION (CSLI, 1995)Morowitz Harold: ENERGY FLOW IN BIOLOGY (Academic Press, 1968)Schrodinger's vision that "living organisms feed upon negative entropy" (they attract negative entropy in order to compensate for the entropy increase they create by living) can be restated as: the existence of a living organism depends on increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe. Mora Francisco: THE HOT BRAIN (MIT Press, 2000)Morowitz Harold: FOUNDATIONS OF BIOENERGETICS (Academic Press, 1978)Morowitz's theorem states that the flow of energy through a system leads to cycling in that system. The flux of energy is the organizing factor in a dissipative system. When energy flows in a system from a higher kinetic temperature, the upper energy levels of the system become occupied and take a finite time to decay into thermal modes. During this period energy is stored at a higher free energy than at equilibrium state. Systems of complex structures can store large amounts of energy and achieve a high amount of internal order. Therefore, a dissipative system develops an internal order with a stored free energy that is stable, has a lower internal entropy and resides some distance from thermostatic equilibrium. Furthermore, a dissipative system selects stable states with the largest possible stored energy. The cyclic nature of dissipative systems can be seen in the periodic attractors. Their cyclic nature allows them to develop stability and structure within themselves. Morowitz Harold: BEGINNINGS OF CELLULAR LIFE (Yale University Press, 1992)Morowitz Harold: ENTROPY AND THE MAGIC FLUTE (Oxford University Press, 1993)Morris C.W.: FOUNDATIONS OF THE THEORY OF SIGNS (University Of Chicago Press, 1938)Murchie Guy: SEVEN MYSTERIES OF LIFE (Houghton Mifflin, 1978)Murray James Dickson: MATHEMATICAL BIOLOGY (Springer-Verlag, 1993)Myers Terry: REASONING AND DISCOURSE PROCESSING (Academic Press, 1986)Includes Johnson-Laird's "Reasoning without logic", a critique of mental logic, and Wilson's and Sperber's "Inference and implicature in utterance interpretation", on their theory of relevance. |
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