Cognition Through Understanding presents a selection of Tyler Burge's essays on cognition, thought, and language. The essays collected here use epistemology as a way of interpreting underlying powers of mind, and focus on four types of cognition that are warranted through understanding: self-knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection.

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology.

In these ground-breaking essays, Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. The author was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics.

We effortlessly recognize all sorts of events--from simple events like people walking to complex events like leaves blowing in the wind. We can also remember and describe these events, and in general, react appropriately to them, for example, in avoiding an approaching object. Our phenomenal ease interacting with events belies the complexity of the underlying processes we use to deal with them. Driven by an interest in these complex processes, research on event perception has been growing rapidly. Events are the basis of all experience, so understanding how humans perceive, represent, and act on them will have a significant impact on many areas of psychology. Unfortunately, much of the research on event perception--in visual perception, motor control, linguistics, and computer science--has progressed without much interaction. This volume is the first to bring together computational, neurological, and psychological research on how humans detect, classify, remember, and act on events. The book will provide professional and student researchers with a comprehensive collection of the latest research in these diverse fields.

Understanding Computers and Cognition presents an important and controversial new approach to understanding what computers do and how their functioning is related to human language, thought, and action. While it is a book about computers, Understanding Computers and Cognition goes beyond the specific issues of what computers can or can't do. It is a broad-ranging discussion exploring the background of understanding in which the discourse about computers and technology takes place. Understanding Computers and Cognition is written for a wide audience, not just those professionals involved in computer design or artificial intelligence. It represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about what it means to be a machine, and what it means to be human. Book jacket.

An examination of what makes us human and unique among all creatures—our brains. No reader curious about our “little grey cells” will want to pass up Harvard neuroscientist John E. Dowling’s brief introduction to the brain. In this up-to-date revision of his 1998 book Creating Mind, Dowling conveys the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience—examining the progress we’ve made in understanding how brains work, and shedding light on discoveries having to do with aging, mental illness, and brain health. The first half of the book provides the nuts-and-bolts necessary for an up-to-date understanding of the brain. Covering the general organization of the brain, early chapters explain how cells communicate with one another to enable us to experience the world. The rest of the book touches on higher-level concepts such as vision, perception, language, memory, emotion, and consciousness. Beautifully illustrated and lucidly written, this introduction elegantly reveals the beauty of the organ that makes us uniquely human.

This book is the first to introduce the study of cognition in terms of the major conceptual themes that underlie virtually all the substantive topics.