In this book, the author develops a new form of structural realism and deals with the problem of representation. The work combines two distinguished developments of the Semantic View of Theories, namely Structural Realism (SR), a flourishing theory from contemporary philosophy of science, and Ronald Giere and colleagues’ Cognitive Models of Science approach (CMSA). Readers will see how replacing the model-theoretic structures that are at issue in SR with connectionist networks and activations patterns (which are the formal tools of computational neuroscience) helps us to deal with the problem of representation. The author suggests that cognitive structures are not only the precise formal tools for regimenting the structure of scientific theories but also the tools that the biological brain uses to capture the essential features (i.e., structures) of its environment. Therefore, replacing model-theoretic structures with cognitive structures allows us to account for the theories-reality relationship on the basis of the most reliable theories of neurology. This is how a new form of SR, called Cognitive Structural Realism (CSR) is introduced through this book, which articulates and defends CSR, and shows how two diverging branches of SVT can be reconciled. This ground-breaking work will particularly appeal to people who work in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.

Within the framework of cognitive grammar, investigates the distribution of infinitival and finite complements--indicative and subjunctive--in the French language, emphasizing the causation/perception, modal, conceptualizing subject and impersonal constructions. Presents a fairly large array of constructions that have received considerable attention in the literature, but rather than attempting comprehensiveness, seeks only to demonstrate that French complementation can be considered in a global fashion. Achard believes the findings can be applied to other languages as well. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

While neuroscientists garner success in identifying brain regions and in analyzing individual neurons, ground is still being broken at the intermediate scale of understanding how neurons combine to encode information. This book proposes a method of representing information in a computer that would be suited for modeling the brain's methods of processing information. Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are introduced here to model how the brain distributes each piece of information among thousands of neurons. It had been previously thought that the grammatical structure of a language cannot be encoded practically in a distributed representation, but HRRs can overcome the problems of earlier proposals. Thus this work has implications for psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, and engineering.

Representation and Understanding