Mit Press imprint: 940 books
Beyond the Self
Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience
Language: English
Release Date: October 27, 2017
Converging and diverging views on the mind, the self, consciousness, the unconscious, free will, perception, meditation, and other topics.
Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating...
by Nils J. Nilsson
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2014
What beliefs are, what they do for us, how we come to hold them, and how to evaluate them.
Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe...
Brainstorms
Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
Language: English
Release Date: December 8, 2017
An anniversary edition of a classic in cognitive science, with a new introduction by the author.
When Brainstorms was published in 1978, the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was just emerging. Daniel Dennett was a young scholar who wanted to get philosophers out of their armchairs—and...
The Bodily Self
Selected Essays
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 2018
Essays on the role of the body in self-consciousness, showing that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness.
These essays explore how the rich and sophisticated forms of self-consciousness with which we are most...
by Steven Horst
Language: English
Release Date: June 24, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: June 24, 2016
An argument that we understand the world through many special-purpose mental models of different content domains, and an exploration of the philosophical implications.
Philosophers have traditionally assumed that the basic units of knowledge and understanding are concepts, beliefs, and argumentative...
by Lawrence Badash
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2009
The rise and fall of the concept of nuclear winter played out in research activity public relations and Reagan-era politics.
Paper Machines
About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929
Language: English
Release Date: August 19, 2011
Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.
Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper...
Education and Social Media
Toward a Digital Future
Language: English
Release Date: May 6, 2016
Leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the future of education, including social media usage, new norms of knowledge, privacy, copyright, and MOOCs.
How are widely popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram transforming how teachers teach, how kids learn,...
The Acceleration of Cultural Change
From Ancestors to Algorithms
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2017
How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors.
From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting...
Waste Is Information
Infrastructure Legibility and Governance
Language: English
Release Date: October 6, 2017
The relationship between infrastructure governance and the ways we read and represent waste systems, examined through three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects.
Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we...
Becoming Fluent
How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language
Language: English
Release Date: August 14, 2015
How adult learners can draw upon skills and knowledge honed over a lifetime to master a foreign language.
Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children. Once they begin to learn a language, adults...
Being Nuclear
Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
Language: English
Release Date: March 2, 2012
The hidden history of African uranium and what it means—for a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.”
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous...
In the Swarm
Digital Prospects
Language: English
Release Date: March 31, 2017
A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action.
The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.
—from In the Swarm
Digital communication...
Getting Through
The Pleasures and Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2017
Understanding how culture affects the ways we communicate—how we tell jokes, greet, ask questions, hedge, apologize, compliment, and so much more.
We can learn to speak other languages, but do we truly understand what we are saying? How much detail should we offer when someone asks how we...