The Mit Press imprint: 939 books
The Geometry of Meaning
Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces
Language: English
Release Date: January 17, 2014
A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be described in terms of geometric structures.
In The Geometry of Meaning, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a theory of semantics that bridges cognitive science and linguistics and shows how theories of cognitive processes,...
Minds without Meanings
An Essay on the Content of Concepts
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2014
Two prominent thinkers argue for the possibility of a theory of concepts that takes reference to be concepts' sole semantic property.
In cognitive science, conceptual content is frequently understood as the “meaning” of a mental representation. This position raises largely empirical questions...
A Mark of the Mental
In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2017
Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation.
In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn...
by Moheb Costandi
Language: English
Release Date: August 16, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: August 16, 2016
The real story of how our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes—with or without “brain training.”
Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change...
Joint Attention
New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience
Language: English
Release Date: January 20, 2012
Interdisciplinary perspectives on definitional concerns, underlying mechanisms, and the functional significance of joint attention.
Academic interest in the phenomenon of joint attention—the capacity to attend to an object together with another creature—has increased rapidly over the past...
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...
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...