Mind As Action
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| Author | : James V. Wertsch |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 216 |
| Release | : 1998-01-08 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0199761566 |
Contemporary social problems typically involve many complex, interrelated dimensions--psychological, cultural, and institutional, among others. But today, the social sciences have fragmented into isolated disciplines lacking a common language, and analyses of social problems have polarized into approaches that focus on an individual's mental functioning over social settings, or vice versa. In Mind as Action, James V. Wertsch argues that current approaches to social issues have been blinded by the narrow confines of increasing specialization in the social sciences. In response to this conceptual blindness, he proposes a method of sociocultural analysis that connects the various perspectives of the social sciences in an integrated, nonreductive fashion. Wertsch maintains that we can use mediated action, which he defines as the irreducible tension between active agents and cultural tools, as a productive method of explicating the complicated relationships between human action and its manifold cultural, institutional, and historical contexts. Drawing on the ideas of Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Kenneth Burke, as well as research from various fields, this book traces the implications of mediated action for a sociocultural analysis of the mind, as well as for some of today's most pressing social issues. Wertsch's investigation of forms of mediated action such as stereotypes and historical narratives provide valuable new insights into issues such as the mastery, appropriation, and resistance of culture. By providing an analytic unit that has the possibility of operating at the crossroads of various disciplines, Mind as Action will be important reading for academics, students, and researchers in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, sociology, literary analysis, and philosophy.
| Author | : David A. Rosenbaum |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 303 |
| Release | : 2022-02-08 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 0262368730 |
An engaging and accessible introduction to the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. This engaging and accessible book offers the first introductory text on the psychology and neuroscience of physical action. Written by a leading researcher in the field, it covers the interplay of action, mind, and brain, showing that many core concepts in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and technology grew out of questions about the control of everyday physical actions. It explains action not as a “one-way street from stimuli to response” but as a continual perception-action cycle. The informal writing style invites students to think through the evidence step by step, helping them develop general thinking stills as well as learn specific facts. Special emphasis is placed on the role of underrepresented groups. The book discusses the intellectual background of the field, from Plato to Kant, Dewey, and others; applications and methods; and the physical substrates of action—bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles, and nerves. It considers the control of actions in space; learning, and the roles of nature and nurture; feedback; feedforward, or anticipated feedback; and degrees of freedom—the multiple ways of getting things done and three methods for narrowing the alternatives. The book is generously illustrated, including many images of thinkers who contributed to the field.
| Author | : James V. WERTSCH |
| Publisher | : Harvard University Press |
| Total Pages | : 182 |
| Release | : 2009-06-30 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 0674045106 |
In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or mediational means that shape both social and individual processes. In considering how these mediational means--in particular, language--emerge in social history and the role they play in organizing the settings in which human beings are socialized, Wertsch achieves fresh insights into essential areas of human mental functioning that are typically unexplored or misunderstood. Although Wertsch's discussion draws on the work of a variety of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, the writings of two Soviet theorists, L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), are of particular significance. Voices of the Mind breaks new ground in reviewing and integrating some of their major theoretical ideas and in demonstrating how these ideas can be extended to address a series of contemporary issues in psychology and related fields. A case in point is Wertsch's analysis of voice, which exemplifies the collaborative nature of his effort. Although some have viewed abstract linguistic entities, such as isolated words and sentences, as the mechanism shaping human thought, Wertsch turns to Bakhtin, who demonstrated the need to analyze speech in terms of how it appropriates the voices of others in concrete sociocultural settings. These appropriated voices may be those of specific speakers, such as one's parents, or they may take the form of social languages characteristic of a category of speakers, such as an ethnic or national community. Speaking and thinking thus involve the inherent process of ventriloquating through the voices of other socioculturally situated speakers. Voices of the Mind attempts to build upon this theoretical foundation, persuasively arguing for the essential bond between cognition and culture.
| Author | : Barbara Tversky |
| Publisher | : Basic Books |
| Total Pages | : 389 |
| Release | : 2019-05-21 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 0465093078 |
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.
| Author | : Barbara Gail Montero |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 303 |
| Release | : 2016 |
| Genre | : Business & Economics |
| ISBN | : 0199596778 |
How does thinking affect doing? It is widely held that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. But is this true? Barbara Gail Montero explores real-life examples and draws on psychology, neuroscience, and literature to develop a theory of expertise that emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action.
| Author | : John Bengson |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 416 |
| Release | : 2012-01-06 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0190452838 |
Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This volume contains fifteen state of the art essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and "anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how--an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action.
| Author | : E. J. Lowe |
| Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
| Total Pages | : 240 |
| Release | : 2008-09-04 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0191550906 |
Personal Agency consists of two parts. In Part II, a radically libertarian theory of action is defended which combines aspects of agent causalism and volitionism. This theory accords to volitions the status of basic mental actions, maintaining that these are spontaneous exercises of the will—a 'two-way' power which rational agents can freely exercise in the light of reason. Lowe contends that substances, not events, are the causal source of all change in the world—with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. And he defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents. Part I prepares the ground for this theory by undermining the threat presented to it by physicalism. It does this by challenging the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms and by showing that a dualistic philosophy of mind—one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively—is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts.
| Author | : Alva Noë |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 291 |
| Release | : 2006-01-20 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 0262640635 |
"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.
| Author | : Fenwicke L. Holmes |
| Publisher | : Jazzybee Verlag |
| Total Pages | : 209 |
| Release | : 2014-06-10 |
| Genre | : Self-Help |
| ISBN | : 3849644677 |
There is a law of healing so plain that even a child can understand it, so fundamental that the ablest mind has never yet thought through all the facts and phenomena of life that rest upon it. It is the purpose of this book to make this law plain. The greatest power in the world is the power of thought, for it is Creative Mind in action. Nothing exists that did not first exist in thought from the first sun that blazed only in the Mind of the Creator, to the last doll-dress fashioned by a childish hand. Science supports the fact that the first movement in nature can have come only from the application of an immaterial force or Will to the primary etheric particles otherwise in a perfect state of equilibrium. It must leave to metaphysics not only an explanation of the Will that moves but also the substance that is moved. This, then, it is the province of this book to show with all that it entails. Since an act of Will is an act of mind, we concern ourselves with the activity of a Creative Mind. Again since Mind acts creatively, there is a way in which it acts. We must also, therefore, teach the way. It is to teach this way that the Bible was written, that Jesus lived and taught. This way has been known for many centuries but has always been taught in terms of the understanding of the day in which the teacher lived. The Great Metaphysician taught largely in parables and oriental figures of speech. But He taught "the Way" and his followers were called the People of the Way.
| Author | : Andy Clark |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 317 |
| Release | : 2010-12-31 |
| Genre | : Psychology |
| ISBN | : 0199831041 |
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
