How The Mind Works
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How The Mind Works
''How the Mind Works'' is a 1997 book by the Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in which the author attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms. Drawing heavily on the paradigm of evolutionary psychology articulated by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Pinker covers subjects such as Visual perception, vision, emotion, feminism, and "the meaning of life". He argues for both a computational theory of mind and a neo-Darwinist, adaptationist approach to evolution, all of which he sees as the central components of evolutionary psychology. He criticizes difference feminism because he believes scientific research has shown that women and men differ little or not at all in their moral reasoning. The book was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Reception Jerry Fodor, considered one of the fathers of the computational theory of mind, criticized the book. Fodor wrote a book called ''The Mind Doesn't Work That Way'', saying " ...
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Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children ac ...
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Difference Feminism
Difference feminism holds that there are differences between men and women but that no value judgment can be placed upon them and both sexes have equal moral status as persons. The term "difference feminism" developed during the "equality-versus-difference debate" in American feminism in the 1980s and 1990s, but subsequently fell out of favor and use. In the 1990s, feminists addressed the binary logic of "difference" versus "equality" and moved on from it, notably with postmodern and/or deconstructionist approaches that either dismantled or did not depend on that dichotomy. Difference feminism did not require a commitment to essentialism. Most strains of difference feminism did not argue that there was a biological, inherent, ahistorical, or otherwise "essential" link between womanhood and traditionally feminine values, habits of mind (often called "ways of knowing"), or personality traits. These feminists simply sought to recognize that, in the present, women and men are signi ...
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English-language Books
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots language, Scots, and then closest related to the Low German, Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is Genetic relationship (linguistics), genealogically West Germanic language, West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by Langues d'oïl, dialects of France (about List of English words of French origin, 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to ...
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Books About Evolutionary Psychology
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ...
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Books About Cognition
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many page (paper), pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bookbinding, bound together and protected by a book cover, cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a Recto, leaf and each side of a leaf is a page (paper), page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it co ...
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Cognitive Science Literature
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, musicology, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied cognition) a ...
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1997 Non-fiction Books
File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of the most observed comets of the 20th century; Golden Bauhinia Square, where sovereignty of Hong Kong is handed over from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China; the 1997 Central European flood kills 114 people in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany; Korean Air Flight 801 crashes during heavy rain on Guam, killing 229; Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner land on Mars; flowers left outside Kensington Palace following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Titanic (1997 film) rect 200 0 400 200 Harry Potter rect 400 0 600 200 Comet Hale-Bopp rect 0 200 300 400 Death of Diana, Princess of Wales rect 300 200 600 400 Handover of Hong Kong rect 0 400 200 600 Mars Pathfinder r ...
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Clive Thompson (journalist)
Clive Thompson (born 30 October 1968) is a Canadian freelance journalist, blogger, and science and technology writer. Early life and education Thompson grew up in the 1970s and the 1980s in Toronto, Canada. He spent his childhood working with early models of computers. He tried to understand programs for games and for artificial intelligence as a child but did not succeed, so he chose not to study science. Thompson graduated from the University of Toronto with majors in political science and English in 1992. He previously worked for Canada's ''Report on Business'' magazine, ''This Magazine'', and ''Shift'' magazine, then became a freelance contributor for ''The New York Times Magazine'', ''The Washington Post'', ''Lingua Franca'', ''Wired'', ''Shift'', ''Entertainment Weekly'' and several other publications. Professional work Thompson writes about digital technologies and their social and cultural impact for a number of publications, including the ''New York Times Magazine'' an ...
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New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital media, digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as ''The Daily (podcast), The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones (publisher), George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times, 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked List of newspapers by circulation, 18th in the world by circulation and List of newspapers in the United States, 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is Public company, publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 189 ...
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This Is Your Brain On Music
''This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession'' is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, and first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2006, and updated and released in paperback by Plume/Penguin in 2007. It has been translated into 18 languages and spent more than a year on ''The New York Times'', ''The Globe and Mail'', and other bestseller lists, and sold more than one million copies. Overview The aim of ''This Is Your Brain on Music'' was to make recent findings in neuroscience of music accessible to the educated layperson. Characteristics and theoretical parameters of music are explained alongside scientific findings about how the brain interprets and processes these characteristics.Sullivan, J. (2006, August 20).He's rocking the world of neuroscience. ''The Boston Globe''. The neuroanatomy of musical expectation, emotion, listening and performance is discussed. ''This Is Your Brain on M ...
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Daniel Levitin
Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC (born December 27, 1957) is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. He is the author of four ''New York Times'' best-selling books, including '' This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession'', (Dutton/Penguin 2006; Plume/Penguin 2007) which has sold more than 1 million copies. Levitin is a James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology, behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; a Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI; and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. He is the Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill. He is a former member of the Board of Governors of the Grammys, a consultant to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fell ...
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Straw Man
A straw man (sometimes written as strawman) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man". The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and the subsequent refutation of that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the opponent's proposition. Straw man arguments have been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly regarding highly charged emotional subjects. Straw man tactics in the United Kingdom may also be known as an Aunt Sally, after a pub game of the same name, where patrons throw sticks or battens at a post to knock off a skittle balanced on top. Structure Th ...
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