Mind - Paul Thagard

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. Paul Thagard's text presupposes no special preparation in any of these fields.;Thagard systematically describes and evaluates the main computational theories of mental representation that have been advocated by cognitive scientists, including logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images and connections (neural networks). He considers the major challenge to the computational-representational view of mind and discusses emotions, consciousness, physical and social environments, dynamical systems and mathematical knowledge.;Teaching cognitive science is difficult, Thagard observes because students come to this multidisciplinary subject with widely different competencies, backgrounds and interests. "Mind" aims to solve this dilemma by making logic comprehensible to psychologic students, computer algorithms comprehensible to English students, and philosophical controversies comprehensible to computer science students. Each chapter concludes with summaries, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.;"Mind" is suitable for introductory courses on cognitive science, and should also be useful as a supplement to courses on cognitive psychology, educational psychology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.