The Mind As a Scientific Object: Between Brain and CultureChristina E. Erneling, David M. Johnson What holds together the various fields that are supposed to consititute the general intellectual discipline that people now call cognitive science? In this book, Erneling and Johnson identify two problems with defining this discipline. First, some theorists identify the common subject matter as the mind, but scientists and philosophers have not been able to agree on any single, satisfactory answer to the question of what the mind is. Second, those who speculate about the general characteristics that belong to cognitive science tend to assume that all the particular fields falling under the rubric--psychology, linguistics, biology, and son on--are of roughly equal value in their ability to shed light on the nature of mind. This book argues that all the cognitive science disciplines are not equally able to provide answers to ontological questions about the mind, but rather that only neurophysiology and cultural psychology are suited to answer these questions. However, since the cultural account of mind has long been ignored in favor of the neurophysiological account, Erneling and Johnson bring together contributions that focus especially on different versions of the cultural account of the mind. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 13 | |
Is the Study of Mind Continuous with the Rest of Science? | 119 |
Eliminative Materialism Sound or Mistaken? | 191 |
Is Mind Just Another Name for the Brain and What the Brain Does? | 245 |
Does Evolution Provide a Key to the Scientific Study of Mind? | 317 |
Is the Mind a Cultural Entity? | 397 |
Rationality Cultural or Natural? | 451 |
Citation Index | 519 |
Subject Index | 527 |
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Page 50 - Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
Page 439 - The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.
Page 50 - SINCE the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate ; it is evident, that our knowledge is only conversant about them.
Page 144 - Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Page 42 - ... immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odour, my mind...
Page 442 - taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour.
Page 129 - ... that which is only probable when asserted of individual human beings indiscriminately selected being certain when affirmed of the character and collective conduct of masses.
Page 439 - one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words)), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the...