my mind on books

Self-Expression by Mitchell Green (Oxford University Press, 2008).

(“Look Inside” available at Amazon.com)

Book description:

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression – a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.

An excellent post by Mark Liberman at Language Log on “Behindology” (Italian “dietrologia” “the attempt to trump even the most fanciful and contorted conspiracy theory“) is jam-packed with ideas about reasoning and interpretations in everyday life.

An excerpt:

The mode of reasoning in dietrologia is abduction: inference to the best explanation. Abduction is a good thing — it’s a key component of the machinery of science — so why does abduction here lead to “fanciful and contorted” theories? There seem to be two problems: a lack of effective coupling to the friction and inertia of fact, and an excessive value placed on indirect and even counter-intuitive explanations.

Later on:

But our inferences about the beliefs, goals and intentions of others are seriously underdetermined by their actions and statements. And those of us who think we’re more insightful than average may just be more imaginative.

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Times Online has a review by A.S. Byatt of Sleeping and Dreaming, “a scholarly and complex set of essays to accompany the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition” by the same name. (Amazon.co.uk link)
At the Wellcome Collection website there’s an “online taster” for those of us too far away to visit in person.

One of the new books I want to highlight is From Neurons to Notions: Brains, Mind and Meaning (coming soon in the US, already available in the UK) by Chris Nunn, a psychiatrist and an editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

From the book description:

Anyone interested in exploring the dynamics of mind and memory, how we experience time, and how ideas seem to have a life of their own, will enjoy this highly readable and enjoyable account written by a specialist in consciousness studies. Chris Nunn builds a picture of our minds suitable for the new century, a picture that is rapidly developing in ways very different from predominant twentieth-century views. Along the way, he offers an understanding of how our minds behave during sleep, how the craze for alien abduction came about, and what our sense of beauty may be based on. Final chapters extend these ideas to cover near-death and mystical experiences, among other topics. Nunn’s account ranges over theories and research evidence of the last one hundred and fifty years, and brings us right up to date with the views of modern brain scientists.

The Author’s website has a Table of Contents and Introduction.

Nunn is also the author of De La Mettrie’s Ghost: The Story of Decisions (Macmillan, 2005) and Awareness: What It Is, What It Does (Routledge, 1995 – “Search Inside” available at Amazon).

Sense-Think-Act is a wiki describing “a model of human ability based on the direct experience of our faculties” with “around 300 exercises and many pages of additional data,” including an extensive bibliography on the senses, mind and basic activities.