my mind on books

Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford Cognitive Science Series) by Jerry Fodor (1998)
The Big Book of Concepts (Bradford Books) by Gregory L. Murphy (2002/2004) – Opening line: “Concepts are the glue that holds our mental world together.”

Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour by Mark Wilson (2006)

Concepts: Core Readings edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (1999)

“Concepts” at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Concept” at Wikipedia

“The classical theory of concepts” at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Online papers on concepts, compiled by David Chalmers (part of “Online papers on consciousness”)

Via BrainEthics blog (via Mind Hacks) comes mention of a new book by Chris Frith –Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World.

More information on author Chris Frith here.

Cognitive Computing 2007 was a two-day event held earlier this month in Berkeley, sponsored by CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society). The event was billed as “a multi-disciplinary synthesis of neuroscience, computer science, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and information theory.” “Engineering the mind by reverse engineering the brain” is one slogan for the theme. One of the speakers was Roger Shepard, Professor Emeritus from Stanford, whose presentation was entitled “Principles of cognition as adaptations to the world.”

Videos are available here.

Celebrities in Cognitive Science from Martin Ryder at University of Colorado at Denver is a great list with lots of links, some overlap with the Conversations on Consciousness crowd I posted on recently. The cognitive science list starts with Charles Babbage and ends with Ludwig Wittgenstein, with names in between such as Douglas Hofstadter, George Lakoff, and Hilary Putnam.

Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (Essays in Social Psychology) by Carol S. Dweck.

Dweck contrasts two different theories of intelligence – an entity theory versus an incremental theory, showing that the entity theory leads to maladaptive responses. The entity theory involves the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait, leading to avoidance of challenge and effort, a decrease in ability to handle setbacks. The incremental theory views intelligence as something that can be increased, and this orients students more toward learning and challenge.

I’m sure I grew up with an entity theory of intelligence; intelligence seemed to be equated with less effort, plus social alienation.

Dweck’s more recent book is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Guy Kawasaki’s blog post includes a link to a video interview and a nice diagram of the fixed versus incremental/growth mindsets.

See also – IT Conversations interview