Specificity Recognition And Social Cognition

Mainstream cognitive science claims that the essence of human cognition is its capacity to categorize the world into stones, trees, friends and foes, elements that form more or less homogeneous groups. But it has seldom been asked how individual entities like one's father or a work of art are in their uniqueness (or specificity) represented mentally, if at all. This book tackles that problem by surveying data and theories coming from various fields such as evolutionary biology, psychology, neurology and philosophy, and fitting them into a coherent, new theoretical framework of a broadly anti-representationalist ilk. In order to construct the framework, the authors introduce a series of new notions, reshape or interpret many already in currency (such as affordances, categories, misrepresentation, conceptual and non-conceptual content, aspect seeing, the analog-digital distinction and the evolutionary adaptivity of art), and formulate five criteria on the basis of which what is and what is not mentally represented can clearly be told apart. The book will be of interest to cognitive scientists in general.

In Volume 3, Eliot R. Smith of Purdue University proposes that social cognition theorists have placed excessive emphasis on the role of schemata, prototypes, and various other types of abstractions. This has affected both the methodologies they use and the type of theories they construct. What has not been adequately appreciated is the storage and retrieval of specific episodes, especially those with idiosyncratic features. This volume s designed as a required text for those studying personality, experimental and consumer psychology, cognitive science, and communications.

Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition brings together contributions discussing issues arising from theoretical and empirical research on social ontology and social cognition. It is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary collection in this rapidly expanding area. The contributors draw upon their diverse backgrounds in philosophy, cognitive science, behavioral economics, sociology of science and anthropology. Based largely on contributions to the first Aarhus-Paris conference held at the University of Aarhus in June 2012, the book addresses such questions as: If the reference of concepts like money is fixed by collective acceptance, does it depend on mechanisms that are distinct from those which contribute to understanding the reference of concepts of other kinds of entity? What psychological and neural mechanisms, if any, are involved in the constitution, persistence and recognition of social facts? The editors’ introduction considers strands of research that have gained increasing importance in explaining the cognitive foundations of acts of sociality, for example, the theory that humans are predisposed and motivated to engage in joint action with con-specifics thanks to mechanisms that enable them to share others’ mental states. The book also presents a commentary written by John Searle for this volume and an interview in which the editors invite Searle to respond to the various questions raised in the introduction and by the other contributors.

This book aims to provide converging evidence as to how knowledge about different categories is represented in the brain, and how this knowledge develops.

Social Cognition in Schizophrenia: From Evidence to Treatment provides a firm grounding in the theory and research of normal social cognition, builds on this base to describe how social cognition appears to be dysfunctional in schizophrenia, and explains how this dysfunction might be ameliorated.

First published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is an invaluable single source for the latest scholarship and clinical knowledge about schizophrenia. The book is divided into three parts, addressing the presentation of schizophrenia, the etiology and pathophysiology of the disorder, and treatment and rehabilitative therapies.