The World in the Head collects the best of Robert Cummins' papers on mental representation and psychological explanation. Running through these papers are a pair of themes: that explaining the mind requires functional analysis, not subsumption under "psychological laws", and that the propositional attitudes--belief, desire, intention--and their interactions, while real, are not the key to understanding the mind at a fundamental level. Taking these ideas seriously puts considerable strain on standard conceptions of rationality and reasoning, on truth-conditional semantics, and on our interpretation of experimental evidence concerning cognitive development, learning and the evolution of mental traits and processes. The temptation to read the structure of mental states and their interactions off the structure of human language is powerful and seductive, but has created a widening gap between what most philosophers and social scientists take for granted about the mind, and the framework we need to make sense what an accelerating biology and neuroscience are telling us about brains. The challenge for the philosophy of mind is to devise a framework that accommodates these developments. This is the underlying motivation for the papers in this collection.

About the Author
Robert Cummins is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reviews
The papers in this collection constitute an important and stimulating contribution to these debates ... Researchers working on these and related issues will greatly benefit from the lucid and thought-provoking discussions gathered here. * Carolyn Price, Mind *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199548033
Author Robert Cummins
Format Hardback
Page Count 340
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 717g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 162mm * 20mm