Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary,scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature,the tasks,and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language,perception,memory,attention,reasoning,and emotion;to understand these faculties,cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics,psychology,artificial intelligence,philosophy,neuroscience,and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization,from learning and decision-making to logic and planning;from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
A metaphor is a figure of speech that,for rhetorical effect,directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to create a likeness or an analogy.
Where Mathematics Comes From:How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being is a book by George Lakoff,a cognitive linguist,and Rafael E. Núñez,a psychologist. Published in 2000,WMCF seeks to found a cognitive science of mathematics,a theory of embodied mathematics based on conceptual metaphor.
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher,best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
In cognitive linguistics,conceptual metaphor,or cognitive metaphor,refers to the understanding of one idea,or conceptual domain,in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality or the understanding of time in terms of money.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics,combining knowledge and research from cognitive science,cognitive psychology,neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real,and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology,neuroscience,linguistics,philosophy,computer science,anthropology,and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore,we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains,the mind and the brain.
An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition,image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions,from linguistic experience,and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind;in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women,Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking;by the collection From Perception to Meaning:Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady.
In cognitive linguistics,a primary metaphor is an ingrained association between certain pairs of distinct concepts. These innate conceptual metaphors inform cognition,and are theorised to arise unconsciously from experienced events. Primary metaphors persist across languages because basic embodied experiences,which form their basis,are universal.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes,from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology,linguistics,computer science,anthropology,neuroscience,and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence,computer science,and neuroscience. In the 1960s,the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California,San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s,the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore,by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
Cognitive rhetoric refers to an approach to rhetoric,composition,and pedagogy as well as a method for language and literary studies drawing from,or contributing to,cognitive science.
Embodied cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of research,the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies:the modeling of psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the mind and body as a single entity;the formation of a common set of general principles of intelligent behavior;and the experimental use of robotic agents in controlled environments.
Fictive motion is the metaphorical motion of an object or abstraction through space. Fictive motion has become a subject of study in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In fictive motion sentences,a motion verb applies to a subject that is not literally capable of movement in the physical world,as in the sentence,"The fence runs along the perimeter of the house." Fictive motion is so called because it is attributed to material states,objects,or abstract concepts,that cannot (sensibly) be said to move themselves through physical space. Fictive motion sentences are pervasive in English and other languages.
Metaphor,the description of one thing as something else,has become of interest in recent decades to both analytic philosophy and continental philosophy,but for different reasons.
Experientialism is a philosophical view which states that there is no "purely rational" detached God's-eye view of the world which is external to human thought. It was first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By. Experientialism is especially a response to the objectivist tradition of transcendental truth most prominently formulated by Immanuel Kant which still requires a commitment to what Lakoff and Johnson call "basic realism". Most importantly,this involves acknowledging the existence of a mind-independent external world and the possibility of stable knowledge of that external world. In Women,Fire and Dangerous Things,Lakoff expands on the foundations of experientialism with research into the nature of categories.
Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma,Italy,and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London,UK (2016–2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology,cognitive neuroscience,social neuroscience,and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition,including action understanding,empathy,language,mindreading and aesthetic experience.
Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions,such as perception biases,memory recall,comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system,the perceptual system,the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness),and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
Louis Arnaud Reid was a British philosopher who held the foundation chair in Philosophy of Education at the London University Institute of Education. He was a founding contributor to the British Journal of Aesthetics,and is best known for his writings on epistemology and aesthetics. He influenced figures as diverse as Susanne Langer,Lionel Trilling and Harold Osborne. Jacques Barzun said that Reid's book A Study in Aesthetics was "the best discussion of art yet produced in our century."
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is a former psychology professor and researcher at the University of California,Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues,ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language,to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language. Raymond Gibbs's research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy,linguistics,and comparative literature.
