Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary,scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics,psychology,neuroscience,philosophy,computer science/artificial intelligence,and anthropology. It examines the nature,the tasks,and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior,with a focus on how nervous systems represent,process,and transform information. 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 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 often compared with other types of figurative language,such as antithesis,hyperbole,metonymy,and simile. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
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.
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.
Darwinian literary studies is a branch of literary criticism that studies literature in the context of evolution by means of natural selection,including gene-culture coevolution. It represents an emerging trend of neo-Darwinian thought in intellectual disciplines beyond those traditionally considered as evolutionary biology:evolutionary psychology,evolutionary anthropology,behavioral ecology,evolutionary developmental psychology,cognitive psychology,affective neuroscience,behavioural genetics,evolutionary epistemology,and other such disciplines.
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.
Stéphan Barron was the first to develop the concept of Technoromanticism between 1991 and 1996 for his doctoral thesis at the University Paris VIII. The main theme of his research is what he calls “Technoromantisme/Technoromanticism”,a neologism which he created and which has been adopted by other English-speaking researchers. Technoromanticism is the theory of links between art and new technologies,within the context of the threats posed to nature by technoscience and economic development. Technoromanticism also seeks to analyse the return of the human body within technological arts,formulating the hypothesis that a technological society needs a corporeal rebalancing of perceptions. Delayed for editorial reasons,his book Technoromantisme was published by l'Harmattan in 2003. Technoromanticism is a term used to indicate those aspects of contemporary culture that ascribe to advanced technologies the capacity to promote the power of the imagination,to restore the role of genius and to bring about a unity;in other words that revive and perpetuate the legacy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artistic and philosophical movement known as Romanticism,but by technological means. The term was used in 1999 in a book that bore the title Technoromanticism outlining evidence of romanticism in many commentaries on digital technology at the time.
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 theory that many features of cognition,whether human or otherwise,are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. Sensory and motor systems are seen as fundamentally integrated with cognitive processing. The cognitive features include 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 into the organism's functional structure.
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.
